I spoke earlier this year at a WIC event (California's Women, Infants & Children Program providing nutrition education, breastfeeding support, vouchers for healthy foods etc). I was there to talk about challenges faced by working moms. Much of the conversation revolved around how low income working women with children have no time. No time for themselves, not enough time with their kids, and little time to prepare healthful food. I spent three years interviewing working mothers for a documentary film, and most women I met were confronted daily with the fast-cheap-good triangle. You can cannot have all three; fast and cheap is awfully appealing when work is demanding, grocery shopping is time consuming, and sleep is at a premium.
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@Miriam2222 Much poorer people who worked much longer hours, e.g. Lancashire mill workers, banded together to buy in bulk (economy of scale), cook in bulk (saving time and fuel) and eat communally (solidarity and friendship). American society, with its obsession with individualism and its blind terror of anything that smacks of socialism, keeps people divided, poor, and unhealthy.
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We in the US will never be able to establish good eating habits nationwide, in part because of our preoccupation with freedoms of speech and press. For example, the sugar industry paid for a campaign of misinformation, blaming dietary fat for our weight problems, when there was little or no basis for those claims. "How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat", NYT, 9/12/2016. Under then- and now-current law, it is their right to publish misleading and doctored information, even if they know some or all of it is false. If they had made misleading statements that hurt one person, they could have been sued. But since their misleading statements hurt all of us, we have no remedy and no way to prevent similar efforts which are almost certainly happening now.
I cannot answer the question of what is the remedy for bad faith speech which is harmful to the public. However, I think it is time we start asking the question.
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Oh, for heaven's sake. Michael Pollan said it best:
"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." If you think you don't have enough time to shop for real ingredients and cook real food, start monitoring the time you waste online and reassess your priorities. Enlist the help of kids if you have them: get them off their devices, teach them some life skills, and thereby encourage genuine self-esteem. Learn quickie recipes. Double or triple recipes and freeze food for later. If you think real food is more expensive than fast food, think again. It isn't. If you live in a food desert, form a food co-op. If you eat too much, stop eating too much. It's up to you.
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Food was worse when I was growing up in the sixties but people got exercise.
The millenials around me are shocked that I walk to the store and back to get groceries. They think its some huge hike. I don't drive and if I want something from the garden center or lumber yard, I either drag my wagon and pull back the big bags of dirt or I just carry the lumber back.
I had a doctor at the VA who was stunned when I told her I rode my bike from Seattle to Cle Elum and back. She asked, "isn't that on the other side of the Cascade Mountains?". Yes, I told her. I was supposed to ride as far as Yakima but the bugs were getting to me so I cut the trip short. I was 55 at the time. I told her how I would walk across town rather than take a bus just for the peace and quite. She looked like she weighed 300 pounds and wouldn't make it a block on our hills.
There are lots of kids in my apartment building. Rarely do I see any of them outside playing. They all have phones and are playing some kind of game. The adults are for the most part chunky if not obese.
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Our health is in decline, in part, because of the big lie. The lie? Olive oil is good for you! Watch any cooking show. It doesn't matter the cuisine. They use olive oil in nearly everything, because it tastes good. Olive oil is NOT good for you. It's liquid fat. The truth is, there are no "good" oils. I quit using olive oil last year. It's just a matter of time before the media starts asking questions and the public becomes informed.
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This is a terribly misinformed comment.
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Gee, that must be why Italians are so fat and die so young. Did an olive tree insult your family?
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Technology will save some of us but it will be expensive and limited to the top 1% of wealthy society. So, in this dog eat dog world, you need to work to become wealthy just to survive the processed food industry. For example, organically grown vegetables are as rare as hens teeth and it is the only way to avoid small molecule pesticides that are used almost universally. The fish you buy from the market are typically from China grown in dirty ponds with untold amounts of ground runoff pollutants. Worse, is the barnyard animal fed antibiotics leading to antibiotic microbial resistance and massive future pandemic dangers, Buying colorful, small plates will help by adding a few minutes to you life expectancy but little else. Unfortunately, as reported in Lancet and elsewhere the global nutraceutical industry is a sham as is the food industry. Science will need to reengineer "eating" entirely as every approach so far is a big fat lie. Reducing the size of a Coke can is pathetic, absurd.
