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sweek0
May 22, 2006

Let me fall out the window
With confetti in my hair
Deal out jacks or better
On a blanket by the stairs
I'll tell you all my secrets
But I lie about my past

Series DD Funding posted:

Chipotle is fine in an athletic context. It's not fine in a "sedentary office worker eating an entire burrito for lunch" context.
It's really not all that bad if you have a balanced diet and get some exercise. Leave the cheese and the sour cream and you're looking at a 750 calorie lunch or so there. I really think it's the in between snacks that are a much bigger issue for the average office worker.

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sweek0
May 22, 2006

Let me fall out the window
With confetti in my hair
Deal out jacks or better
On a blanket by the stairs
I'll tell you all my secrets
But I lie about my past

Blister posted:

The term "Empty calories" is the biggest reason why almost every piece of junk food is now fortified by adding unnecessary vitamins and nutrients to make it "healthy"
I don't see how you can be against the term 'empty calories' but don't mind using the term 'junk food'. How would you define junk food, then?

sweek0
May 22, 2006

Let me fall out the window
With confetti in my hair
Deal out jacks or better
On a blanket by the stairs
I'll tell you all my secrets
But I lie about my past

Canine Blues Arooo posted:

ITT, the law of conservation of mass does not apply to fat people.
To be fair to them, I do think that long term behavorial change does very much require a change in mindset and that dieting and cutting out food groups entirely rarely leads to lasting change.

Is there evidence that supports sugar taxes, better food in schools and other government policies when it comes to long-term reduction in obesity?

sweek0
May 22, 2006

Let me fall out the window
With confetti in my hair
Deal out jacks or better
On a blanket by the stairs
I'll tell you all my secrets
But I lie about my past

Effectronica posted:

The key issue at play here is that if obesity was solely a matter of people overeating or developing bad habits, there would not be an epidemic of it. The epidemic means that there are societal factors that are, in the end, more important than all the diet advice people can toss out when it comes to dealing with this public health issue. The overall approach of telling people "eat healthier, exercise more" on an individual level and on national levels has been going for more than twenty years, and it has failed continually. Part of this, of course, is due to the exploitative diet industry and its promotion of useless and worse-than-useless diets, and another part of it is due to "common sense" bad advice circulating around. But these, too, are societal factors that must be overcome or circumvented.
We also have a food industry that is actively trying to create bad food addicts. For anyone who hasn't read it yet, I found The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food to be a real eye opener that encouraged me to create some changes in my own diet.

sweek0
May 22, 2006

Let me fall out the window
With confetti in my hair
Deal out jacks or better
On a blanket by the stairs
I'll tell you all my secrets
But I lie about my past
Running isn't bad for your joints if you have good running technique.

As someone who does both running and weightlifting, I would say that running is probably considered more fun by most people. I think so anyway. And in the end the best exercise is the one that you'll stick with and all that.

sweek0
May 22, 2006

Let me fall out the window
With confetti in my hair
Deal out jacks or better
On a blanket by the stairs
I'll tell you all my secrets
But I lie about my past

khwarezm posted:

You know who you're talking to don't you?

Question for people here, does anybody have any idea what plausible programs governments could put forward that they think could make a serious impact on this situation? It just keeps on getting worse, everywhere, what the gently caress is about this that makes so unsolvable? I'm not looking forward to this future of heart disease and busted knees.
Food education starting as young as possible and healthy school lunches. Serving kids pizza, burgers and fries (or giving them the option at least) is a pretty terrible idea.

The soda tax in Mexico is showing positive effects as well, and something like that could be replicated quite easily.

