Posted on 06/25/2006 4:57:20 PM PDT by bd476
Largest retailer boosts organic market as nation tackles bulging waistlines
For the organic grape tomatoes to land in Tara Smoot's shopping trolley required a tremendous act of will. First she renounced all junk food, banishing fried chicken and chocolate milk from her children's menu, and the pasta, crisps and sweets she and her husband had enjoyed. Then she prepared herself for a higher grocery bill.
"It's a lot cheaper to eat unhealthily than healthily," she says. And there is temptation every step of the way. To reach the fresh produce section in this Wal-Mart super centre Ms Smoot had to push her trolley past jumbo bags of peanuts and "sugar-free" chocolate cream pies - still 220 calories a slice. Ahead lie the ubiquitous chocolate bars at the checkout counter.
But Ms Smoot, 27, a stay-at-home mother who changed her diet last October after developing high blood sugar, says she is determined to eat better. Dinner tonight is low-carb salmon wraps, a mozzarella and tomato salad, and soy milk smoothies. "We are trying to eat a little more healthy - nothing canned or frozen," says her sister, Amber.
Families like the Smoots were part of Wal-Mart's calculation when the world's largest retailer announced last April that it would begin selling organic food at its famously low prices, charging a 10% premium over non-organic.
Organic food for the masses has arrived, and at a time when America as a nation has never been fatter or eaten so badly. Seventeen per cent of children and teenagers are overweight, and 66% of adults, of whom 32% are obese. Seventy-eight per cent of adults admit they do not eat enough fruit or vegetables.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
It looks like Wal-Mart just might save America.
There is no nutritional difference between "organic" and "non-organic" produce.
Alouette wrote: "There is no nutritional difference between "organic" and "non-organic" produce."
Shhhhh, I won't tell if you won't tell...
Lol!
She sounds as manic as a reformed smoker. Healthy is nice, but nothing frozen? And there's no fewer calories in organic tomatoes over non-organic ones.
I recently changed my diet to improve my immunity against colds, which I used to suffer every couple of months or so. More plant-based foods, less meat-based foods. For a while, I shopped at Whole Food Markets, but then I found out that Super Wal-Marts offered similar products that I needed for my new diet at a lower cost. So yes, Wal-Mart wins my hard-earned, health-conscious dollars.
Fatter yes. Eaten so badly? No.
Because so much of the food even the "junk food" is enriched with basic nutrients we have never eaten so well.
When was the last time you saw a kid with rickets? Or with scurvy? Or a goiter?
Common in children in my parents generation. Now the cases you find are mostly in the elderly who are not eating.
Nothing wrong with canned or frozen vegetables, Amber, as long as there's nothing added.
It would be good to hear sometime in the future if eating healthier foods works out for you and about any changes in your health.
Fat, American, and proud. Excellent points, all.
Just more gratuitous anti-Yanqui boosterism.
My two rules of thumb for eating:
Try hard to eat more veggies
Choose your grandparents carefully
I mentioned that I used to get a cold every couple of months, but with my new diet, I've reduced it to once every six months. And hopefully I can reduce it even further.
Furthermore, this was all the result of diet, I haven't increased my amount of exercise at all.
People have just enough information to waste money but not enough to accomplish anything by it.
This canard was invented when people started pointing out that America's "starving poor" were mostly big and fat.
I've shopped my whole life. It's no big trick to buy store brand frozen vegetables, bulk rice and whatever chicken parts happen to be on sale that week.
It's a lot cheaper than the equivalent amount of yodels and doritos.
True, but with something organically grown, you know chemicals were not added to them. The small farmer does exist, but not in a large amount, almost all farms run as agribusinesses these days, focusing on yield as opposed to quality, this is due primarily to the fact that crops prices tend to be too low, and foreign produce further complicates the market, and by and large, they have less overhead, so they can often grow a product without chemical intervention, and undersell the Americans who have to use high yield techniques.
Personally, I make all efforts I can to avoid anything that has been hormonally or genetically enhanced, because that's not what God intended, and when you start screwing with stuff like that, problems are bound to come out of it.
It's not just the poor that are fat. In general, people of all socioeconomic brackets are fatter in the Southeast, because of our style of cooking, which is not healthy at all.
Sure, but Southern food is GOOD. God wanted us to enjoy the Earth's bounty, IMHO.
What's "living" if you can't enjoy a dang meal? Life is the leading cause of death.
Last point: if, God forbid, one were to have an MI, which country on Earth would be the best place to have it?
