Why individuals "just saying no" to Big Food isn't enough

Michelle wrote:

We have seen so many arguments here on babble about how it is each person's individual responsibility to eat properly, that no further regulation is needed, and people can "just say no" to junk food and fast food.  And that furthermore, if a child becomes obese, it is all the parents' fault, because parents can just stare down the overwhelming pressure from constant junk food advertising aimed at children by "just saying no" to their kids when they want junk food.

Well, Dr. Freedhoff doesn't think much of this individualistic solution, mainly because it just doesn't work in practice.

Poverty is one example of why this doesn't work in practice. For the first dozen years of my life I'd say that my family ate fairly healthily. We ate a balanced diet. We never had sugary cereals in the house. The only time my dad ever bought pop was when we'd go camping on Victoria Day weekend. He'd buy a flat of pop, and that would last our family of five right through to the end of summer. But in the '90's things became very tight finacially, and it really had a negative impact on what we ate - and even more so on what we drank. Cheap processed foods replaced the more nutritious - yet more expensive - whole foods on our plates. And unlike my early years when our consumption of pop was kept to a minimum - a special treat for camping, fishing trips, and barbeques - 2-litre bottles of store brand pop gradually took the place of milk and juices in our refrigerator, becoming pretty much the only thing we drank at home. We didn't even drink water at home because the rising cost of rent in the city meant we eventually had to leave the suburbs and move into a rural area where our well water had a really bad taste which only my dad seemed able to tolerate. So yeah, it's not as easy as just saying 'no' to junk food. Proper nutrition is sometimes a 'luxury' that people can't afford, even when they know what things they should and shouldn't eat to be healthy.

onlinediscountanvils wrote:

Proper nutrition is sometimes a 'luxury' that people can't afford, even when they know what things they should and shouldn't eat to be healthy.

There are tens of millions of grossly obese peope in North America...and North Americans are among the wealthiest people on Earth.

TMN (The Movie Network) has been showing a three-part documentary this month, each 90 minutes long, about the obesity epemic affecting children in the US. It's chilling how lobbyists prevent Congress from passing laws to ensure schools have safe, healthy food in their cafeterias. It's especially bad in Wisconsin, which was profiled last night. It's unbelievable how much junk food is served up in school cafeterias despite Michelle Obama's (and others) efforts to convert school cafeterias acrross the US to healthy food. And that fruit juices - apple, orange, grape - have as much sugar as soda! And that shit like high energy drinks are sold in school cafeterias. 

When I went to school in the 1950s and 1960s, all I took for lunch in a brown paper bag were either peanut butter or ham and cheese sandwiches, and an apple - five days a week. I drank either cold milk from the school fridge or water. That was it.

School cafeterias - elementary and secondary - in the US serve up fries, burgers, chicken nuggets, pizza, and other high fat content foods, along with soda, energy drinks, as well as milk and fruits (that go largely unsold). Why are children being fed that shit in school????

US school cafeterias do have what they call healthy hot lunch specials - but look pretty disgusting and are mostly ignored by the children.

I think the solution is to ban school caferias from serving anything except sandwiches, fruit, a salad, milk, and giving free water - in glasses, not plastic bottles. Unfortunately, how do you defeat the lobbyists who fight this tooth and nail???

Not everyone suffers from obesity in the USA - but the problem is growing, as are diabetes, high blood pressure, and other health problems rarely seen before in young children. It's insane. 

And - only seven states have mandatory physical education in elementary schools - I think it's the same for secondary (high) schools in the US as well. Growing up in Ottawa and just outside Ottawa, physical education was mandatory - every day.

The documentary showed that all over the US, kids are more sedentary than ever - playing with video games, social networking (facebook)  on computers, and watching television - instead of going outdoors and getting exercise. No wonder there's a problem not only in the USA but here as well - our lifestyles here reflect the USA so much.

ETA: The documentary showed that pizza is classified as a vegetable in some school cafeterias. That's the problem in a nutshell.

With regard to your point about food allergies - yeah, but all parents need to pack something suitable for their kids. And teach them not to share lunches with others. Food safety and food health begins at home.