Good cycling and walking infrastructure in cities really does help as well.

sweek0 fucked around with this message at 12:06 on Nov 25, 2015

sweek0
May 22, 2006

Let me fall out the window
With confetti in my hair
Deal out jacks or better
On a blanket by the stairs
I'll tell you all my secrets
But I lie about my past

SgCloud posted:

What about vegetables and fruit?
Having been in supermarkets all over Europe and the States I'd say they're not. Fresh vegetables and fruit are there everywhere and the price compared to fast/junk/convenience food is similar everywhere. The amount of and variety in convenience food is much higher in the US though.

sweek0
May 22, 2006

Let me fall out the window
With confetti in my hair
Deal out jacks or better
On a blanket by the stairs
I'll tell you all my secrets
But I lie about my past

fishmech posted:

No it isn't. They're all perfectly fine foods.
As an occasional meal, sure. As a regular school lunch option which is currently the case (the part that you cut out when you quoted me), no.

sweek0
May 22, 2006

Let me fall out the window
With confetti in my hair
Deal out jacks or better
On a blanket by the stairs
I'll tell you all my secrets
But I lie about my past
Alright, this is from the Huffington Post on typical school meals. No issue here, then?


Fried "popcorn" chicken, mashed potatoes, peas, fruit cup and a chocolate chip cookie.


Fish soup, tofu over rice, kimchi and fresh veggies.

Sorry, I'll stop responding to fishmech posts now.

sweek0 fucked around with this message at 15:22 on Nov 25, 2015

sweek0
May 22, 2006

Let me fall out the window
With confetti in my hair
Deal out jacks or better
On a blanket by the stairs
I'll tell you all my secrets
But I lie about my past

computer parts posted:

Also what they don't tell you about fish is that most of it is frozen anyway, the "fresh" stuff is just left out to go bad quicker.

I have absolutely no issue with frozen food. Frozen fish and vegetables tend to contain more nutrition than their fresh counterparts.

sweek0
May 22, 2006

Let me fall out the window
With confetti in my hair
Deal out jacks or better
On a blanket by the stairs
I'll tell you all my secrets
But I lie about my past

fishmech posted:

Well you were just trying to act like the fresh vegetables in the korean lunch was supposedly a point in its favor versus the presumably non-"fresh" potatoes and peas in the american lunch.
I never mentioned freshness? The description of the Korean meal has that word on it, that's all. It's a comparison of the nutritional values of those school lunches.

sweek0
May 22, 2006

Let me fall out the window
With confetti in my hair
Deal out jacks or better
On a blanket by the stairs
I'll tell you all my secrets
But I lie about my past

PT6A posted:

To be fair, you have to first go to the grocery store and buy those things before you can eat them. I love cooking, but I absolutely despise grocery shopping because it's a completely awful experience in every way (I still do it, mind you), so I can see how that would be the final straw that deters people from cooking for themselves.
You have to do that for junk food, too! And you can do that shopping online.

Although yes I understand that cheap junk food is more easily available. But having a number of good staple foods such as cans of beans, rice, porridge, some fruit and frozen vegetables really isn't all that difficult.

sweek0
May 22, 2006

Let me fall out the window
With confetti in my hair
Deal out jacks or better
On a blanket by the stairs
I'll tell you all my secrets
But I lie about my past

PT6A posted:

Are people really getting fat because they're going to the store and buying tons of junk food and soda, though? Or are they getting fat because, gently caress it, it's a lot easier to hit McDonald's on the way home than anything else.

Before I got serious about eating healthier, I never bought junk food to eat at home, I just ate out constantly because I was lazy.

I don't think it's an either or.

Yes, fast food outlets are easy, convenient, and strategically located to try and get people to buy their dinner there. But looking at what people pick up from grocery stores, what products have special offers on them (nearly always the junk food), what kind of products are placed near the check out., the misguided labelling, etc. I think supermarkets are a huge factor as well.

sweek0
May 22, 2006

Let me fall out the window
With confetti in my hair
Deal out jacks or better
On a blanket by the stairs
I'll tell you all my secrets
But I lie about my past
From the New Yorker today, Teaching Grownups How To Eat.
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page...=ODAyNDk1MTU2S0

It may be difficult to relearn how to eat as an adult, the British food historian Bee Wilson tells us in her book “First Bite,” but it is possible, and, in much of the developed world, it is necessary.