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I've been around this block many more times than most of the commenters. And my observations are: 1) We have been lied to. Some studies, we now know, were biased and we were misled by the true results. To that point, people do NOT live longer on a low-fat diet. Moral of the story is don't fall for these studies. 2) Everyone's physical reaction is different to food. Learn how your body processes it. My nephew has been very overweight for years and has excellent cholesterol and blood pressure numbers!! 3) Olive Oil IS good for you which is why Italy is one of the healthiest countries...and one reason why Sardinia is a "Blue Zone". There is nothing mysterious about why our health is bad...we eat too much at one sitting, we eat too much sugar (fruit juice is VERY high in sugar), and we don't relax while we're eating. Go to Italy and see how they eat lunch...shops close for 2 hours and people have lunch and often a nap on a cot in the shop's back room! What they don't do is shove a hamburger in their mouths while driving somewhere. Really, the solution is not that complicated.
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@J. G. Smith Well said. Indeed, we have been lied to, but that should be obvious. Abundant information is available. Every food advertisement we see should be treated with total skepticism, asking ourselves "In whose interests is it that I believe this?" The answer is always "Not mine." Readers might be interested in British documentary-maker Jacques Peretti's three-part series, The Men Who Made Us Fat. He reveals the food industries' epic lies and the governmental irresponsibility and chicanery that have encouraged the epidemic of obesity and ill health: https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/04/arts/television/the-men-who-made-us-fat-finds-lots-of-unhealthy-food.html
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I want to know why we were all so slim in the 60s and 70s--to the extent that attempts to portray people of that era in movies or on TV inevitably look stupid to me--everyone looks too fat.
We were not all pure food hippies, the meals of 60s and 70s often were horrendous.
Maybe why not heavy? The calibration of normal weight is way way off as is the concept of serving size.
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Haven’t read the book yet but am wondering how much she gets into meat consumption and factory farming. Per capital meat consumption has been rising around 5% per year for some time, correlating to meat prices dropping. We treat sentient, feeling animals like raw materials, worse even. If you eat meat, please reduce your intake significantly and commit to buying only verified humane sources. I did. It took time to adjust. I used to utterly crave meat — now I eat it rarely.
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How hard is it to eat right? I'm seventy-one, BMI 20, and 175lbs. I figured it out a long time ago.
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@James A. Barnhart
Not at all helpful. Good for you, though.
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Recent research shows that too many calories too often and lots of sugar and saturated animal fats are the answer to lots of the questions.
Eating less calories per meal, eating 3 meals, little snacking, all food with in 10 hours, no food before 4 hours at bedtime.
Fasting for at least 18 hours 2 times a week. Add water soluble fiber additives to diet so get 30-40 grams per day. Keeping all meats down to 4 ozs. 2-4 X per week. Heavy on plant foods.
See letswakeupfolks.blogspot.com- Diet and what it means for details and reasons why this works.
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I am halfway through this book and find it infinitely fascinating because she weaves extensive research into her inquisitive nature. And it is important to note that she is a really good writer. Interesting and recent data support her conclusions. Her global review of how we got to where we are today allowed me to gain a meta-based awareness of how and why my eating habits had changed over time without me really giving it all that much attention. This has made it easier to see how I can reverse, maybe just on a small individual or family basis for starters, my own ways of approaching eating. I now make more thoughtful, conscious meal choices that I believe will contribute to improved health and weight control.
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I grew up in the 60's.
A snack was a small meal served to school aged children around 4pm. It had nutritional value. Other occasions for eating between meals might be during cocktails when teeny cups of nuts were set out or on special holidays when they were served in reasonable quantities determined by whoever plated them.
