It’s hard to find “fit” people anymore. Walking around some grocery stores is mind blowing. I honestly feel bad for people. The “food” we have is shit and life is getting busier and busier.
Something I haven’t seen other commenters bring up that can have a huge impact, is the overall lifestyles people are living.
The unhealthiest years of my life were when I was working 2 jobs and struggling to keep a roof over mine and my 3 kids heads. Stress and depression were huge problems and money was tight, so sometimes the little bit of dopamine or serotonin from eating a “treat” were the highlights of the day. Add to that, the guilt of not being around to cook regular meals for my kids lead to 1) making large amounts of food on my one day off that could be eaten as leftovers throughout the week or 2) easy convenience foods (frozen pizzas, boxed Mac and cheese, etc) that the kids could make when I wasn’t around.
Fast forward many years - my kids are adults taking care of themselves and I’m down to 1 good job that offers financial stability. My diet and health have completely changed. I actually have the time and energy to cook and plan better.
I’m not saying this to shift blame or responsibility, but to bring a different experience. When I hear (hopefully well meaning) people suggest “just cook healthier meals” it strikes me about the same as “stop eating avocado toast and you could afford a house.”
Lack of free time to cook healthy food with a busier and more expensive life with salary raises that don’t keep up with inflation or layoffs for many people definitely doesn’t help. Healthy food ends up costing twice as much, if not more than unhealthy food. It’s a multi-faceted problem and should be treated as such.
I don’t think healthy food is necessarily more expensive, at least not if you know what you’re doing. My personal experience is actually the opposite.
The problem, as you mentioned is the time, and the emotional and physical labor of figuring out something the whole family will want to eat and cooking it. Those things are all expenditures in their own ways, but not financial.
Tell me a healthy meal I can make for the same 5 bucks that I can feed 4 people with by buying a red baron pizza.
Ingredients: rice, black beans, eggs, onion, garlic.
The night before, let the beans soak. Before cooking, change the water on the beans. Heat until boiling, change the water again, add salt and let the beans boil slowly for 1.5-3h.
Slice the onion and garlic in small chunks. Fry in a shallow pot, in just a bit of olive oil. Add some oregano or whatever spices you enjoy. When it is fried to your taste, add the rice. Mix it for a bit, and then add 2.5 cups of water for each cup of rice.
Let it boil until the water doesn’t cover the rice, then turn the heat down until it’s just evaporating water (I like my rice dry). Meanwhile, fry a couple eggs, use a strainer to get the beans out, and add everything to the rice (or you can serve the eggs on the plate).
• 1kg of rice: 2€ • 1kg black beans: 4€ • A carton of eggs: 2.5€
YMMV but this is tasty and pretty inexpensive, if you don’t count the 2h of boiling beans, but I prefer them on the soft side :P
Love how everyone is like “beans and rice!” and totally ignoring the energy and time it takes to make such things. And not everyone is a fan of beans and rice. At the end of the day being able to have a slice of pizza may be the only bright spot when you’re living paycheck to paycheck.
Yep. My boomer dad: “When I was a kid, we walked everywhere! Nobody walks anymore!” Also my dad: “I’m afraid to drive into Portland because my truck might get stolen.”
Well said, that’s what we call canard advice. Unhelpful advice that’s obvious to everyone and does no fucking good to say whatsoever. You can cook more when your primary financial needs are met, so you can just work 40 hours in a week. That and the RTO mandates going around are robbing people of a significant chunk of time yet again ontop of overemployment. When you have to work a 10 hour day and commute an hour plus each direction, then come home and “cook” something, it usually translates to heating up frozen shit and then wishing you weren’t miserable.
Been there and done that, fuck hustle culture.
That really depends on where you live. I know when I go to visit my parents I’m always very impressed by the older people (65+) that I see on their daily walks. They are definitely fit. It’s the same when I go to the supermarkets in that area, I see a lot of fit, healthy people of all ages. Even the people working the register are in good shape.
When you get to 65+, the less-fit people who would be there are, sadly, dead.
The healthy food options are also usually twice the cost too.
