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Fed Up: documentary
Replies
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It does amaze me though with a discussion of obesity in America that no one has brought up the elephant in the room.
Has no thought about the relative costs of whole vs processed foods? Especially if you need to cook it or store it.
If you can't store food you can't buy in bulk.
If you can store food whole foods go bad faster.
If you can't cook it is cheaper to buy fast food.
If you don't know how to cook it is cheaper to buy fast food.
If your family doesn't know nutrition or how to cook, do you think children learn it?
Different people have different nutritional needs, and may have been taught by family to eat in a counter productive way.
There are many factors that effect what people eat and saying everyone should just watch what they eat is a very privileged statement.
Saying that everyone is able to research and figure out nutrition on their own is also a very privileged statement.
Saying that something is a very privileged statement is also a very privileged statement.12 -
bmeadows380 wrote: »Thanks for posting this. I agree with a lot of what you said here.
The main theme that stuck out in the documentary was that the parents of the children featured weee being told that the solution to their child's obesity was CICO. The kids were eating too much and not burning enough. The documentary wanted to address one portion of why CICo may not be the entire problem/solution for the families featured and how the food industry may share some blame.
When you see the young girl in n the documentary who was practicing with her swim team and jogging with her family a few times a week, making food choices she thought were good, and couldn't lose weight, it makes me think there is something else at large going on.
Does the documentary.make some sweeping statements? Yes. Are they 100% true? No. Is there something more to the types of food we perceive as healthy which may not be healthy for everyone? I think so.
Bottom line: telling families they just have to practice CICO and it will solve their obesity problems is not a solution.
The bolded is a bit misleading imo. Making good choices is a good thing. Making good choices in the correct amounts is another. My diet is loaded with lots that is considered bad from donuts and cereal to twinkies, alongside a lot of stuff considered good by most camps.
I just don't over eat and maintain at ~180lbs pretty easily.
I agree - portion size is everything, and most people are especially poor judges at what constitutes a portion size.
For instance: my local grocery store sells apples in two sizes, one called lunchbox size and the other called regular. The USDA's website shows that for 100g, an apple has 52 calories; at 154g that goes up to 80 calories. How many people would be able to eyeball the two apples side by side and realize just how much of a calorie difference that is? And we're talking about something rather calorie low to begin with. There are some things that just a little bit more can equate to a huge difference in calorie content, such as peanut butter or almonds.
Yep. Peanut butter is usually my go to example because who is REALLY satisfied with a level tablespoon? Even a "responsible" amount spread out on a slice of bread can actually equal out to 2 or 3 servings, which, depending on brand, could easily add ~380 calories but still look thin on the bread.
Good point.
I LOVE to have apple slices and peanut butter for lunch. I manage the amount of peanut butter I consume by buying the Jif to-go cups. That way I'm not getting one more dab and stay at 250 fabulous calories.
(Doesn't make peanut butter the devil)
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Yet I can. So is the problem the diet or the dieter?
So I guess after all thatyou CAN say the problem is me.
I think that (and the post you're replying to) is unrealistically stark, especially in context of the thread.
The thread was (I think) about Fed Up, and the discussion began over whether it was presenting an accurate picture of the obesity crisis, and (more implicitly) whether its message would be helpful to reducing obesity as a population-scale problem.
When we take obesity down to an individual scale, we all have individual struggles or challenges. Those are part of our personal context; they may not provide useful insights at the population-wide scale (though it's likely that any individual challenge that applies to you or me also applies to some others, and sharing our strategies at an individual level can be helpful, of course).
You have a relatively low calorie goal as compared with your satiation needs, so you can't fit in certain high-calorie theoretically tasty foods** while simultaneously feeling full and satisfied, and also accomplishing your weight-management goals. (** Theoretical only because I don't personally enjoy donuts ).
That situation's unfortunate, I can see how it creates a challenge for you, and I'm sorry that that's true for you (among others). But it's a problem that doesn't apply to everyone, as others in the thread have described.
As a somewhat-similar example ***, I have a torn meniscus and osteoarthritis in knees and hips. Unless I want to experience severe pain, and accelerate my need for disruptive surgery, I can't run for exercise. I've read things that say you aren't fit if you can't run a mile at X speed. If a documentary said that, I could take that as a sign that I'm disadvantaged and can never be fit, so I might as well give up (which is an unhelpful conclusion for me individually). That doesn't make running bad, or unable to be a part of an overall healthy routine or make it completely useless in a context where we'd like to reduce population-wide obesity. It's just my personal context (and also true for some other people).