Until the twentieth century, Japanese food was often neither delicious nor nourishing. Junichi Saga, a Japanese doctor who chronicled the memories of elderly villagers from just outside Tokyo, in the nineteen-seventies, found that, in the early years of the century, most families scraped by on a mixture of rice and barley, accompanied by small quantities of radish leaves, pickles, or miso. Animal protein was almost entirely absent in the Buddhist country, and even fish, as one of Saga’s informants recalled, was limited to “one salted salmon,” bought for the New Year’s celebrations, “though only after an awful fuss.”

It wasn’t until after the Second World War, with the arrival of American food aid as well as new fishing and storage technologies, that Japanese cuisine became varied in both seasoning and substance. In the course of the twentieth century, consumption of grains in Japan fell by almost half, replaced by eggs, meat, fresh fruit and vegetables, and, most of all, fish. These new influences were incorporated into Japanese cuisine, adapted to fit traditional ideas about portion size and meal structure as well as traditional tastes for miso, soy, and pickled and fermented vegetables. By the nineteen-seventies, the country’s food culture had been utterly transformed. Today, Japan is one of the most food-obsessed countries in the world—the first perfect watermelon of the season sells at auction for more than two thousand dollars, and gourmet manga top best-seller lists—and yet it also has one of the lowest rates of obesity in the world.

In her new book “First Bite,” an exploration of how individuals and cultures learn to eat, for better and for worse, the British food historian Bee Wilson cites Japan’s culinary history as an example of how dietary improvements can take place on a national scale. The lesson to draw from the Japanese, she argues, is not that the West must move to a sushi-based diet to tackle its obesity pandemic, no matter how delicious that sounds. Instead, Japan is an example of how eating habits, far from being “inevitable or innate,” can evolve remarkably quickly, even in places where healthy practices are lacking. “We often convince ourselves that there is something vital within us that prevents us from ever eating differently,” Wilson writes. But “if the Japanese can change, why can’t we?”

Wilson—whose previous book, “Consider the Fork,” was a fascinating look at how kitchen utensils have shaped how and what we eat—often uses the topic of food as a gateway to explore the intersecting histories of ideas, culture, technology, and society. She’s written about the evolution of food fraud, the history of the sandwich, and humans’ relationship with bees. “First Bite” marks something of a shift in subject matter and approach: the book contains copious archival research, illuminating, for example, the history of school-food programs and eating disorders, but it also incorporates personal anecdotes from Wilson’s life: her troubled relationship with carbohydrates as a teen, and her desperate attempts to spoon healthful foods into the mouth of her resistant toddler son. Much of the book is concerned with how children learn to eat: Wilson explores the latest research on when to introduce solid food and the long history of government interventions in childhood nutrition, as well as how flavor preferences are imprinted or picky eating habits developed. Although she seems reluctant to preach (“No amount of urging from me to eat this or that food will make you eat it,” she writes), Wilson does have an agenda. It may be difficult to relearn how to eat as an adult, she tells us, but it is possible, and, in much of the developed world, it is necessary.

After all, in America, at least, many adult diets remain stuck in an endless rotation of scaled-up favorites from the kids’ menu: more than half of all food ordered in restaurants consists of burgers, French fries, pizza, or Mexican food.
As a nation, our intake of calories from vegetables has fallen by three per cent since the nineteen-seventies, which, as Wilson points out, “is a bigger drop than it sounds like,” since vegetables contain fewer calories than other food groups. Even more dispiritingly, five foods—iceberg lettuce, frozen potatoes, fresh potatoes, potato chips, and canned tomatoes—made up nearly half of those vegetable servings. With skyrocketing rates of obesity and diet-related diseases, a Japan-style transformation in the United States seems overdue.

