We are a generation of fat people raising another generation of fat people. America has a 34% obesity rate, but luckily that has leveled off over the past few years. Notice I said "leveled off" and not decreased. Apparently we've run out of fatty foods or we've just gotten as sedentary as we can possibly get and still be alive enough to count towards the statistic. Hell, we've even got people trying to get as fat as possible. No wonder British chef Jamie Oliver couldn't take it any longer and traveled to America to try and teach us how to eat healthy. His new reality show, Jame Oliver's Food Revolution shows that many Americans would just rather be fat and die early.
Someone should have warned Jamie that West Virginia is not the best place to go for a show, unless you're doing a Depression Era series and don't have the money for wardrobe or make-up or real actors. No surprise that Jamie met with a lot of opposition trying to change the types of food elementary school age children were eating at home and especially at school. Parents and school administrators and cooks would rather stuff the children with fat laden pre-processed crap than entertain the idea of feeding them healthier food. They had excuses for everything: the food had to meet certain guidelines to be served to school children, they don't have the time or the man power to serve healthier food, and they don't think elementary school children should be given forks and knives to eat with. That last one stunned Jamie and quite frankly me too. I remember elementary school and I'm pretty sure we had forks and knives and we weren't stabbing each other with it or anything like that. The school cooks are surprised that elementary school kids are expected to know how to eat like a normal human being with manners and instead expect them to shovel nachos and sloppy joes into their mouths with their hands and maybe a spoon if they want to get all uppity about it.
Maybe I'm missing something here. I would personally rather pay a little extra money and take a little extra time to prepare healthy foods rather than feed my children crap that I know will make them unhealthy shorten their lives. The children in the elementary school Jamie visited couldn't even identify vegetables and didn't know that french fries came from a potato! Granted, this is West Virginia and probably not the best example of American children's eating habits.
It is a shame that the quickest, simplest thing to make is unhealthy but that is changing. Now you can buy foods that require little to no preparation that are healthy, but these are often more expensive than their unhealthy counterparts. I'll give you an example of a food that's inexpensive and requires no preparation: an apple. You don't have to spend your evenings eating tofu burgers and brussel sprouts but at least make a conscious effort to avoid eating your daily allowance of fat in one meal. If money and convenience is an issue, at least consider frozen and canned vegetables over a continuous parade of chicken nuggets, french fries, and pizza.
I suppose a lot of this has to do with culture and economic status, but there has to be a point where you decide that you want your children to lead a better, healthier life than you. Just because your parents were ignorant of nutritional content and what constitutes a healthy diet, doesn't mean you have to be ignorant too. And if you want to eat pizza and burgers at least run or something you lazy bastard.
1 comment:
Wow, West Virginia. What good things can I say about West Virginia...Oh I know, I've never had to visit.
It's sad times that we live in. If you're ever in the Pacific Northwest, you'd swear that it's a requirement to be overweight there. Even the Army is taking on a lot of people that are overweight due the need for soldiers. Then what they end up doing PT all day, every day. And they're "flagged" so they can never be promoted and they'll never receive an award for anything that they participate in. Is it there fault for being overweight, maybe, but then they grew up that way. They didn't no any better as a child. One of the guys that I'm forced to work with fits that category. He's been over weight at least his entire adult life. He's been in the Army almost 4 years and he's still a PFC, granted he can't retain anything and even the simplest tasks any poorly when he's left responsible. But he's flagged and there's no way he can get promoted. We get attacked with an IED, ok sure, he slept through it and I believe to this day he still doesn't know what happened, but he won't get a CAB. I digress.
Many obese people are ambivalent about their weight. They feel that looking that way and eating what they want is their happiness and who are you to dictate?
A lot of things in society quietly condone it too. Dr. Phil and all his daytime accomplices participate in the problem as well. Any time a man leaves his woman because she's tripled in size doesn't resemble any part of the woman he fell in love with, oh it's his fault. He's a terrible man. She's still the same woman. Beauty is on the inside. You do what makes you happy sweetheart.
It's just wrong and it's a bad path that we're going down. And obesity costs this country a lot NOW, the new healthcare plan..blah blah, we know.
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