Posted on 08/28/2006 11:20:06 AM PDT by freepatriot32
Fat is not a feminist issue, as Susie Orbach once claimed. Fat is a class issue. Rich, educated people are not fat; you see almost no children in private schools who are overweight. Fatness and obesity are directly related to lower education and lower incomes. What is sad is that at a time when this country is richer than ever and ought to have better schools than ever, we have far more fat people than ever — a dangerous explosion of flab. Last week the Department of Health issued a report grimly called Forecasting Obesity to 2010 and its findings were grotesque. Within four years, it predicts, a third of all adults — 13m people — will be obese. So will 1m children
Obese means not just podgy, but dangerously, disablingly, distastefully fat, as in American fat.
This is not just shocking; it has also happened shockingly fast. As the report says, a third of all men will be obese by 2010; in 1993 the figure was only — if one can say only of such a large figure — 13%, rising to 24% in 2004.
The same is true of women, although the rate is rising more slowly; 16% were obese in 1993, 24% in 2004, and the trend is expected to rise until 2010. The proportion of boys who were obese stood at 17% in 2003 and is predicted to rise to 19% by 2010, while among girls it is expected to increase more swiftly from 16% to 22%.
This presents an awkward challenge to libertarians. The libertarian assumption is that we should all be free to do what we want, as far as possible, and if some people’s lifestyle choices involve snacking on deep-fried Mars bars and triple-processed cheeseburgers, other people have no business interfering, still less the government.
Besides, there is the embarrassing fact that those who eat and drink junk do so for cheap comfort and because they are either too poor or too ignorant (or both) to prepare healthy food. It doesn’t come well from the consumers of steamed organic asparagus and free-range ducks’ breasts to criticise those who can manage only frozen reconstituted chicken nuggets and sugary baked beans.
However, obesity does not concern only the obese. It concerns all of us. Obese parents produce obese children, and obesity places a crippling burden on the National Health Service, quite apart from the many personal miseries involved. Currently 10% of NHS resources are spent on diabetes (two-thirds of which is the avoidable type 2 associated with obesity) and this could easily double within the next four years to 20%.
This is quite apart from the increased risk among the obese of heart disease and other serious illness. More young people are being diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, something previously seen only in people over 40. In these circumstances even the most swivel-eyed libertarian would probably agree, for once, that something must be done and even perhaps by the government.
Curiously enough, however, in one of the few areas where our ever-intrusive government might for once justifiably intrude, new Labour does almost nothing. Possibly as a result of the ferocious lobbying of the food industry, ministers restrict themselves to making repetitive noises about healthy living and “small changes” that won’t cost anybody anything.
Tony Blair said last month that if the food industry did not agree to limit junk food advertisements by 2007 he would bring in mandatory rules, but he has said that before and more than once. Besides, why not bring them in straight away? His government has persistently ignored the demands of the Commons health select committee for a traffic light system of food labelling, enabling shoppers to make informed choices.
England’s chief medical officer warned in this year’s annual report that public health budgets were being raided to deal with deficits. That is the reality behind government talk of raising public awareness.
I have never been convinced that government health education has any effect. Despite the “five-a-day” campaign, only a quarter of people in England eat vegetables every day. About half of overweight men are in denial; they don’t see themselves as overweight, according to the report.
There is nothing complicated about being thin. Being fat is usually the result of eating too much junk food and taking too little exercise. Being thin means eating much less food, avoiding junk food altogether and taking exercise every day. It may be that nothing can be done about the plague of obesity; there is a growing epidemic in Europe and worldwide. Perhaps affluence is a disease to which only the fortunate few are immune. But if anything could be done about it, it would have to be radical.
Nobody who craves cheap comfort food will willingly give it up. But if over-processed, over-refined food and junk food were to become expensive while healthy fresh food became cheap — the opposite of the case today — people would be forced to eat well. This could be done through taxes or subsidies. Alternatively, you could ration unhealthy food.
There could be a public campaign against fattening food, just as there was against smoking, aimed at making everyone ashamed of consuming anything naughty but nice. I am just as greedy as anyone else but I have come to think of cakes, biscuits, crisps, sweets, white bread and puddings as more or less toxic. Foods like this should have health warnings — “cake can kill”. They are not just unnecessary, empty calories; they interfere with your blood sugar levels, affect your appetite and your mood; they may even induce food addiction. The same applies to alcohol: more than a modest amount makes you fat, interferes with your mood and is often addictive.
Just as there would need to be financial incentives to eat well, there should also be inducements to take exercise. The cost should be subsidised or declarable against tax. Employers should be required to give workers time off to go to the gym or jog. We could imitate the Japanese and have mass group exercises at work every day.
And that is the problem. Obesity, one of the trials of affluence, can be solved only, if at all, by the kind of interventionism that has been discredited by the failure of socialism. Liberty is indivisible; it belongs to the ignorant and the low paid just as much as to anyone else. Perhaps obesity is one of the many prices of liberty. Fat is a freedom issue.
They drumsticks are good. I've made them before, with and without skin. I've gotten pretty good at weeding out the inexpensive, healthy foods as of late. It was sticker shock at first, to be sure. I like the thighs as well, but I'm the only one, so I don't get them as often. Frozen veggies are my friend, but the broccoli is sometimes more bitter than usual (and I don't mind the bitter, usually).
Cheap and as healthy as fresh. You can eat cheaply and well, but you have to look around and think outside the box.
