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Our fruits and vegetables were just fine before the were "certified organic". Its just marketing to drive up the cost of my tomato, and overrun my neighborhood with these....
And then there's flawed study about fats and how the USDA picked up and ran with it until this day. Grains as the main basis for a diet is just silly and plays right into the subsidies' hands.
Will cite if desired off work hours.
Also, I'm LOVING this thread. So many contributors!
Now that I am 5'10 210 lbs, but should be 170 and I know why. Health and the science behind what my body does with food has become a pretty big interest of mine. It is significantly harder to lose weight than it is to maintain it though. So, I am currently struggling to get my body fixed after a lifetime of abuse.
I don't place a stich of blame on corn subsidies, fast food, serving sizes, or how good bad food tastes. It's all up to numero uno to make the decisions.
By the way, when I was a kid the Food Pyramid hadn't been invented yet. We still had the Four Food Groups.
If that's the discussion we're having, I'm fat due to absolute lack of willpower.
Now I'm a college student and am not active much at all. I skip breakfast most mornings, eat a small lunch, and usually try not to eat much at dinner (the dinners here can get pretty nasty). It's strange, I haven't gained or lost more than 5 pounds in the past 3 years of my life (I've stayed almost exactly on the magic number of 175) and I've had radically different diets over that time. I feel like my body has been naturally adjusting to my activity level and my food intake has matched that. I can also barely finish one full plate of spaghetti now. I still love eating, but I just don't eat as much.
I'd say that (barring glandular problems and eating disorders) people's food intake isn't matching their metabolism, and they could quite possibly be feeling pressured to eat about as much as the people around them do, at least in public places. I've noticed that I feel fairly uncomfortable when I'm at say a Chinese buffet and I only eat one or one and a half plates compared to the 3 of the other people. It's also strange, now that I'm looking back as a child my parents would always ask me if I wanted more food. I never want more now, I can usually fill up on what I can fit on my plate. I'd say people need to know and maintain their limits if they don't want to gain weight. And be active and eat healthy people and yada yada yada
Also, obligatory:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTYfv-vl72Y
That said, the fact that EVERYTHING has high fructose corn syrup in it doesn't effing help. I seem to also recall studies that show HFCS to have an addictive effect.
I and other Puerto Ricans are fat mostly because of culture. Even though I grew up in the US, I still mostly Hispanic food. Food at school was actually pretty healthy (no soda machines or anything). The thing is that at home I ate like a grown fat man. I could eat 2 plates filled with rice, beans and meat. I was "husky" kid but not that fat since I was somewhat active. Wasn't a geek/nerd back then. Rode my bike, played basketball, etc.
Arrival to Puerto Rico changes things. We eat fried food for breakfast, lunch and dinner. I've been out to work at 6am only to find people at kiosks waiting in line for fritters. Another breakfast could be a "Tripleta" which is a sandwich of three meats, be it pastrami, pork, ham in a loaf of bread that's half a pound. Add a Pepsi and it totals to around $5. Food here is cheap. There's a place in my town that cooks "home cooked" meals (rice, beans and meat) and a soda for less than $4.
That whole eating healthy trend hasn't really arrived to PR yet and I don't think it ever will. There's no way you can compete with a $5 meal that can feed a small family. Hell, even people that do eat at health food stores still stuff their face because they think it's healthy even though the portions are ridiculous.
I've focused too much on food. On to image. Guys here like big girls and woman here don't give a fuck about their figure. Only ones that are conscious about their image are the ones more exposed to American media and fashion.
As for more culture, kids don't play outside that much anymore. Probably the same in the US. 100 yards from my house is a basketball court and 200 yards is a baseball field which are mostly empty every day. That wouldn't have been the case 15yrs ago.
We're fat because we couldn't care less.
I spent a summer in London during college. During that time I dropped a ton of weight without eating differently then I did at home. I attribute it completely to our base activity level. I can simply not be as active as I was when I was in London. I had to walk to the grocery store, walk to the underground, walk to class.
Removing cities like New York and Chicago from the list, where in the USA do you *have* to walk/ride a bike/skate/be active in order to get from point A to B? I tried when I worked only 5 miles from home, to switch to riding my bike to and from work. Its simply too unsafe to do here, and I have yet to visit a city where it would be safe enough to be in my comfort level.
I can't say that the solution is to just "move downtown", Cincinnati and Columbus (the two cities that I'm extremely familiar with) are food deserts downtown. You have to go to the suburbs to find anything like a grocery store. I've heard tell that a downtown like Seattle, and a few areas in California are better for this, but that's still not the majority of the country.
I don't think that our base activity level can be fixed, without massive subsidies onto public transportation, anytime in the near future.
Just a more well-rounded view of food, at least where I am.
Also worth noting: subsidies into public transportation won't help. If you're riding the bus to work, you're not making significantly more effort than if you drove to work. The expansion of dedicated bike lanes, walking trails, the elimination of or reduction of need for cars from cities, and more short-distance, people-friendly neighborhoods all contribute to a vastly larger daily expenditure of energy and sense of community. All of these things are Good For Humans. A decent amount of research is going into people-friendly community planning lately, which is excellent. It still relies on people living close enough to their jobs to make biking or other active transportation methods feasible, though.
I'll have to dig for the data, but I've also seen studies that suggest very strongly that the biggest culprit (outside of self-control, but I'll get to that in a minute) to obesity in the US is the low-fat culture.
For whatever reason, around the 50s, it was decided that fat was a bad thing, and the ultimate root cause for all of our health problems. So everything started coming out low-fat this, and low-fat that. Margarine replaced butter, and so on. Everyone wanted their products to be as low fat as possible.
But, with the dissolution of fat came a reduction in flavor (hence the first reason I quoted Brian. A double QP with cheese is a supremely tasty item). Manufacturers scrambled to get the flavor back without increasing fats. So they increased sugars, salt, and other things to account for the lack of delicious lipidinous compounds.
Even with all of the flavor 'enhancements' to the low-fat foods, they still weren't as satisfying. Satisfying in that we don't feel as full after eating a portion of the low-fat food, as we did with the full-fat food. Since we're not satisfied, we eat more (which is the second reason I quoted Brian. The previously mentioned double QP is an incredibly satisfying thing).
Combine all of this with grain subsidies and a food pyramid that loads us up with carbs (in fairness, the new pyramid is much more sane, but still not great), and you quite literally have a recipe for disaster. We have a culture of consumption that has taken out one of the natural controls to over-consumption, which is the fat that tells our body that we're satisfied and that it's ok to stop eating.
Personally, I've stopped worrying about content so much as quantity, and I've been much more satisfied in my eating. In the year or so since I made that decision, I've eaten much more richly and still managed to drop 20lb and a notch on my belt. But I've also noticed that with the proportional increase in fat intake, my overall intake has dropped significantly. I'm more satisfied after eating less, and I tend to stop at 'full', rather than 'holycrapimsostuffedithinkimightexplode'.
http://scallywagandvagabond.com/2011/03/3-year-old-boy-tops-the-scales-at-132-pounds/