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Originally Posted by Agota  P.S. One of my favorite episodes was the one where I found out that apparently, a french frie is officially a vegetable in U.S. What's wrong with people who watch after nutrition in schools? Do they want to kill the entire generation or what? |
This goes to the heart of why the obesity problem is so much bigger (no pun intended) than 'lazy fat people who can't be bothered to eat less or exercise'.
I grew up in a family that grew their own vegetables, and what we didn't grow, we often went and picked direct from growers. I was raised to eat and cook whole, healthy foods (icecream and soft drinks were for birthdays only, and I didn't even try a McDonalds burger till I was a teenager), my parents took me on walks and paid for ballet and gym classes.
Unsurprisingly, I have never been overweight. And likewise, it is hard for me to get my head around the idea of a french fry being regarded as a vegetable because I have always known better than that. To be honest, I find it hard to get my head around the idea that a lot of people don't know how to poach an egg, grow vegetables or roast a chicken.
But that is the reality.
There is a whole generation of people who spent 95+percent of their day sitting or lying down, who have never been taught to cook, and therefore live on food produced by others, who have totally screwed-up ideas about what foods are healthy and what are not, have tastes for fatty, sugary foods that have been cultivated since they were too young to be able to choose foods for themselves, and for whom the idea of the ongoing effort for what may be years of completely changing everything about what they are used to eating and doing is just waaaay too big to contemplate or endure.
Let's not even go to the fact that obesity is strongly correlated with poverty, and that eating healthily and exercising requires both financial and/or significant time investment. If you are working two jobs to support your family of five on minimum wage (or if you are pouring 80 hours a week into climbing the corporate ladder as a single person), finding time to shop for and prepare nutritious meals and exercise becomes much, much harder.
The problem with 'the people who watch over nutrition in schools' is that they are funded by or reliant on substantial discounting from food-producing corporations. So there is a vested interest in promoting 'food products' over actual food. This is what happens when schools are underfunded - they have to turn to corporate interests to stay afloat. And those corporate interests are not in our waistlines, they're in the company bottom line.