Similarly, if donuts rock someone's world, and they can't possibly sustain a reduced calorie regimen without eating one now and then, but they in reality could've fit them in, the idea that donuts (or sugar, or carbs, or bread, or whatever non-poisonous thing) are inherently "bad", and that no one can possibly manage their weight if they ever eat them . . . that's an unhelpful conclusion for some people, who are in a different context from you.
A documentary that makes that kind of argument in a broad way is unhelpful for many people. It's not nuanced or insightful.
Reading the forums here, I've seen many people (I'm not saying a majority, because I don't know) who say that they've failed at weight loss over and over because they thought they had to give up certain "bad" foods forever, but that learning the science behind calories and weight were the magic that helped them actually achieve their goals: They can manage their weight, and have a donut occasionally, it isn't universally either/or. Again, not everyone can fit in that donut, just as I can't run for exercise. My personal context doesn't invalidate the core issue.
*** Side note: I'm aware that I'm comparing something a lot of people consider "bad" (donuts) with something a lot of people consider "good" (running). (It does depend on whom you ask, though ). But the point is that broadly defining either of those things as inherently "good" or inherently "bad" doesn't contribute to useful, nuanced discussion.
If you can't eat donuts, but wish you could, I'm sorry that that's true, just as I'm sorry I can't run for exercise. Individually, we need to find another workable path.
Personally, I feel quite negative about any broadside position that unnecessarily disempowers people. Books or documentaries that leave people feeling they're helpless victims (of big corporations, or sugar, or whatever) are fundamentally disempowering.
Any individual situation becomes more manageable if we assess it in terms of what we personally and individually can influence or control, because those are the points where we can create leverage for change. To me, communicating the truth about food, movement and weight (as most sources like WHO and USDA try to do, BTW) is empowering. Most of us have quite complete control over what we put in our mouths, chew, and swallow, and how often and how much we move our bodies.
Documentaries that distract us from those facts are not very helpful at the population scale. But hardly anyone wants to watch a documentary that says we should eat less and move more, because we kinda don't want to do that.
The main theme that stuck out in the documentary was that the parents of the children featured weee being told that the solution to their child's obesity was CICO. The kids were eating too much and not burning enough. The documentary wanted to address one portion of why CICo may not be the entire problem/solution for the families featured and how the food industry may share some blame.
When you see the young girl in n the documentary who was practicing with her swim team and jogging with her family a few times a week, making food choices she thought were good, and couldn't lose weight, it makes me think there is something else at large going on.
Does the documentary.make some sweeping statements? Yes. Are they 100% true? No. Is there something more to the types of food we perceive as healthy which may not be healthy for everyone? I think so.
Bottom line: telling families they just have to practice CICO and it will solve their obesity problems is not a solution.
But isn't the simple first possible answer that she was eating too much? You can eat too much nutritious food. You can out-eat exercise. You can exercise for an hour each day but sit on the couch for the rest of it and need less calories than you want.
And you keep conflating health with weight loss. A person can eat healthy foods and become overweight by eating too much of them. A person can eat a mixture of whole and processed foods and eat the right amount of calories to maintain a healthy weight. And if a person is carefully choosing processed foods looking for appropriate fiber, protein, and fat levels they could eat a mostly processed diet and maintain a healthy weight at the right calorie level.
The bolded is a key part of my life story. Vegetarian for 45 years, eating the whole grains and other good stuff, mostly. Overweight and obese for something like 30+ years, because I ate waaay too much of them . . . and during the last roughly 15 years of that, I was very active, quite fit, and even competing as a masters' athlete while obese (not a star, but in the pack, not performing pathetically poorly).
That's part of why I'm so convinced that it's more about how much one eats, than what one eats . . . and about how that amount (of calories) compares to calorie expenditure, not about exercise per se. It's fairly challenging to add 500 calories of additional activity to one's day; it's frighteningly easy to add 500 calories of additional food.
I've done that experiment; it ended poorly. Well, until I changed the intake to be calorically smaller than output, back in 2015.
I am one of many with a similar story. I'm not vegetarian. But I always ate a healthy, primarily whole foods diet with very little highly processed food from boxes. Put on about 40 pounds above a healthy weight eating this way, mainly because I didn't pay any attention to calories for a long time.
It was any lack of knowledge about good nutrition on my part. I was a chef. I was intimately familiar with the nutritional content of food and how to construct a diet with lots of nutrient dense foods. I didn't buy lots of packaged stuff that had words like "healthy" or "lean" on them because I would look past those labels to the nutrition panel and the ingredients.