Meals contained all the "food groups" Served at regular times. It was believed people would get all sorts of maladies if they didn't follow these rules from insomnia to constipation to cancer. Also there was a really strong moral or social imperative to this. People used to have some "shame" and tucking a huge bag of chips under one's double chin like a feedbag and slumping on a sofa to watch a game would have shocked the conscience!
Sodas were for parties and the bottle had 8 oz and no one would have more than a couple. A bag of chips lasted a week; you might have four on your lunch plate with the sandwich and pickle and carrot sticks.
Desserts were served daily in my house. 4 oz of pudding, a 3 oz scoop of ice cream, a one inch slice of loaf cake/bread like banana nut. Dessert had to have some perceived redeeming food value to justify the sugar and fat. Eaten only right after a full meal or you would get "sick".
There were no seconds. All meals were eaten at table and if you couldn't be there your meal was plated and held. This included all socioeconomic groups, by the way. It took a little planning, so what?
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@ck Generally it took a stay at home woman.
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@Karen . 40% of adults in the US do not work. And of the 60% who do most of them do have time to prepare meals. Children can also participate in meal preparation and clean up. It would mean taking half hour a day away from the screens, that is all. In a family of 4 with two working parents if everyone participated in meals 30 minutes a day that would be whopping 14 hours a week devoted to shopping, cooking and eating. Four people can eat healthy with that kind of time spent. We gotta stop making excuses. Oh, snd also, eat half as much and you'll have plenty of money for healthy food!
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@ck - I grew up in the 60's and have no idea what you are talking about:)
Every thing was fried in Crisco and had Miracle Whip in it. Dinner was in front of the tv and usually said Swanson on it. To not go back for seconds was to insult the cook. Ice cream was served covered in chocolate syrup and Redi Whip.
No one had heard of whole grain anything where I came from. I didn't hear of whole wheat until I was in high school in the seventies. Pork was served about three times a week with canned mushroom soup which is mostly salt, beef three times, chicken once. Rarely did I see fish. That was something Catholics ate on Friday and we weren't Catholic:)
My breakfast consisted of things like Fruit Loops and Lucky Charms and of course, Tang. Sugar was added to everything.
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"We are the first generation to be hunted by what we eat." If there are any more so-unintentionally-hilarious bon mots in this book I might have to actually buy it.
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I’ve been a Bee Wilson fan since Consider the Fork, a must-read.
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One fast food meals overloads sugar, salt & carbs for the day. Then there are seconds and dessert plus lunch & dinner. And as Jacquie of Iowa offers "We have abundant food soaked in pesticides, fungicides and antibiotics. It seems obvious why our health is so bad."
Other first world countries with abundance do not have a 50+% obesity rate.
At the same time, the article is interesting; heading out to buy the book.
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If you read the Weight of the Nation, the CDC NHANES data, and the USDA studies, you can see that 60% of food intake are processed foods and that food nutrient content has declined significantly (due to farming practices).
However, at the risk of adding even more complexity, all that is affected by the school systems and the explosive changes in family structure. Who walks to school anymore or has PE? The nuclear family is a rare bird.
The military is sort of acting as a microcosm of the larger social changes. Lappe documented a 20% osteopenia rate in women entering the Army (all had passed a physical). Westphal documented malnutrition increasing on the military diet. Cropper documented 12+% of AF recruits arriving with iron anemia (female rates 2x the male rates).
Or the CDC NHANES documenting decreasing Bone Mineral Density (BMD) due to decreasing activity levels.
Walk around your grocery store. How much space is devoted to different fresh foods? How big is/are the frozen pizza aisle(s)?
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@CW - I would have to say that the stores I go to have as big (if not bigger) of fresh foods than frozen pizza aisles.
The one store I go to only carries one brand of pizza. The dairy aisle is pretty skimpy. If you want half a dozen kinds of bok choi they have you covered though.
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I have not read the book. But I watch cooking, street food of east Asia and Southeast Asia on YouTube and I see healthy foods especially fishes, poultry and vegetables. I have no knowledge of the country referred to in this piece. A local grocery chain where I live displays unhealthy sugary drinks and empty calorie cookies in the front foyer before entering the store despite a plethora of healthy foods inside. There is no need to explore the southern hemisphere for this piece. Be mindful of your local grocery.