Get rid of the school hot lunch programs altogether, and throw out the junk food. For those in need, have packed lunches (sandwiches, etc) readied in place of the hot food program.

The documentary also showed that every school cafeteria surveyed had potato chips, nacho chips, and other crap displayed prominently by the cash register - get that crap out now!

And have water fountains - no more bottled water.

Boom Boom, hot lunches are a way of making sure kids eat some vegetables (in soup etc) which they might not eat otherwise. And might sandwiches not be a healthy choice for those who have to avoid carbs, or gluten?

The packed lunch also has to consider allergies. For example, I'm allergic to apples, a common fruit around here. Teachers forced me to eat them, and to drink milk, and were aghast when my face then turned beet red from allergic reactions.

Except in the case of serious allergies, I'd think teaching children not to share is socially extremely negative!

A disproportionately large number of those people are from lower-income households, due to the fact that junk food is cheaper and much more easily available than nutritous, healthy food in the areas where lower-income people predominate.

Things like the the lack of supermarkets or farmers' markets and the destruction of community gardens in low-income areas to accomodate gentrification also make the problem much worse.  The closures of gyms and playgrounds in low-income neighborhoods reduces the ability people have to be physically active.  You can't just tell the poor "it's enough that you can go jogging".

Among working-class and middle-income people, obesity has been made worse, in significant measure, due to the increased hours working-class and middle-class people have been made to work since 1980 simply to hold onto the same purchasing power they had BEFORE what we can now call The Great Rearrangement.  Those extended hours often force people into worse nutritional choices(you can't really eat a nutrititous mean when you only have a 30 minute lunch hour, or when you're doing a working lunch at your desk, or when you're pulling forced overtime at the plant.  In those situations, people are pretty muched force to eat things like candy, chips and, God help us, microwave burritos.

And those extra hours also mean that people don't have the time they once had to exercise.

Other posters will be able to add greater detail to fill in this point.

You can't reduce the whole thing to bad individual choices, Sven.  There's a clear class basis to nutritional problems and obesity in North America.  Yes, North America is an overall wealthy place, but the concentration of wealth among a very few makes that meaningless when considering the reasons most North Americans who are obese happen to be.

The only way we can really make North Americans healthier is to create a society and a system with healthier values, one that doesn't treat large numbers of people as expendable.

lagatta wrote:

Except in the case of serious allergies, I'd think teaching children not to share is socially extremely negative!

Except children - indeed most people - do not know who around them have allergies. What if your child unwittingly caused serious harm or even the death of a fellow student due to an unknown allergy?

Food is an entirely separate issue from the practice of sharing. Share your clothes or crayons or pencils or what have you, but children should NEVER  share  food in an uncontrolled setting.

Absolutely right, Mr. Tea. Good post.

Boom Boom mentioned that diabetes is on the increase in children. 

<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/30/health/research/obesity-and-type-2-diabetes-cases-take-toll-on-children.html?_r=1">NY Times</a> wrote:

“It’s frightening how severe this metabolic disease is in children,” said Dr. David M. Nathan, an author of the study and director of the diabetes center at Massachusetts General Hospital. “It’s really got a hold on them, and it’s hard to turn around.”

Before the 1990s, this form of diabetes was hardly ever seen in children. It is still uncommon, but experts say any increase in such a serious disease is troubling. There were about 3,600 new cases a year from 2002 to 2005, the latest years for which data is available.

The research is the first large study of Type 2 diabetes in children, “because this didn’t used to exist,” said Dr. Robin Goland, a member of the research team and co-director of the Naomi Berrie Diabetes Center at Columbia University Medical Center in New York. She added, “These are people who are struggling with something that shouldn’t happen in kids who are this young.”

<a href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/PrintArticle.php?articleId=21281">Rady Ananda</a> wrote:

Factory foods comprise most of the US diet. Industrial food adulterations are directly responsible for the skyrocketing rates of obesity, diabetes, and heart and neurological diseases. Farm overuse of antibiotics has led to drug resistance in humans.