Until you go on vacation to a “poor” country where it suddenly costs virtually nothing.
Are Avocados a conspiracy?
Avocados spoil quickly, so they have to be transported faster. That means the further you get from the source, the more expensive they are.
More durable produce can be shipped slower, or can sit on the shelf longer, making it less expensive.
ditch all the sugar drinks and drink plane old water, like out the toilet.
Rice and beans can be made in 1000 different ways. $1/lb uncooked.
Eating out is almost never a healthy option.
Healthy and expensive don’t correlate in my outlook. I spend less eating better. Factor in not eating out and my pockets are fat, but not my ass.
I prefer plain water myself. Not your bougie plane water.
The planes collect it as they fly through clouds. Imagine drinking water that’s touched the ground…
the blue hawaiian water that collects near the back is the best water.
Eating out is almost never a healthy option.
This is a big deal people often don’t realize. Even something as simple as an alfredo pasta will have way too much butter in it when you order it at a restaurant. (Why do you think it tastes so good?) An entire stick of butter for a single serving is quite common.
Not only is cooking for yourself significantly cheaper than ordering food, you are also significantly more aware of the calories you are putting into the food.
Even something as simple as an alfredo pasta will have way too much butter in it when you order it at a restaurant.
Hell no. It will have too little and probably doesn’t contain proper parmesan, either. Also it’s not actually simple, it’s minimalist, but hard to actually get right – Italian cuisine in a nutshell. I almost wanted to say “and be extended by starch slurry” but then realised that pasta water vs. starch isn’t really something one should complain about, if anything that’s a fault of sub-par noodles… anyway:
The butter unhealthy / saturated fat unhealthy thing is due to plant fat manufacturers trying to sell hardened fats as healthy giving us the wonders of trans fats, flanked by the sugar industry’s “fat makes fat”. While I’m at it the cholesterol stuff is the equivalent of “dead firefighters found at conflagration site, thus, abolish the fire department”. Not to mention that dietary cholesterol has no correlation to blood cholesterol. And how could I forget the tobacco industry which was very successful in blaming the cardiac arrest epidemic on anything but smoking by concern trolling the scientific process.
There’s processed foods which are perfectly fine but as an experiment try avoiding anything that has been invented in the last 100 years or so for a while and observe the difference. There’s certainly restaurants around which cook like that but it’s not going to be the ones people with two jobs eat at.
Oh and I don’t think the science is completely in yet but it seems that the “gluten intolerance” epidemic is due to increased use of glyphosate directly before harvest to make wheat grow faster: It’s not the gluten but some people’s stomach just don’t take the residue as well as others. So YMMV on being able to get proper ingredients for that experiment.
But I’m sure the free market will fix everything.
“If you want to be healthy, you must suffer and just eat beans and drink toilet water”
What a great argument for healthy living.
Go into the produce isle for once, veggies are cheap…fish and chicken is cheap. A single trip to McDonald’s for 2 is like $25 or more now. You can get like 6 or 7 whole chicken breasts for that price and have money for potatoes and fresh veggies.
This is so fucking false its hilarious.
It’s cooking – cooking is cheaper. Cooking anything is cheaper than buying boxes.
Cooking costs time and energy, which not everyone can afford.
That’s a different argument and much more valid.
I imagine it would be pretty easy to take the list of what people buy/eat and their health issues and see clearly what foods are causing what health problems.
I bet the average cashier would even be able to point out the worst products.
But never, ever, will that happen. Grocery store is full of dead animals and animal proteins and cancer look to go hand in hand. The other big one is sugar. People are hooked on it like cocaine.
I imagine it would be pretty easy to take the list of what people buy/eat and their health issues and see clearly what foods are causing what health problems.
True, but it entirely ignores what’s driving them to buy those things. For example, if you’re a single parent working two jobs, when you get home do you want to start cooking a meal, or just put a Stouffer’s in the microwave and veg out?
Here we go again, giving no accountability. Yes, healthy food is more expensive, but that doesn’t mean fat people didn’t eat themselves fat.
The Internet will bend over backwards to ignore the algebra of calories. Base metabolic rates are basically identical between all humans. The lie of a “fast metabolism” is not why some people are skinny.