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@Uly Very true! When I take my granddaughter into the grocery store I will stay in the outer isles and show her all of the Chips, Soda and what not junk food isles in between and tell her "this is what kills Americans". The grocery store is a minefield of sorts if we do not arm ourselves with the education to know what is printed on those labels.
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@Hulagirrrl It's even better to buy food with no labels at all: fresh fruit and vegetables and bulk pulses and grains.
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@Uly - The main store I go to throws you right into the produce section and they have free snacks (bananas, apples, etc.) for the kids to eat while shopping.
The other one I go to throws you into mangoes, manzana bananas, and things of this nature.
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I agree that a lot of the food we eat is bad for us, and eating lots of food is a bad idea, but if it is all so bad, why do we live so long?
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Quality of life trumps quantity of life every time. Millions of people are being kept alive by advances in technology and pharmacology and it is certain that many of them are not so thrilled about it with their minds and bodies falling apart.
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@Michael c My mother was 5"1' and weighed over 300 pounds most of her adult life. She lived to be 82 but the last 15 years were spent mostly in bed in a nursing home, she had to be machine lifted into a bath which was only given once a week. And there were many others in the nursing home in the same situation.
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I borrowed the book from our local library and could barely tear myself away from it until I finished. I have read several of Marion Nestle’s books. I’m buying a copy of Wilson’s tome to reread at my leisure; it will rest next to Nestle’s books. HIGHLY RECOMMEND.
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The benefits of abundant food far outweigh the negatives. People's health as measured by life expectancy has never been better (except for opiod/methamphetamine users).
People can eat better, certainly, and the America has far too many overweight people. (And people put cheese on everything, which is disgusting.) But your ancestors would trade that in a second when compared to the possibility of a new potato famine.
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"We have abundant food. Why is our health so bad?" Because food is abundant.
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"...slow ourselves down to some kind of sense. It won’t be by turning back the clock to an idealized past that was in fact ruled by drudgery and monotony."
This assumption, nearly universal among today's academics, desperately needs to be re-examined. It goes with Hobbes' usually misconstrued statement that our ancestors' lives were "nasty, brutish, and short", and was fixed permanently in our humanist minds by Millet's shocking painting of "The Man With The Hoe."
There is no doubt that the Man with the hoe was exactly as pictured- beaten down into his animal core. Yes that happened, and happens- but cotton does not cause slavery- people do.
If you can find old movies of pre-industrial peoples at work farming rice, or cassava, the current bugaboo of the anti-drudgery coterie- you will find the people - singing as they work, often in very interesting and complex ways. Watch, and you will see all kinds of community/social interactions going on- during this supposedly soul-killing work.
I had the great good fortune in 1988 to visit a small primal village in China. No electricity; these people lived exactly as they had for the past thousand years. Constant labor; but their community was intact- and the people- happy.
I recommend Kurosawa's great movie "Seven Samurai" for an accurate look into the world of labor intensive agriculture. Are there abuses? Plenty. But the movie ends with the village singing ancient song, as they plant the rice.
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@Greenpa Forgive me if I’m skeptical about the happiness of your Chinese villagers in 1988. I grew up in India in the 1970s-80s. Most villages didn’t have electricity, water, medical care or any form of electronic communication. Infant mortality was incredibly high, primarily because of hunger - real hunger, the sort that distends the bellies of malnourished children and bleaches the hair of dark-skinned people light brown - and secondarily because of the lack of the most basic medical care. Children died of chronic diarrhea and small cuts that got infected.
Communities were strong; they had to be to deal with the pain of living.
And I guarantee that almost every one of those villagers would take obesity over hunger, and give up forever the singing while they’re hunched over ankle deep in water planting rice and keeping a watchful eye out for snakes while working.