I still eat this way. Even more so now that I retired to Oaxaca, MX where there are amazing Mercados with all kinds of wonderful fresh items!! The difference is that, about 8 years ago, I started paying attention to calories and lost that 40 lbs (have since put about 8 back on in a slow bulk for muscle building). I am at a healthy weight and have great bloodwork.
To me, the issue with these documentaries is they are editorials, not news. The facts are always slanted to suite the hypothesis of the creator. Personally, I prefer studies and scholarly articles from trusted sources to any documentaries. Facts and conclusions suggested instead of editorial comment. And I even view those sources with a critical eye as to how they are constructed and the bias of the researchers.
I don't disagree and the fact that some information is being presented as a slanted editorial rather than presentation of facts does harm in that people tend to dispute the presentation as being entirely false (as seen in this thread).
My takeaway from watching the documentary: I needed to more closely examine the food I am eating, the decisions I make regarding that food, and the reasons why.0 -
cayenne_007 wrote: »bmeadows380 wrote: »Thanks for posting this. I agree with a lot of what you said here.
The main theme that stuck out in the documentary was that the parents of the children featured weee being told that the solution to their child's obesity was CICO. The kids were eating too much and not burning enough. The documentary wanted to address one portion of why CICo may not be the entire problem/solution for the families featured and how the food industry may share some blame.
When you see the young girl in n the documentary who was practicing with her swim team and jogging with her family a few times a week, making food choices she thought were good, and couldn't lose weight, it makes me think there is something else at large going on.
Does the documentary.make some sweeping statements? Yes. Are they 100% true? No. Is there something more to the types of food we perceive as healthy which may not be healthy for everyone? I think so.
Bottom line: telling families they just have to practice CICO and it will solve their obesity problems is not a solution.
The bolded is a bit misleading imo. Making good choices is a good thing. Making good choices in the correct amounts is another. My diet is loaded with lots that is considered bad from donuts and cereal to twinkies, alongside a lot of stuff considered good by most camps.
I just don't over eat and maintain at ~180lbs pretty easily.
I agree - portion size is everything, and most people are especially poor judges at what constitutes a portion size.
For instance: my local grocery store sells apples in two sizes, one called lunchbox size and the other called regular. The USDA's website shows that for 100g, an apple has 52 calories; at 154g that goes up to 80 calories. How many people would be able to eyeball the two apples side by side and realize just how much of a calorie difference that is? And we're talking about something rather calorie low to begin with. There are some things that just a little bit more can equate to a huge difference in calorie content, such as peanut butter or almonds.
Yep. Peanut butter is usually my go to example because who is REALLY satisfied with a level tablespoon? Even a "responsible" amount spread out on a slice of bread can actually equal out to 2 or 3 servings, which, depending on brand, could easily add ~380 calories but still look thin on the bread.
Good point.
I LOVE to have apple slices and peanut butter for lunch. I manage the amount of peanut butter I consume by buying the Jif to-go cups. That way I'm not getting one more dab and stay at 250 fabulous calories.
(Doesn't make peanut butter the devil)
I actually do feel satiated when I scoop out two tbsp. of natural peanut butter and eat it with celery sticks. It's a really good snack for me. Would I only do 1 tbsp of peanut butter?0 -
cayenne_007 wrote: »bmeadows380 wrote: »Thanks for posting this. I agree with a lot of what you said here.
The main theme that stuck out in the documentary was that the parents of the children featured weee being told that the solution to their child's obesity was CICO. The kids were eating too much and not burning enough. The documentary wanted to address one portion of why CICo may not be the entire problem/solution for the families featured and how the food industry may share some blame.
When you see the young girl in n the documentary who was practicing with her swim team and jogging with her family a few times a week, making food choices she thought were good, and couldn't lose weight, it makes me think there is something else at large going on.
Does the documentary.make some sweeping statements? Yes. Are they 100% true? No. Is there something more to the types of food we perceive as healthy which may not be healthy for everyone? I think so.
Bottom line: telling families they just have to practice CICO and it will solve their obesity problems is not a solution.
The bolded is a bit misleading imo. Making good choices is a good thing. Making good choices in the correct amounts is another. My diet is loaded with lots that is considered bad from donuts and cereal to twinkies, alongside a lot of stuff considered good by most camps.
I just don't over eat and maintain at ~180lbs pretty easily.
I agree - portion size is everything, and most people are especially poor judges at what constitutes a portion size.
For instance: my local grocery store sells apples in two sizes, one called lunchbox size and the other called regular. The USDA's website shows that for 100g, an apple has 52 calories; at 154g that goes up to 80 calories. How many people would be able to eyeball the two apples side by side and realize just how much of a calorie difference that is? And we're talking about something rather calorie low to begin with. There are some things that just a little bit more can equate to a huge difference in calorie content, such as peanut butter or almonds.