This bears repeating. I think far too many people who are earning less don't bother, don't want to bother, and are resistant to change. But it is certainly a challenge to scavenge for the good stuff, through the myriad of less healthy, heavily processed foods.
Bravo Sierra! I am rich, educated AND fat.
The author should have phrased it differently. She is making the mistake of equating "rich" with upper- or upper-middle class. Those class divisions are not perfectly correlated with wealth. In other words, it's possible to be rich and middle-class or lower-class: the guy from the inner city who wins the lottery and becomes rich does not therefore become upper class and change his tastes, interests, goals, and values. Similarly it's also possible to be upper-class and poor.
Go to the gentlemen's clubs in London, to the committees for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to the boxes at the Lyric Opera, to the older foxhunting clubs. You will not find fat people there. And as the author points out, there aren't any fat kids in the older private schools unless Mom and Dad just got rich day before yesterday and somehow got them in.
There are always a few exceptions; I do know a few people from very old families who for some reason put on weight. But they aren't waddling-fat.
That is just SOOOOOOO wrong. But I guess it's similar to the situation I've got with chicken around here.......there are 2 processing plants right in this county 100,000s of chickens are grown in this county (there are 170,000 of them across the road from me right now) and yet the price in the supermarket is outrageous.
I was a picky eater as a child, as well, and now I enjoy just about everything. Maybe there's hope for him someday. :)
And you don't need a large area to have enough produce to feed your family. The easiest of the veggies to grow, like tomatoes, peppers, squash, all freeze very well......as do peas and beans.
And to make it even cheaper the following year, buy heirloom as opposed to hybrid plants and/or seeds.......then you dry and save the seeds and don't have to spend any money the following year........
I was born in South Carolina in 1944, the typical diet went something like this,
Breakfast, fried eggs, salt cured ham or pork sausage, biscuits cooked with milk and lard, sometimes large helpings of homemade molasses, grits with gravy made with the fat out of the ham, etc.
Dinner, (the big meal at noon) more pork, more biscuits, vegetables cooked with pork fat in them, potatoes etc.
Supper, (usually a smaller meal in the evening) leftover vegetables from the noon meal, corn bread, milk.
Most people think this diet would make everyone fat but there were very few fat people around back then. Most young people were rail thin. Of course most people got more exercise in a day than many people do in a month now.
And eggs!!!! Also beans and rice. I know about the beans and rice just from reading shelf labelling at the supermarket. I know about the eggs because a friend of mine gets WIC and her family eats/uses very little in the way of eggs.......my family, OTOH, goes through eggs like water...so I always know if I run out I can get some from her.
You can buy a black angus calf for about $200. A year in your yard, and another $200 for processing, and you have a year's worth of beef.
I just gained 5 lbs. reading your post. Sounds wonderful!
The thing that really bites me about the high prices of produce is that the farmers aren't getting paid those prices. I'll grow my own danged tomatoes (and I do) before I will pay $2 a pound for them in August...January and February is a different story, but when I can get fresh local grown 'maters through November, no way will I pay the price in the supermarket.
But you're right - it seems the closer you are to the source, the higher the price..........and most especially if you live in a rural area that has very little population (like where I live).
No - that's reserved for chocolate.
It apparently grows like a weed.........to harvest it you get a hoe or trowel and dig straight down to cut the root. The edible part is the root. Just cut out a chunk of the root - it doesn't kill the plant - then wash it, peel it and grate it. But be aware, if you're senstive to cutting onions, this is a heck of a lot worse.
You would have to mention the leaf - now I can't think of the name of it.......LOL!!!
So start a garden and freeze the excess - you'll eat veggies and potatoes all winter.
I planted a bunch of squash, tomatoes, beans, melons, potatoes, onions, strawberries, blueberry and raspberry bushes. I seldom buy fresh produce except lettuce - I can't seem to get the hang of lettuce.
Absolutely. When I raised my own vegetables, it was not only cheaper but more healthful and far, far better quality than anything in a supermarket, even the "high end" ones. There was also less waste, since I could just pull what I needed off a growing plant or right out of the ground. Fortunately, a nearby stable loaded all the aged horse manure I needed onto my truck bed for free.
Back then, I never bought spices, except a few, such as saffron. I grew everything else I needed. If you want to maximize available soil space, get a book called, "Square Foot Gardening." It's written by an engineer turned amateur gardener. I used to get huge yields of tomatoes by training them on 8-foot trellises made of scrap plumbing pipe and elbows, with plastic coated wire cables on turnbuckles. Did the same thing with snap peas and such on the shady side of the yard.
Lard is healthier than vegetable oil when it comes right down to it.....
But you are right about the amount of excercise now compared to abck then.
Thanks, but no thanks.........
I've got plenty of venison in the freezer and plenty more where that came from. didn't cost me a penny, just the time to cut it up and package it.
I would love to learn how to make sauerkraut. A friend of mine knew a guy who would make, so one year when the cabbage crop came in we bought a mess of it and brought it to him to make us sauerkraut. She and I each wound up with 100 quart bags of it. I cried when I took the last bag of it out of the freezer.........
So you know what leaf I'm talking about? My friend couldn't remember the name - they weren't even completely sure it was Cuban.
It looks like a big banana leaf - wide and flat. It's a lovely deep green.
I've only done leaf lettuce........and like spinach it does not like hot weather. I'm planning on putting some more in next week.
Do you freeze your potatoes? If so, how? I've never heard of freezing potatoes except in already cooked dishes.
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