People are fat because they consume more calories than they burn. Blaming someone else doesn’t fix it.
“Oh gosh, I don’t drink soda and rarely eat treats, why am I still fat?” Because you eat too much for your daily expenditure.
This would make sense… If it was exactly the same everywhere with a similar level of convenience.
But it’s not, America is much much worse than Europe on this, and rich countries in Europe don’t exactly have less convenience than the US. How else would you explain it other than a systemic difference? American brains are not fundamentally different to European ones.
As an Europan I can tell you, that the food in de US often tasted sweet to me. It’s like people in the US lost their taste buds for bitter and sour. There is no need to add sugar to every dish, especially bread. The other thing was the amount of fat in nearly everything. Salad? With a creamy sauce or tons of oil. Of course you have to add 400g meat AND a high calories cheese to it. Served with some sweet bread and it’s basically a burger in disguise. We were told that California was the healthy and rich state. If that was the healthy food, I’m starting to believe all those images on social media of fat dripping dishes.
In the end we cooked ourselves most of the time and payed the horrific price.
Try eating it for a few months and I bet you will see that people acclimate. Just like if you cut out salt suddenly processed shit tasted way too salty. Hell, I just had a peanut butter cup, first candy in weeks and it was like hyper sugar. Yuck.
A buddy of mine spends time in an easy Asian country where even desert is barely sweet and he noticed the same coming back to the states.
See, food companies figured out they could make more money selling food with cheap HFCS because it “tastes better”. It’s cheaper than sugar because we grow boat tons of corn + govt subsidies. It isn’t banned because corruption and regulatory capture that is ubiquitous in the US.
Lucky us.
Repeating my previous response:
I think diet is a part of it, but car culture and fast food is the biggest difference. Many developed European countries still rank much higher than the US in steps taken per day. Plus, fast food is usually a treat and not the default with a drive thru. It is back to the algebra of calories in the end.
I work on OpenFoodFacts, and the big issue is simply the amount of saturated fats and refined sugars there are in a lot of processed foods.
Like, sure, people have to be held personally responsible to some extent, but it should also be on the government to properly regulate how foods are advertised. I really appreciate the Nutriscore system that’s being pushed for in Europe despite the flaws it has, and here in Canada they’ve been making some changes in how certain products are shown on shelves such as requiring labeling if they’re high in sugar or fats and changing the previous confusing labels for energy drinks with a more easy-to-read Supplemental Food Facts label.
End of the day though, if something is still being labelled as being “healthy” when it really isn’t, that’s all it takes to fool the average consumer unfortunately. Stuff like Lucky Charms shouldn’t be advertised to kids as “part of a complete breakfast”, and it’s absurd that a lot of “healthier” alternatives to certain foods are being advertised that way despite only being barely any better than the original product, like turkey bacon or veggie straws.
You can have something packed with sugars that says “NO FAT!” on the label, and otherwise intelligent people will think it’s healthy.
My brother-in-law eats a huge bowl of cold cereal every morning with skim milk… I drink a coffee with heavy cream or half and half and don’t eat breakfast. He’s a bigger guy that can’t figure out how to lose weight and I’m not anymore.
To be fair I can’t figure out what to have for breakfast. I have issues with low blood sugar recently so I’ve been having… Lucky Charms :/. I just need to cut calories elsewhere I guess
The problem could be how fast you digest your food. As high as fat is in calories, it also digests much slower than sugar. So low fat might actually worse for you in a lot of cases.
Eggs are great. Protein is also very slow to digest. Eggs are mostly protein and fat, and the fat is largely good fats. Eggs also take well to being mixed with other foods. Once you get sick of basic eggs, like fried eggs and scrambled eggs, then you can sprinkle a little bit of cheese on it and it’s a completely different flavor. Full fat cheese please, none of that 2% bullshit. Add some bread and you have an egg and cheese sandwich, toast and eggs, toad in the hole, or basic French toast.
