Worried about peoples over amped nutritional expectations.

Mr_Knight

I would like to know everyone's thoughts on this?

Like the man once sang...

"So much for the afterglow...yeah, I guess we need the drama..."

Obsessing is part of the human condition. Do what you need to do, ignore the rest.

healthyscratch1978

The point was that food designed to be enticing and delicious is hardly some new-fangled thing created by marketing departments and the purveyors of so-called unnatural foods. Humans have been making food as appetizing as possible for ages, and I hardly think that the "processed" stuff that people complain about is somehow more magically irresistable than the kind of menu I mentioned. I certainly know which I'd choose!

The ubiquity of extremely cheap high-calorie, low nutritional value food is absolutely a "new fangled thing". Sorry, there are scientists employed by the purveyors of this fare figuring out how to make things as appealing as possible. That kind of complexity in food preparation and targeted marketing has not been a part of normal human existence until very recently, that's just a fact.

jofjltncb6

The point was that food designed to be enticing and delicious is hardly some new-fangled thing created by marketing departments and the purveyors of so-called unnatural foods. Humans have been making food as appetizing as possible for ages, and I hardly think that the "processed" stuff that people complain about is somehow more magically irresistable than the kind of menu I mentioned. I certainly know which I'd choose!

The ubiquity of extremely cheap high-calorie, low nutritional value food is absolutely a "new fangled thing". Sorry, there are scientists employed by the purveyors of this fare figuring out how to make things as appealing as possible. That kind of complexity in food preparation and targeted marketing has not been a part of normal human existence until very recently, that's just a fact.

My mom didn't need a team of scientists to make her food taste more delicious than any other food in the history of ever...

...and yet we still managed to eat at a calorie level appropriate for our activity level.

I still manage to do this even with this "new" food that is supposedly as delicious/addictive as science can make it even with billions of dollars in marketing to try to get me to do otherwise.

Am I just an outlier? Or am I someone who takes responsibility for his actions and doesn't look for scapegoats for bad decisions?

RHachicho

Let's not get into an argument here. I think you are both right. Honestly the prevalence of unhealthy appealing food is a new thing. However it is the MEANS used to make food appealing that separates it from good old fashioned home cooking. And I hate to say it the more I think about it the more I realize that it is the absence of the home maker that has left room for this kind of stuff to flourish. Please note that I am not sexist. I absolutely do think that men can and should be home makers too. But undeniably in the past SOMEONE was home to look after the kids and cook the dinners. And they take way more time over it than the sellers of the pre packaged crap do. AND since they cater for their loved ones they often did a damn good job of making sure the stuff was healthy too. But under increasing economic pressure for all people who are able in a household to earn and the fact that the job of a home maker has been stigmatized by both men and women. Very often people resort to the quickest easiest path. Eating pre prepared and eating out way more often than is good for them.

The point is delicious you cook at home. And delicious you order in a restaurant or heat up in a microwave usually have an ocean of difference between them in terms of healthiness.

bcattoes

Let's not get into an argument here. I think you are both right. Honestly the prevalence of unhealthy appealing food is a new thing. However it is the MEANS used to make food appealing that separates it from good old fashioned home cooking. And I hate to say it the more I think about it the more I realize that it is the absence of the home maker that has left room for this kind of stuff to flourish. Please note that I am not sexist. I absolutely do think that men can and should be home makers too. But undeniably in the past SOMEONE was home to look after the kids and cook the dinners. And they take way more time over it than the sellers of the pre packaged crap do. AND since they cater for their loved ones they often did a damn good job of making sure the stuff was healthy too. But under increasing economic pressure for all people who are able in a household to earn and the fact that the job of a home maker has been stigmatized by both men and women. Very often people resort to the quickest easiest path. Eating pre prepared and eating out way more often than is good for them.

The point is delicious you cook at home. And delicious you order in a restaurant or heat up in a microwave usually have an ocean of difference between them in terms of healthiness.

I think this has some truth to it, but I don't believe it explains as much as you seem to suggest. For one, read through the forums to see how many stay at homes moms are here trying to lose significant amounts of weight. And, having grown up in the 60's and 70's when obesity was less of a problem, many of our meals would not be considered healthy by todays standards.