Yep. Peanut butter is usually my go to example because who is REALLY satisfied with a level tablespoon? Even a "responsible" amount spread out on a slice of bread can actually equal out to 2 or 3 servings, which, depending on brand, could easily add ~380 calories but still look thin on the bread.
Good point.
I LOVE to have apple slices and peanut butter for lunch. I manage the amount of peanut butter I consume by buying the Jif to-go cups. That way I'm not getting one more dab and stay at 250 fabulous calories.
(Doesn't make peanut butter the devil)
You're the 2nd or 3rd person who mentioned those to go cups to me. I need to get off the fence and buy them lol.
And I completely agree, about PB or any food really. I LOVE to eat, so why would I want to make food the enemy? It's so much more satisfying to plan something in, like I do with PB now. I'll eat short all day so I can have 800 calories worth of PB and my favorite crackers for a snack later.
If I go over well...no one made me do it. Food is just food. I do agree marketing and labeling can be a sham, but again, no one makes me buy it, pile it on a plate and eat it. I do that with much enjoyment all by myself lol.1 -
Yet I can. So is the problem the diet or the dieter?
So I guess after all thatyou CAN say the problem is me.
I think that (and the post you're replying to) is unrealistically stark, especially in context of the thread.
The thread was (I think) about Fed Up, and the discussion began over whether it was presenting an accurate picture of the obesity crisis, and (more implicitly) whether its message would be helpful to reducing obesity as a population-scale problem.
When we take obesity down to an individual scale, we all have individual struggles or challenges. Those are part of our personal context; they may not provide useful insights at the population-wide scale (though it's likely that any individual challenge that applies to you or me also applies to some others, and sharing our strategies at an individual level can be helpful, of course).
You have a relatively low calorie goal as compared with your satiation needs, so you can't fit in certain high-calorie theoretically tasty foods** while simultaneously feeling full and satisfied, and also accomplishing your weight-management goals. (** Theoretical only because I don't personally enjoy donuts ).
That situation's unfortunate, I can see how it creates a challenge for you, and I'm sorry that that's true for you (among others). But it's a problem that doesn't apply to everyone, as others in the thread have described.
As a somewhat-similar example ***, I have a torn meniscus and osteoarthritis in knees and hips. Unless I want to experience severe pain, and accelerate my need for disruptive surgery, I can't run for exercise. I've read things that say you aren't fit if you can't run a mile at X speed. If a documentary said that, I could take that as a sign that I'm disadvantaged and can never be fit, so I might as well give up (which is an unhelpful conclusion for me individually). That doesn't make running bad, or unable to be a part of an overall healthy routine or make it completely useless in a context where we'd like to reduce population-wide obesity. It's just my personal context (and also true for some other people).
Similarly, if donuts rock someone's world, and they can't possibly sustain a reduced calorie regimen without eating one now and then, but they in reality could've fit them in, the idea that donuts (or sugar, or carbs, or bread, or whatever non-poisonous thing) are inherently "bad", and that no one can possibly manage their weight if they ever eat them . . . that's an unhelpful conclusion for some people, who are in a different context from you.
A documentary that makes that kind of argument in a broad way is unhelpful for many people. It's not nuanced or insightful.
Reading the forums here, I've seen many people (I'm not saying a majority, because I don't know) who say that they've failed at weight loss over and over because they thought they had to give up certain "bad" foods forever, but that learning the science behind calories and weight were the magic that helped them actually achieve their goals: They can manage their weight, and have a donut occasionally, it isn't universally either/or. Again, not everyone can fit in that donut, just as I can't run for exercise. My personal context doesn't invalidate the core issue.
*** Side note: I'm aware that I'm comparing something a lot of people consider "bad" (donuts) with something a lot of people consider "good" (running). (It does depend on whom you ask, though ). But the point is that broadly defining either of those things as inherently "good" or inherently "bad" doesn't contribute to useful, nuanced discussion.
If you can't eat donuts, but wish you could, I'm sorry that that's true, just as I'm sorry I can't run for exercise. Individually, we need to find another workable path.
Personally, I feel quite negative about any broadside position that unnecessarily disempowers people. Books or documentaries that leave people feeling they're helpless victims (of big corporations, or sugar, or whatever) are fundamentally disempowering.
Any individual situation becomes more manageable if we assess it in terms of what we personally and individually can influence or control, because those are the points where we can create leverage for change. To me, communicating the truth about food, movement and weight (as most sources like WHO and USDA try to do, BTW) is empowering. Most of us have quite complete control over what we put in our mouths, chew, and swallow, and how often and how much we move our bodies.