What is "non-organic" produce? I seem to recall from chemistry class that "organic" means "contains carbon." But all food except minerals [e.g., salts, iron, zinc, sodium, potassium, copper] and water contains carbon--including especially proteins, fats, and carbohydrates. So is inorganic produce an inedible glassware in the shape of a carrot? I'm really confused. I thought that the "organic" label on produce is rather superfluous, like the "zero carbohydrates" label on bottled water.
My point was the people aren't fat because they're poor. They're fat because they eat too much. Just like rich fat people and middle class fat people.
The obviously contradictory theory that fat poor people are fat because they're poor was invented by liberal knuckleheads who couldn't wrap their heads around the idea that the poor in this country aren't really all that poor.
No other country now or in history has experienced an epidemic of fat poor people.
No need to buy long grain rice or 1 minute rice if you know how to properly cook rice...and the store brand is cheaper. Even left over rice can be added to sauteed onions and green peppers, then add soy sauce, and you have a delicious new dish of fried rice.
Canned and/or frozen vegetables are healthy, cheaper and tasty....if you know how to properly season and cook them.
Nailed. Only in America do you get Food Nutritional Pyramid guides with your publically-subsidized Welfare handouts.
How economics escapes the Left is really puzzling, since Marx spent his waking days as a self-styled economist.
Put a sub-Saharan in the US, with Section-8 housing, multiple food banks nearby, free community-college/vocational-college tuition, and then get back to me how "poor" he really feels here.
Not disagreeing with you that it's good, and by in large, it's cheaper than what we are buying now, but the fact is, before, we had a black lady that would cook for us. Not a gourmet chef by any stretch of the imagination, she cooked what she knew, cause we were too busy at the time to well, even cook or clean the house.
Today we are more financially well-off, her (the maid's) son is making a decent living as a financial advisor in Chicago, helps her out alot, and well, now that we are more well-off, neither of us are putting in as many hours, which means my wife now does all the cooking, and she got on the health food kick a long time ago. Given that she had to cave on living where we now live (she didn't want to move), I've had to cave on other things, to a degree, that includes eating food that tastes like food.
God Bless You, and God Bless America. People just haven't seen real poverty - which is well-defined by malnutrition, infant mortality, and truncated mean life spans.
Think about how meaningless it is to turn on your kitchen faucet. You're not likely to have had corpses floating in your watershed, as well as many other bugs and communicable things coming through your tap.
[Say, do you know anyone in the Seattle area looking for domestic work?]
Except the price.
When I was a kid on the farm in the 40's and 50's, our family occasionally had fried chicken on Sunday. Organic chicken, no less. Fresh, free roaming chicken from the yard. No growth hormones, no antibiotics in the feed, just chickens like God intended. But you don't want to know of the eating habits of chickens left to browse on their own. Pigs are clean by comparison.
Why is a reformed smoker "manic?"
It's a cliche of the person, having shed a bad habit, of now having a rabid reaction of crusading against that habit with great fervor against anyone who still practices it. It's not a smear on smokers (either reformed or not), but simply a standard example of that certain percentage of people who 'find religion' and zealously try to drag everyone else to find it, too, even to the point of going overboard.
Yes, it's not accurate-- not all ex-smokers are manic. But some are, and the term conveys a certain type of human behavior.
Thanks for the link, BenLurkin.
Good points, Atomic Possum!
bttt
Interesting. I gave up smonkin' and drinkin.' But I have NO problem with others who continue doing so. I'll usually have a cigar and a glass of wine so they don't feel intimidated by my normally "clean habits."
Soy is a garbage filler, in my opinion. I figured out I was allergic to it and found it's in everything, as I started researching it. It's one of the top ten allergens, yet it's used in so much of what we eat. I have read that boys given soy formula have smaller testicle and girls undergo earlier puberty. Don't know if that's just hyperbole, but it's scary.
There are enough good studies that implicate soy in systemic damage that I make an effort to avoid it. There is the strong phyto-estrogen component which is implicated in a number of correlated symptoms (what you are refering to), there is the glandular dysfunction (endocrine?) in children well documented in Japanese children with high soy intakes, as well the damage it causes to the brain by blocking healing and repair mechanisms of the central nervous system. And a number of other implicated interactions, never mind the allergy component.
There are a lot of things we could be eating with a far smaller risk profile than soy. Ignoring the fact that tofu is one of the most unappealing foodstuffs ever.
'As opposed to the fine cuisine Guardian writers eat over there. I'll take our food over theirs anyday, and, uh, brush my teeth afterwards, too.'
All Brits have bad teeth and all Americans are obese. No-one ever died of bad teeth though! :D
Yes they have.
Poor dental care can lead to a number of unpleasant diseases and infections that will indeed kill you.
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