Humans by nature are lazy, I think. If there is an easy way to do something, we generally do it that way. Why would eating be an exception. Unfortunately, we are also pretty good at inventing ways to make things easier. Ever heard the phrase "best thing since slice bread". Making bread from scratch is time consuiming. Buying it from the store is not.

jofjltncb6

Let's not get into an argument here. I think you are both right. Honestly the prevalence of unhealthy appealing food is a new thing. However it is the MEANS used to make food appealing that separates it from good old fashioned home cooking. And I hate to say it the more I think about it the more I realize that it is the absence of the home maker that has left room for this kind of stuff to flourish. Please note that I am not sexist. I absolutely do think that men can and should be home makers too. But undeniably in the past SOMEONE was home to look after the kids and cook the dinners. And they take way more time over it than the sellers of the pre packaged crap do. AND since they cater for their loved ones they often did a damn good job of making sure the stuff was healthy too. But under increasing economic pressure for all people who are able in a household to earn and the fact that the job of a home maker has been stigmatized by both men and women. Very often people resort to the quickest easiest path. Eating pre prepared and eating out way more often than is good for them.

The point is delicious you cook at home. And delicious you order in a restaurant or heat up in a microwave usually have an ocean of difference between them in terms of healthiness.

I disagree with a lot of this but especially with the bolded. I do not believe there is a substantial difference between the "healthiness" of meals cooked in a small kitchen vs commercial kitchen.

lemurcat12

The point was that food designed to be enticing and delicious is hardly some new-fangled thing created by marketing departments and the purveyors of so-called unnatural foods. Humans have been making food as appetizing as possible for ages, and I hardly think that the "processed" stuff that people complain about is somehow more magically irresistable than the kind of menu I mentioned. I certainly know which I'd choose!

The ubiquity of extremely cheap high-calorie, low nutritional value food is absolutely a "new fangled thing". Sorry, there are scientists employed by the purveyors of this fare figuring out how to make things as appealing as possible. That kind of complexity in food preparation and targeted marketing has not been a part of normal human existence until very recently, that's just a fact.

What's new is that (a) food is now cheaper than before, on a relative scale at least; and (b) people don't tend to eat consistent with the physical activity they do. What's not new is that people have especially appealing food. Again, if you think some fast food meal, let alone some packaged lasagna from the grocery store is more appealing than the meal I mentioned or my grandmother's lasagna, well, there's something wrong with your taste buds! (Kidding--taste is subjective and all that.)

Of course it's true that people in the food industry try to make their products more appealing to as many as possible. This is not scary, it's what people in all kinds of businesses do. I've still yet to actually meet an adult who thinks fast food or grocery store processed aisle stuff is somehow irresistibly tasty in some special way that no other food is. I mean, compare a homemade pie from someone who knows how to bake well to what you can buy at McD or the supermarket. Scientists are getting way too much credit here.

The real reasons that people eat fast food beyond what might be healthy for them, IMO, is that it's convenient and they often don't really know how to cook or feel like they lack the time to do so. Not because food is somehow more appealing than before or they are addicted to it (which really makes no sense).

In fact, one of the unhealthy things about US food culture, IMO, is that there's this lack of appreciation in many cases for genuinely good food. I know there's a problem with poverty and the like, but the US still has one of the lowest per capita food costs/expenditures, and yet what works from a marketing perspective is more food for less money (and thus our giant sizes, which is what the market demands). Related to this is the love of convenience foods and a tendency in at least a large part of the population to not make eating a culturally significant thing--eat at home with the family--but something you do on the run, at your desk, in your car, and for many overweight people, that pushes over to in secret and there's this weird shame about it, which is probably counterproductive. It's entirely possible I'm imposing more complicated causes when it's just simple (more and cheaper food, less activity), but I think it's worth thinking about. In cultures like France and Italy which do have less obesity than we do, there's certainly plenty of focus on making food appealing and enticing in a way we often don't see in the US. For the record, I'm not blaming individuals for this--it's cultural and real pressures at work, although I do think individuals can choose to opt out of it.

lemurcat12

I think this has some truth to it, but I don't believe it explains as much as you seem to suggest. For one, read through the forums to see how many stay at homes moms are here trying to lose significant amounts of weight. And, having grown up in the 60's and 70's when obesity was less of a problem, many of our meals would not be considered healthy by todays standards.