Obesity researchers and healthy-food advocates today offer a variety of suggestions for how to reform the American diet. Some, such as Adam Drenowski, the director of the Center for Public Health Nutrition at the University of Washington, blame the country’s poor eating habits on structural issues: economic inequality, an obesogenic environment, and a national agricultural policy that favors the production of calories over nutrients. Change, seen from this perspective, will only come about through government action. Others, such as the chef and activist Alice Waters, take a more didactic approach to food reform. If individual Americans were taught to grow and cook healthy food, she and others argue, they would learn to eat that way—and the country’s food system would shift to meet that demand. Yet another approach, perhaps best embodied by the now ubiquitous hundred-calorie “snack pack,” holds that the best way to change American eating habits is by stealth: redesigning packaging, grocery store layouts, and kitchen counters across the country to make it harder not to make healthy food choices.

Wilson does not discount any of these solutions, but she is realistic about the barriers that stand in the way of systemic change. Established agribusinesses lobby against farm bill reform, supermarkets lose money when they remove candy from the checkout aisle, and low-income single parents working several jobs to make ends meet will struggle to find the time to cook dinner from scratch, whether they know how to or not. Wilson’s interest in “First Bite” lies in how the combined forces of culture, memory, and long-standing food preferences lead individuals to perpetuate the often unhealthy eating habits they’ve inherited. “Just because dietary change can happen on a national stage,” she writes, “does not make it easy to enact it at a personal level.”

The key to lasting dietary change, according to Wilson, is “a hedonic shift” in attitudes toward food—a reorienting of our palates that would render broccoli at least as delicious as cookies. “When our preferences are in order,” she argues, “nutrition should take care of itself.” Better yet, the trick to learning to love cruciferous greens turns out to be relatively simple: repeated, positive exposure to broccoli and its cousins. To prove how malleable our palates can be, Wilson marshals an array of case studies and experiments that have examined the human ability to shape and reshape food preferences.

Though our tastes can seem as hard-wired as eye color or blood type, evidence shows that genetics can account for only a small fraction of the variation in individual food likes and dislikes. Far more important are the pressures and cues we’re exposed to from the time we begin choosing what to eat. In an astonishing experiment conducted in Cleveland and Chicago in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, the pediatrician Clara Davis set out to explore what babies would choose to eat if freed from the expectations of their parents. At each meal, the subjects were presented with ten bowls of puréed foods. A team of nurses was trained to only scoop a spoonful of a food if the infant pointed toward a particular bowl, and to only put the spoon in the child’s mouth if the mouth was open. Children in Davis’s “eating-experiment orphanage” chose to eat liver, sour milk, and beets just as happily as they chose chicken and bananas.

In another chapter, Wilson describes the simple technique that Keith Williams, the director of the Penn State Hershey Children’s Hospital Feeding Program, employs to expand the palates of extremely picky young eaters. Bite-sized servings of three or four new or “difficult” foods are placed on one plate, known and liked foods are served on a second plate, and the picky child is asked to take a bite from the first plate, and then from the second plate, moving back and forth between plates for ten minutes. This process is repeated several times a day, over the course of several days. For Tyler, a sixteen-year-old boy with Asperger syndrome who would only eat ham steak, cereal, and farfalle pasta, two weeks of this two-plate treatment resulted in the addition of seventy-eight different foods to his diet.

Children, Wilson’s engaging journey through the research shows, are especially receptive to this kind of dietary exposure. But her larger point is that it’s never too late to change how we eat. In Sweden, an experimental “taste school for the elderly” managed, through repeated and enjoyable cooking and dining activities, to get a group of eighty-year-old men to not only try fennel and sweet potato for the first time but to actively choose to eat them. Being an omnivore does indeed pose its dilemmas, but its “wonderful secret,” Wilson writes, “is that we can adjust our desires, even late in the game.”

sweek0
May 22, 2006

Let me fall out the window
With confetti in my hair
Deal out jacks or better
On a blanket by the stairs
I'll tell you all my secrets
But I lie about my past

Mr. Wookums posted:

poo poo, the only reason I don't treat obese people with complete and utter contempt is that it isn't socially acceptable yet. I'd love for that to change.