Documentaries that distract us from those facts are not very helpful at the population scale. But hardly anyone wants to watch a documentary that says we should eat less and move more, because we kinda don't want to do that.
The main theme that stuck out in the documentary was that the parents of the children featured weee being told that the solution to their child's obesity was CICO. The kids were eating too much and not burning enough. The documentary wanted to address one portion of why CICo may not be the entire problem/solution for the families featured and how the food industry may share some blame.
When you see the young girl in n the documentary who was practicing with her swim team and jogging with her family a few times a week, making food choices she thought were good, and couldn't lose weight, it makes me think there is something else at large going on.
Does the documentary.make some sweeping statements? Yes. Are they 100% true? No. Is there something more to the types of food we perceive as healthy which may not be healthy for everyone? I think so.
Bottom line: telling families they just have to practice CICO and it will solve their obesity problems is not a solution.
But isn't the simple first possible answer that she was eating too much? You can eat too much nutritious food. You can out-eat exercise. You can exercise for an hour each day but sit on the couch for the rest of it and need less calories than you want.
And you keep conflating health with weight loss. A person can eat healthy foods and become overweight by eating too much of them. A person can eat a mixture of whole and processed foods and eat the right amount of calories to maintain a healthy weight. And if a person is carefully choosing processed foods looking for appropriate fiber, protein, and fat levels they could eat a mostly processed diet and maintain a healthy weight at the right calorie level.
The bolded is a key part of my life story. Vegetarian for 45 years, eating the whole grains and other good stuff, mostly. Overweight and obese for something like 30+ years, because I ate waaay too much of them . . . and during the last roughly 15 years of that, I was very active, quite fit, and even competing as a masters' athlete while obese (not a star, but in the pack, not performing pathetically poorly).
That's part of why I'm so convinced that it's more about how much one eats, than what one eats . . . and about how that amount (of calories) compares to calorie expenditure, not about exercise per se. It's fairly challenging to add 500 calories of additional activity to one's day; it's frighteningly easy to add 500 calories of additional food.
I've done that experiment; it ended poorly. Well, until I changed the intake to be calorically smaller than output, back in 2015.
I am one of many with a similar story. I'm not vegetarian. But I always ate a healthy, primarily whole foods diet with very little highly processed food from boxes. Put on about 40 pounds above a healthy weight eating this way, mainly because I didn't pay any attention to calories for a long time.
It was any lack of knowledge about good nutrition on my part. I was a chef. I was intimately familiar with the nutritional content of food and how to construct a diet with lots of nutrient dense foods. I didn't buy lots of packaged stuff that had words like "healthy" or "lean" on them because I would look past those labels to the nutrition panel and the ingredients.
I still eat this way. Even more so now that I retired to Oaxaca, MX where there are amazing Mercados with all kinds of wonderful fresh items!! The difference is that, about 8 years ago, I started paying attention to calories and lost that 40 lbs (have since put about 8 back on in a slow bulk for muscle building). I am at a healthy weight and have great bloodwork.
To me, the issue with these documentaries is they are editorials, not news. The facts are always slanted to suite the hypothesis of the creator. Personally, I prefer studies and scholarly articles from trusted sources to any documentaries. Facts and conclusions suggested instead of editorial comment. And I even view those sources with a critical eye as to how they are constructed and the bias of the researchers.
Just a side note: I do not have nearly the knowledge regarding nutrition that you do, and yet still lost weight and maintain with few to no problems.
That doesn't leave much in the way of excuses to fall back on.
That said, I'm fully aware there are medical outliers out there. No disrespect to you folks at all. I'm speaking primarily about people who do not have a medical condition that may require certain drugs etc.3 -
https://nutritionstudies.org/fed-up-with-fed-up/
The ‘authorities’ in this film are mostly the same people who have been chanting the same mantra against the WFPB diet at other venues and in other media. They are making headway with the public, partly because they use reductionist argument and experimentation and partly because they have ready access to resources and supporters who want to maintain the present systems of food production and health care.
This “Fed Up” film, aptly named from more than one perspective in my view, is an abysmal failure that lures unassuming consumers to ignore the big picture while mostly maintaining the present status quo. The film’s assertions have little or no credence or potential to resolve the health crisis (poor health, high health care costs) in the U.S.