I have spent most of my life struggling with low blood sugar issues. It is not only difficult to live with, but it is impossible to find real advice on how to deal with it. Most doctors are arrogant pricks that tell you just to eat less. Sure, I’ll just go on a diet again and lose consciousness on the way home from work again, great fucking advice.If it is really negatively affecting your health, you might also look at semaglutide. It works by making you digest slower. That has been a game changer for me. Being able to eat like a normal person is freeing… I actually worked through lunch this weekend. Completely forgot to eat because I was doing something really interesting. If you don’t understand how big a deal that is, then you just need to work on eating better foods, you don’t need the semaglutide. If that sounds like a fantasy thing that You would never f****** dare, then it might be something to look into.
Yeah I had a seizure in early January and the culprit seemed to be low blood sugar. When I came to, they took a blood glucose reading and it was 50. I suspect some medicines I was taking at the time were artificially reducing my blood sugar without me realizing it.
So these days, I would never dare it yeah haha. Isn’t protein something I want to avoid though, since it doesn’t really add to my blood sugar and just makes me feel full? I’m not following I guess.
There may be a lot of reasons that you should avoid protein, but as a general rule of dieting, protein is harder to digest than carbs, so it slows your digestion down, and it has less calories than fat. The idea is to dispense the calories as measured and slow as possible, while still having enough to feel energetic.
Hmm, so by having carbs with protein, I get the benefit of both?
Just a few things come to mind :
- Lobbyists stopping sugar taxes.
- Big Pharma and health industry making tons of money.
- European Union being very tolerant about pesticides.
- Supermarkets putting candy close the counters where parents with kids are in queue.
- Lots of people spending most of their time on mobile phones only exercising the muscles of their eyes.
I am happy that an organisation like Foodwatch exists : https://www.foodwatch.org/en/foodwatch-international
- Normalized obesity
- Healthy at every weight culture
- Unacceptable to discuss personal accountability
I keep getting into it with people I mostly agree with. Yes, it’s fucked up that we add HFCS to everything and that corporations have weaponized addiction, but we can fight back.
Yep, way to many people over eat, and it has nothing to do with what’s in the food, people are just super seditaty these days and eat constantly.
Clicking the downvote button doesn’t magically make me wrong. There is a reason that you can eat straight Twinkies for a month and watch the calories and still lose weight. You’re not smarter than physics.
I run approx 5k a day because I overeat lol. Only way I keep from being 300 pounds.
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I envy you.
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You give me hope for my future if I don’t burn out before then. I long for the small town life again as I get older.
Bitching about down votes doesn’t magically make you right. You’re being downvoted because what you said is idiotic.
It has a lot to do with what’s in the food. Sure, if you eat nothing but 1500 calories of Twinkies every day, when you were eating 3000 balanced calories, you’ll lose weight.
That is about 12 Twinkies. Not even an entire box of Twinkies. And that’s all you get to eat in a day.
It would be much easier to reduce calories if half of them were from vegetables and the other half from meat. Feeling hungry has a lot to do with why diets fail. You can’t just apply physics to the human body and expect emotional and hormonal changes not to have an impact on the choices that human makes.
Naa I’m being down voted because people want the easy way out, all the time. You’re the same type that runs with the Healthy at any size. The same groups that promote that sudo science bullshit. No where did I say it was healthy to eat Twinkies and lose weight, but acting like people are fat because of the food that’s offered is a fucking cop out.
Actual studies have been done on this. You’re not only wrong but you’re scientifically wrong.
Eating ultra processed foods are not only unhealthy, they also cause you to eat more than you would if you were eating exactly the same thing with real food.
An argument you’ll note that is not only consistent with my guest comment, but actually argues for people doing more work than they’re likely doing to lose weight.
Literally every point you made was incorrect.
Subjects were instructed to consume as much or as little as desired.
The study also lasted 2 weeks and had less than 40 people in it. This is a bullshit study, we know people are going to eat ultra processed foods because it tastes good. Hell I’m guilty of it even, I will eat an entire pizza on my own if I don’t stop myself. This study should say, people lack will power to not eat free fast food… it’s a complete nothing burger of a study.
Ah yes, the age old, “I know better than an actual scientist because their science disagrees with my feelings”