Some people in London are handing out these flyers:

sweek0
May 22, 2006

Let me fall out the window
With confetti in my hair
Deal out jacks or better
On a blanket by the stairs
I'll tell you all my secrets
But I lie about my past
Fishmech: what would you actually like to do about any of the problems around obesity and food-related diseases, if anything at all? Is it all completely hopeless?

sweek0
May 22, 2006

Let me fall out the window
With confetti in my hair
Deal out jacks or better
On a blanket by the stairs
I'll tell you all my secrets
But I lie about my past

IAMNOTADOCTOR posted:

Why are we discussing a societal problem that has already been solved?

- While Europe is getting fatter, the Netherlands is getting thinner. It's the only country in which the World Health Organisation (WHO) is predicting a decline in obesity rates. The organisation's recent obesityreport predicts 49% of Dutch men will be overweight, and 8% obese, in 2030 — compared to 54% and 10% in 2010.

Phone posting, so I can't link the report and I am of course aware that this is not the ultimate answer but the Dutch government has basically been using the message: 1excersise for at least 30min a day (mostly not fit weight control). Brisk walking is fine. 2 Reduce caloric intake, the exact makeup of your diet is not important and high protein diets are silly.

I don't know man this eat less and move more thing sounds like a bit of a fad to me.

sweek0
May 22, 2006

Let me fall out the window
With confetti in my hair
Deal out jacks or better
On a blanket by the stairs
I'll tell you all my secrets
But I lie about my past
Fichmech. We can agree on eating less. We can also agree on there not being one size fits all solution on how to get everyone to achieve that. That doesn't mean that it's useless to try and come up with ways of getting people, especially future generations, to eat less. Not everyone will learn a language or how to dance tango in the same way either, but that doesn't mean that a multifaceted approach can't work.

For example, just because not every kid will end up being healthier and fitter if we serve healthier school meals doesn't mean it's not a valuable thing to do.

sweek0 fucked around with this message at 12:55 on Jan 20, 2016

sweek0
May 22, 2006

Let me fall out the window
With confetti in my hair
Deal out jacks or better
On a blanket by the stairs
I'll tell you all my secrets
But I lie about my past

fishmech posted:

That's utterly bullshit. People eat tons of chicken breast all the time. It's one of the most commonly purchased meats in the country!

So then wouldn't unpalatable school meals mean people are eating less according to you?
It's not about the meat itself but the preparation. Yes it's popular but it's very often battered and fried.

And school meals can be balanced as well as tasty to get kids to actually eat it. It is possible and other countries do this. We weren't even given the option of leaving school and eating anything else.

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sweek0
May 22, 2006

Let me fall out the window
With confetti in my hair
Deal out jacks or better
On a blanket by the stairs
I'll tell you all my secrets
But I lie about my past

fishmech posted:

Then why does he insist on saying chicken breast? Regardless, people eat tons of chicken breast in all the many ways it can be prepared.

If kids aren't eating the current school meals then I fail to see how that leads to them getting fat. Skipping a whole meal seems like it would tend to cause you to lose weight. Also in other countries, the schoolkids bitch about their school meals just as much as American kids do. Finally, so, what, you really think that any restaurant you could have gotten to during the like 30-45 minutes a regular school lunch takes would have been better? Frankly that seems unlikely.
School meals to me are an opportunity for a governing body to get kids acquired to healthy and balanced meals, making them more likely to eat those types of meals more often during the rest of their lives. It's about creating healthy habits and behaviours. Skipping that meal would probably lead you to eat something else, and very likely something worse, instead, if they have that option. Which is the habit we're trying to avoid.

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