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/does-the-movie-fed-up-make-sense/
Conclusion
The film’s thesis, that sugar has caused the obesity epidemic, is not well supported by evidence. It is a partial truth that the filmmakers have dogmatically represented as the whole truth, with nary a hint of nuance. And it’s not fair to demonize the food industry. It has done a lot of good by providing a greater variety of safer food to more people for lower prices. We must share the responsibility for their shortcomings, because their less healthy offerings were created in response to public demand, and large numbers of people have chosen to buy those products because they don’t know any better.
The film will undoubtedly do some good by helping raise public awareness of childhood obesity and of hidden sugars in processed foods. I only wish it could have done so without misrepresenting the facts and without the bias and hype in support of the filmmakers’ political agenda of increasing food regulation. I try to eat a healthy diet, but I enjoy an occasional sugary treat and fast food meal, and I appreciate the convenience of packaged, processed foods when I don’t have a lot of time to shop and cook. I see no compelling reason to think it is impossible for people to lose weight on a diet that is overall nutritious and calorie controlled but that allows small amounts of even the “worst” foods.15 -
It does amaze me though with a discussion of obesity in America that no one has brought up the elephant in the room.
Has no thought about the relative costs of whole vs processed foods? Especially if you need to cook it or store it.
If you can't store food you can't buy in bulk.
If you can store food whole foods go bad faster.
If you can't cook it is cheaper to buy fast food.
If you don't know how to cook it is cheaper to buy fast food.
If your family doesn't know nutrition or how to cook, do you think children learn it?
Different people have different nutritional needs, and may have been taught by family to eat in a counter productive way.
There are many factors that effect what people eat and saying everyone should just watch what they eat is a very privileged statement.
Saying that everyone is able to research and figure out nutrition on their own is also a very privileged statement.
Saying that something is a very privileged statement is also a very privileged statement.
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It does amaze me though with a discussion of obesity in America that no one has brought up the elephant in the room.
Has no thought about the relative costs of whole vs processed foods? Especially if you need to cook it or store it.
Rice and beans and potatoes are about as cheap as you can get and store well. In season vegetables are usually very cheap. Frozen vegetables are very cheap. Eggs and meat are cheap in the US, especially less popular cuts of meat. Boneless skinless chicken breast will be more expensive per calorie/g than getting a whole chicken, but personally I ate almost no boneless skinless chicken breast and lots of whole roasted chicken when I was losing (and before and after). I don't like canned tuna, but it's cheap too, and so are oats and milk and peas, etc.
"Processed" foods (which are extremely varied and not a good synonym for "not healthy") are almost always more expensive than the equivalent in whole foods, since you add the processing and marketing/advertising costs.
I think people who think whole foods are more expensive than ultra processed or fast food or what not are not comparing equivalents and assuming "healthy food" means fancy trendy items (like almond milk or organic or out of season veg and fruit or lentil pasta vs. lentils and plain old pasta or pre cut veg (which seem to be extremely popular) or premade cauliflower rice vs frozen or the "boring" in season and local stuff. If someone is buying Hot Pockets, they are already spending more than they'd need for a whole foods based diet that's calorie appropriate and filling.
You don't need a lot of room to store foods (and you don't need to store a lot of food to make whole foods cheaper than other options).If you can't cook it is cheaper to buy fast food.
No, it's still not. It might be easier. Solution -- eat fast food that fits in your calories or (better) learn to cook it is not hard. I didn't cook in my 20s (I cooked some growing up but never learned to do so without it being a time-consuming get ingredients, follow a recipe beyond a few things I ate often like eggs). But prior generations learned to cook (my mom got married in 1967, didn't really know how to cook, was given a cook book when she married and learned). I did the same -- I bought a good cookbook and decided to learn. Soon enough I figured out how to whip up a meal in 30 minutes without a recipe and using what was in my refrigerator, and I was working 80+ hours a week at the time.If your family doesn't know nutrition or how to cook, do you think children learn it?
Nutrition is commonly taught in school. As noted above, one can learn to cook from a book or the internet these days. It's also just not true that the issue is not understanding nutrition. Here's an article contradicting the idea that people just don't know how to eat: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/01/rich-kids-healthier-foods/431646/
I think it shows a more realistic reason why more strapped people might end up allowing their families to eat more poorly, but that is different than the "I thought I was eating super healthy because ads fooled me" excuse.