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@Shiv - I'm certain your observations are correct; but you need to remember China is not India. While my Chinese village was isolated, and had no electricity, it did have school for the smaller children, available medicines and treatments vastly better than in India, and the knowledge that their country was moving, and cared about them. I had with me my Fruit and Tea Institute partners- aliens here; a county high official, and a local official. I was watching interactions intently, since I understand far more Chinese language than I can speak.
The village head man knew only the local official; and was in awe of all the others. But relations with the local official were close and friendly.
Yes, in order for people to be "happy" in work like growing rice, it is necessary that they not be hungry, ill, and afraid. Perhaps that is the chief purpose of civilization; that it make it possible for the common people to be fed, well, and safe.
That has been achieved many times, resulting in astonishing cultural achievements. But it seems to be incredibly difficult to sustain- since the "elite" usually take a little more, then a little more- leaving always less for the people. Then; collapse; since Sumeria.
The Chinese had just been through a collapse period; the end of the Qing dynasty, when all was corruption, deadly poverty, and famine. China is now at that point in the cycle where the common people are not hungry, not sick, and not afraid and more than you or I.
2
This isn't true. We eat better than ever before. In the past, fast food was unhealthy or fried stuff like pizza and burgers, but now chain restaurants have gotten healthier and ingredients like kale, cabbage, broccoli are on almost every fast-food menu. People have gotten the message that fiber is important, and have cut down on red meat while increasing vegetable intake. We see this all around us. I would say the last remaining vestige of poor diets in America is the sweetened beverages (juices and soda), but even that is slowly fading. Chipotle, Cava Mezze, Gusto etc. are now offering Black Tea, Hibiscus Coolers, and other low-sugar options, although there needs to be more of that.
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You can’t equate fast food and chain restaurants. Fast food is still wildly unhealthy- McDonalds isn’t serving kale. Chain restaurants may offer healthier options but if you look around the dining room, most people are not ordering the healthy options.
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@Eugene
Your data to support your claims?
Read the CDC NHANES and USDA studies.
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We have abundant food soaked in pesticides, fungicides and antibiotics. It seems obvious why our health is so bad.
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@Jacquie
Agreed + hormones routinely added into dairy.
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@Jacquie Also, we don't exercise enough. My husband and I don't own a car and until the last few years (in our early 80's) we arranged our lives so we could get by without one. We bought our house where it is so my husband could walk to work. My friends live in much nicer houses.
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@independent thinker Bovine growth hormone is banned in Canada and Europe because it's terrible for both cows and milk-drinkers. The U.S. has caved to the greed of Big Dairy, as it caves to Big Everything, and to hell with humane farming practices and public health.
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A top-down system to feed 7 or 8 billion people needs to produce and distribute massive amounts of food. After it is produced, the food needs to be stored, transported, and distributed, which takes time. It needs to be grown in huge plots that produce economies of scale. And it needs a long shelf life to arrive at its destination in edible condition.
Carbs and processed foods fit this bill nicely. Fresh, wholesome foods do not.
Then there's the packaging. All that mass-produced food needs to be sold in individual packets that buyers are used to throwing away.
For people with the means, time, and money, there are alternatives. For people without, I don't see any.
A localized system doesn't have to do it this way, but it's expensive.
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This comment gets to the problem of food in a mass, modern society. The book argues for what conservatives call a nanny state. Chile is the example. Americans will not agree to that. We will remain free to become obese, yet the irony is that people fooled and manipulated by corporations aren’t really free, and a political system controlled by said corporate powers keeps us unfree. Yes the educated can opt out, for money, and do. I do. But it makes me sad , like so much else in this country.
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@mlbex
My area of Northern CA was among the first to use railroad cars to transport fruit to the East Coast, +/- ice.
Also it was ridiculous on Maui to see small growers forced out of larger market by Safeway etc, which imported everything--even bananas which my 3 plants in yard had so many I couldn't give them away.
Nor could anyone else keep up with their own natural bananas.
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@mlbex
One advantage (perhaps the only) of the industrial food complex is the ability to freeze and ship vegetables. Frozen vegetables retain nutrients better than fresh when shipped long distances.
4