Humans by nature are lazy, I think. If there is an easy way to do something, we generally do it that way. Why would eating be an exception. Unfortunately, we are also pretty good at inventing ways to make things easier. Ever heard the phrase "best thing since slice bread". Making bread from scratch is time consuiming. Buying it from the store is not.

I do think something has changed and I'm not sure what.

My mother loves convenience food and hates cooking. She was a stay at home mom 'til I was 8 and worked out of the house after that (I'm 44, so this is 70s and 80s). She didn't have a lot of time, but she clearly had grown up with an idea of what dinner and other meals were supposed to look like (she had to take home ec in school and women at her public university were taught about dinner party etiquette, which just seems hilarious to me now), and made dinner, even though they were pretty repetitive and I now know she considered it a chore.

Anyway, so it was understood that we were to eat together as a family and meals weren't super healthy, but they were balanced. It's what I used to mock as basic Midwestern, but not that different than I eat now, seriously, except in the specifics. Basically, we had meat (generally beef or chicken, but also lamb sometimes and a good bit of fish), a starch (often potatoes), and a vegetable (often from a can, corn counted). For a nicer meal we'd have bread and salad. Never "pasta", but spaghetti or lasagna (American style), sure. Occasionally some kind of dessert (pudding or cookies or ice cream), not every night. On super special occasions in the summer we'd get to go to McD (generally for lunch) and get kids food (burger and small fries and small coke). On other special occasions we'd get Chinese food or pizza or go to a restaurant, not that often. We did not have pop in the house, but were expected to drink milk (whole) with meals. Other meals were more catch as catch can, but pretty boringly standard American options.

One thing, though, is that I grew up not learning to cook, and only taught myself to cook in my late 20s. For people of my generation, at least judging by my social group (which tended to marry and have kids later), this was not uncommon. But I still did have a sense of what a proper meal was based on my upbringing, although I knew shockingly little about nutrition for an otherwise educated person (something that again isn't all that unusual, IME).

I get the sense that since then, with the passage of time, people are even less likely to grow up with even a basic idea of what a balanced meal is. I mean, I didn't much like vegetables as a kid (again, canned), but I was expected to eat them, and that probably played a role in me ordering and eating them at restaurants and learning to like them and cook them. If you have people raised by people who may have grown up like me and never learned to cook and who also never rectified this, then it's not surprising that people end up relying on packaged items or convenience food even more. It's not that it's so irresistibly good, but that the cultural way that we traditionally learned how to eat has changed, for whatever reason. (I don't particularly think it's women working or 2 job families, since I know plenty of such people who do live more like we did as kids, although it does seem more the exception than the rule.)

Ugh, too long and vague, ill-formed thoughts. And clearly you don't need fast food or packaged items to get fat--I did. (And to the extent it's restaurant related, which is part of it, it's not that restaurant food is bad for you, but that you can eat in an indulgent way 4-5 times a week and not gain weight. So that's on me--a failure of self-discipline and exercising good sense.)

RHachicho

Well let's just get his out there i make no claim to omniscience XD. I am just taking my best guesses at what the root of the problem could be. Perhaps it is simply because people have become far more aware of what's in their food these days. Maybe it is just natural to obsess over it once you are aware there is something to obsess over. But I think honestly our current obsession with foods micro contents comes from a number of different factors. I don't think any single factor can be singled out and blamed. I just think that it's getting out of control. Just because indulging in a meal out in a restaurant is not the best thing for you in the world doesn't mean that it isn't acceptable once in a while. And eating the occasional microwave meal when you have had a rough day and don't have the time or the energy to cook won't kill you either.

But hell maybe it's just ANOTHER way that people snob over other people. I eat cleaner than you therefore I'm better than you. I think that this suspicion more than anything else is what annoys me over the whole thing. When I get right down to it you guys are right I really shouldn't be overly concerned with the damn fool things strangers are doing. But when people start lording on about how their lives have changed completely since they went paleo or cut wheat out of their diet I kind of want to throttle their smug faces with their own tape-measures. It's not really that I'm insecure it's that this crap is everywhere these days. It's like when i was young and fat and didn't really care but people would follow me around taking the piss constantly and getting in my face. It drives me up the wall that's for damn sure. But not because i secretly think that being fat is bad and what they are saying is getting to me. But because they just wont shut up. I would feel the same annoyance from a terrier following me around all day yapping away constantly.

I really don't know if that made any sense at all but yeah there it is.