I also think there has been a disturbing generational change. My parents both grew up in families where money was very tight (my mom's family had a farm and other jobs to try to make ends meet), but they grew up with a grasp of nutrition and an idea that it was important. Money was really tight often when I was growing up, and my parents basically fed us what I'd call a very traditional American diet (when I was a vegetarian in my 20s and later, more healthfully, in my 30s, my parents still found the idea of dinner without meat super weird). We'd commonly have meat (including fish, my dad and his friends liked to fish and we'd get dragged along too), potatoes (or bread or peas or corn or rice or spaghetti, which was never called pasta), and veg. We were not permitted to not eat our veg (which we'd sometimes resist or avoid, but on the whole we learned to eat them, and both my sister and I now like vegetables a lot). This was not some "privileged" way of eating, it was how my parents grew up eating (with canned veg out of season, which we also had a lot, and I am grateful that's not something I have to eat now, the options for almost everyone are much greater now). Restaurants (including fast food) were special occasion things -- in part because more expensive -- and so were things like soda, packaged sweets. All indulgences (and additions to the food budget). We did have canned soup and so on, which would no doubt be sneered at by the FedUp people as icky processed foods that cause obesity, but no, they didn't.Saying that everyone is able to research and figure out nutrition on their own is also a very privileged statement.
No, it's the opposite. Saying people can't manage to figure out how to eat is really condescending.13 -
No, it's still not. It might be easier. Solution -- eat fast food that fits in your calories or (better) learn to cook it is not hard. I didn't cook in my 20s (I cooked some growing up but never learned to do so without it being a time-consuming get ingredients, follow a recipe beyond a few things I ate often like eggs). But prior generations learned to cook (my mom got married in 1967, didn't really know how to cook, was given a cook book when she married and learned). I did the same -- I bought a good cookbook and decided to learn. Soon enough I figured out how to whip up a meal in 30 minutes without a recipe and using what was in my refrigerator, and I was working 80+ hours a week at the time.
As a slight extension to this - isnt YouTube great?
My eldest is 15 and is becoming a pretty handy cook, and most of what she does is following videos on YouTube.
Watch the step, pause, perform the step, watch the next step...
She's cooked a variety of meals, from scratch, simply by following along with a video.
Which now has her confident enough to either improvise basic meals or go through cook books and take recipies from there.8 -
Yet I can. So is the problem the diet or the dieter?
So I guess after all thatyou CAN say the problem is me.
I think that (and the post you're replying to) is unrealistically stark, especially in context of the thread.
The thread was (I think) about Fed Up, and the discussion began over whether it was presenting an accurate picture of the obesity crisis, and (more implicitly) whether its message would be helpful to reducing obesity as a population-scale problem.
When we take obesity down to an individual scale, we all have individual struggles or challenges. Those are part of our personal context; they may not provide useful insights at the population-wide scale (though it's likely that any individual challenge that applies to you or me also applies to some others, and sharing our strategies at an individual level can be helpful, of course).
You have a relatively low calorie goal as compared with your satiation needs, so you can't fit in certain high-calorie theoretically tasty foods** while simultaneously feeling full and satisfied, and also accomplishing your weight-management goals. (** Theoretical only because I don't personally enjoy donuts ).
That situation's unfortunate, I can see how it creates a challenge for you, and I'm sorry that that's true for you (among others). But it's a problem that doesn't apply to everyone, as others in the thread have described.
As a somewhat-similar example ***, I have a torn meniscus and osteoarthritis in knees and hips. Unless I want to experience severe pain, and accelerate my need for disruptive surgery, I can't run for exercise. I've read things that say you aren't fit if you can't run a mile at X speed. If a documentary said that, I could take that as a sign that I'm disadvantaged and can never be fit, so I might as well give up (which is an unhelpful conclusion for me individually). That doesn't make running bad, or unable to be a part of an overall healthy routine or make it completely useless in a context where we'd like to reduce population-wide obesity. It's just my personal context (and also true for some other people).
Similarly, if donuts rock someone's world, and they can't possibly sustain a reduced calorie regimen without eating one now and then, but they in reality could've fit them in, the idea that donuts (or sugar, or carbs, or bread, or whatever non-poisonous thing) are inherently "bad", and that no one can possibly manage their weight if they ever eat them . . . that's an unhelpful conclusion for some people, who are in a different context from you.
A documentary that makes that kind of argument in a broad way is unhelpful for many people. It's not nuanced or insightful.
Reading the forums here, I've seen many people (I'm not saying a majority, because I don't know) who say that they've failed at weight loss over and over because they thought they had to give up certain "bad" foods forever, but that learning the science behind calories and weight were the magic that helped them actually achieve their goals: They can manage their weight, and have a donut occasionally, it isn't universally either/or. Again, not everyone can fit in that donut, just as I can't run for exercise. My personal context doesn't invalidate the core issue.
