This piece in The Guardian has it all, including a picture of skinny kids and an alarmist quote:
He wondered whether I – as a clinician – believed the consequences of eating junk food were as bad for our health as smoking cigarettes. “No, not as bad,” I replied, “in many ways it’s far worse!”
Not as bad as emitting CO2, surely?
Omno, it seems you may be unfamiliar with the guiding principle of fear merchants: everything is bad for us, and for future generations, and our very existence is, in the end, the source of these problems.
What this implies, though, is that these problems would go away if we did not exist — and that truth is so obvious that it proves itself.
“We must educate children properly about nutrition if we are to stand a chance of altering the statistics on obesity.”
Nothing like changing your behavior/altering your
lifestyle . . . to alter statistics. Really gives
meaning to life.
I was taught about nutrition when I was a kid.
Food pyramid, cetera. Had nothing to do with
obesity. Obesity has to do with eating too much.
And governments publishing preposterous
statistics as to how many are obese. Less than
10% are obese, from my casual observation at
the local Wal-Mart. If 30-40% are obese, where
are they? I look for them, and don’t see them.
there’s more to it than eating too much. There’s also HFCS and transfats. Do the experiment, drink HFCS soda for a month and watch yourself get fat, then eat nothing but double quarter pounders with bacon and fries all day and watch the pounds slip off. As soon as we get rid of HFCS, we can start saying that obesity is about eating too much again.
Also, obesity statistics are much lower in some places than in the places where they are alarmingly high. You should be happy that your jurisdiction is better off than others.
Absurd, tom.
absurd? that literally happened to me. but data is not the plural of anecdote. this whole anti-HFCS craze started with a (heavily criticized) 2004 study in which rats given HFCS sugarwater got significantly fatter than rats given sucrose sugarwater. More recently it has been claimed that HFCS doesn’t lead to the insulin response that tells you when you’ve eaten enough. Which I can totally believe, considering how much soda people drink
Sucrose (natural, cain, beet) sugar is a disaccharide: 50% glucose, 50% fructose. HFCS is about 50% glucose, 50% fructose, but sometimes is a little higher in the sweeter tasting simple sugar, fructose. Weight gain is more a matter of caloric intake exceeding expenditure, not which sugar is consumed, or do we also plan to ban naturally occuring fructose? I think the key is “how much soda” or other food people eat. I didn’t drink very sweet drinks and didn’t regularly eat high sugar snacks and disserts. I do like high carbohydrate (hydrolyzes to glucose) foods. My BMI was 46 a year or so ago. It was a combination of caloric intake and exercise. It had nothing to do with HFCS, fizzy soda or any of the other bete noir’s we keep hearing about. Changing the input-output caloric thingy has dropped the BMI considerably, but I’m not drinking any less high sugar drinks now than I did beofre.
The whole war on junk foods is a distraction from the real threats to our children, drugs, violence, sexualization, deliberate ignorance being taught in our schools. We have a local TV station and ABC affiliate that runs program ads that are pornographic during family viewing time. Then they have a news segment attacking junk foods called “Putting children First”. I am not a fan of junk food for myself or for children, but it is just a boogeyman to distract us.
child obesity is a legitimate problem, that must be addressed. By a combination of better nutrition and exercise.
http://www.cdc.gov/HealthyYouth/obesity/facts.htm
“Obesity is defined as having excess body fat.”
What used to be called “fat” is now defined
as “obese.”
Sorry, tom, it’s all MADE UP.
whatever you want to call it, the percentage of kids that are fat is higher now than it has been, which is concerning.
I’m not concerned. Except for all the people
who want to involve government. Or, more
accurately, all the people in government or
GONGOs who want to get involved.
There are good solutions and there are bad solutions. I think everyone but the hard left agrees that taking food options away from consumers is generally a bad solution. Forcing kids to do jumping jacks in gym class is a good solution.
McDonalds used to use beef fat to fry french fries in. Then a bunch of busybodies decided to browbeat them into switching to partially hydrogenated vegetable oils instead. Oops, that’s trans-fat. In Boston, trans-fats are now banned in restaurants. Personally, I think that eliminating trans-fats is a good idea, and advocating for their use 30 years ago was a terrible mistake that should never have been made