*** Side note: I'm aware that I'm comparing something a lot of people consider "bad" (donuts) with something a lot of people consider "good" (running). (It does depend on whom you ask, though ). But the point is that broadly defining either of those things as inherently "good" or inherently "bad" doesn't contribute to useful, nuanced discussion.
If you can't eat donuts, but wish you could, I'm sorry that that's true, just as I'm sorry I can't run for exercise. Individually, we need to find another workable path.
Personally, I feel quite negative about any broadside position that unnecessarily disempowers people. Books or documentaries that leave people feeling they're helpless victims (of big corporations, or sugar, or whatever) are fundamentally disempowering.
Any individual situation becomes more manageable if we assess it in terms of what we personally and individually can influence or control, because those are the points where we can create leverage for change. To me, communicating the truth about food, movement and weight (as most sources like WHO and USDA try to do, BTW) is empowering. Most of us have quite complete control over what we put in our mouths, chew, and swallow, and how often and how much we move our bodies.
Documentaries that distract us from those facts are not very helpful at the population scale. But hardly anyone wants to watch a documentary that says we should eat less and move more, because we kinda don't want to do that.
The main theme that stuck out in the documentary was that the parents of the children featured weee being told that the solution to their child's obesity was CICO. The kids were eating too much and not burning enough. The documentary wanted to address one portion of why CICo may not be the entire problem/solution for the families featured and how the food industry may share some blame.
When you see the young girl in n the documentary who was practicing with her swim team and jogging with her family a few times a week, making food choices she thought were good, and couldn't lose weight, it makes me think there is something else at large going on.
Does the documentary.make some sweeping statements? Yes. Are they 100% true? No. Is there something more to the types of food we perceive as healthy which may not be healthy for everyone? I think so.
Bottom line: telling families they just have to practice CICO and it will solve their obesity problems is not a solution.
But isn't the simple first possible answer that she was eating too much? You can eat too much nutritious food. You can out-eat exercise. You can exercise for an hour each day but sit on the couch for the rest of it and need less calories than you want.
And you keep conflating health with weight loss. A person can eat healthy foods and become overweight by eating too much of them. A person can eat a mixture of whole and processed foods and eat the right amount of calories to maintain a healthy weight. And if a person is carefully choosing processed foods looking for appropriate fiber, protein, and fat levels they could eat a mostly processed diet and maintain a healthy weight at the right calorie level.
I saw this documentary many years ago so forgive me if my recollection is inaccurate. Isn't she is the girl who was eating the Nutella snack packs? Bear with me here... I am by no means against Nutella. In fact, it's a staple in our house (lol). But that snack pack has a whopping 270 calories--not easy to burn off if consumed regularly. Couple that with a typical school lunch which can add an additional 400-500 calories (I'm a teacher and very well-acquainted with the typical school lunch menu and associated calorie/nutritional values), those two items would essentially make up half of a young teenager's daily caloric requirement--and that child hasn't yet had eaten breakfast, dinner, or had any other snacks or other beverages.
My point is... I'm not suggesting that this particular kid on the documentary ate the Nutella snack pack every day, but I've had family members and friends who insisted that their kids couldn't lose weight (the kids were significantly overweight and/or obese) and took their children to nutritionists. Over time it turned out that the kids were in fact consuming additional calories at school that were not being acknowledged and hence recorded, i.e., in the form of soft drinks or candy bars, etc. (Not dissing sugar here--I'm merely suggesting that people can't necessarily be trusted to self-report, especially in the case of diets. Something strikes me as "off" about that equation. Either that, or there is a metabolic issue at play.)
[quote=And you keep conflating health with weight loss. A person can eat healthy foods and become overweight by eating too much of them. A person can eat a mixture of whole and processed foods and eat the right amount of calories to maintain a healthy weight. And if a person is carefully choosing processed foods looking for appropriate fiber, protein, and fat levels they could eat a mostly processed diet and maintain a healthy weight at the right calorie level.[/quote]
In terms of weight loss and health. This is just one anecdote but I'll share. I'm vegetarian and I eat what I would say it a very healthful diet. My husband essentially eats what I eat because, well, I prepare the food. My husband and kids aren't vegetarian and so I prepare meat or fish for them to accompany the meals. I know the caloric and nutritional values of the food I prepare. I am not overweight and aside from my two pregnancies, I've never really had to lose weight. My husband, on the other hand, is overweight. He's overweight because he eats too much of the same healthful food. His choice of snack at night? grapes or cherries--but he has an entire bowl of them lol. So the guy "is" healthy--his blood panels and other health tests indicate as such. But, he's still overweight. one couple--same food, pretty much same diet, different quantities. The only thing that is significantly different is our activity levels.6
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