Big Food owns governnment. Policies for neoliberal deregulation have resulted in a loss of family farms and placed the emphasis on big agribusiness and industrial food. They are putting chemicals and antibiotics in our food that were never a part of the human food chain until relatively recent times. If they don't know what it's doing to our health, like they didn't want to know about tobacco for decades, then it looks like the unprecedented epidemic of diabetes in children will continue unabated. Monopoly capitalists prosper by deliberate and unwritten government policies that suggest what the public doesn't know can't hurt us.

The U.S. Government and our's are not very transparent or accountable to the public. The war on cancer is said to be another bogus government war on a deadly disease since Richard Nixon's time in the sun. They didn't want to know about the effects of tobacco for over 50 years, says U.S. public health authority Devra Davis. The corporate good is more important than human health as a general rule of thumb.

Kids pick nutritional Happy Meal when no toy offered with less healthy option: study

Quote:

Hobin said the fact children in the intervention group were more likely to opt for the healthier meals when a toy was offered suggests that restricting promotional premiums could be one way to get kids to avoid eating less nutritional fast food.

"Currently, Canada has very few regulations restricting food marketing practices directed at children, despite the fact that government and non-government organizations have identified that reducing food marketing to children as a priority in Canada's childhood obesity strategy," she said.

Alas, those occupying the halls of powerlessness in Ottawa can do nothing. Their impotence is not a real medical condition and exists only in their feeble minds.

Actually Britain introduced hot school dinners long before the US did, and they are a longstanding tradition in the Nordic countries. France if famous for its use of school dinners to introduce not only healthy food habits, but also exposure to a wide variety of foods, but their famed school dinner plan has come under criticism for its failure to accommodate vegetarians (and especiallly vegans). France is known to be rather militantly secular, but in practice, there are many schools in neighbourhoods with numbers of Muslim and/or Jewish students that refrain from serving pork, or make it one choice among others.

http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/restaurants-and-bars/sandwiches-m...

One of MANY articles about French school dinners. A friend in France (originally Canadian, from Toronto, and secular-Jewish) confirms these practices, as his daughter (now at university) made her way through the publlic school system in the 19th arrondissement in Paris, an area where many people of Maghrebi origins, both Muslim and Jewish, live.

Regarding food deserts, I think that is part of the problem here in Saskatoon.

The fact is that two of the cheapest grocery stores, with some of the highest-quality produce and meat are right in the centre of our "desert". But as Asian food stores they don't have dairy, bread, or a lot of other things that many people here are used to eating. So many wind up going to Giant Tiger.

This in no way lets the grocery store chains off the hook for abandoning the city centre, and I am not saying it is the fault of the people living in the core for not using foods they might be unfamiliar with. But it is maddening to see a food option which is better than the chains under-used, while people have to pay cab fare to get to a grocery store.

I remember that it was a similar story in Winnipeg when Eatons closed its food store in the basement downtown. 

And regarding school lunches, they actually ask parents to not send certain junk foods and candy. It is not strictly enforced, but from what I have seen it is generally followed.

Timebandit wrote:

  My kids get exposed to the same advertising as their peers, but they don't clamour for junk food or sugar cereals.

That's nice, and you must be very proud, but most children do not understand the intentional propaganda effect of junk food advertising. I still want junk food ads targeting children banning.

Good choices, Boom Boom. I like bran flakes and raisins with banana or strawberry slices or blueberries. Mmm good.

The history of breakfast cereals 

I was there at Battlecreek, MI but not to eat cereal. Apparently we have Seventh Day Adventists to thank for the cold breaky treat. Kellogg apparently wanted people to be healthy.

Quote:

He was searching for a digestible bread substitute using the process of boiling wheat. Kellogg accidentally left a pot of boiled wheat to stand and the wheat became tempered (soften). When Kellogg rolled the tempered or softened wheat and let it dry, each grain of wheat emerged as a large thin flake. The flakes turned out to be a tasty cereal. Kellogg had invented corn flakes.

Fidel wrote:

Timebandit wrote:

  My kids get exposed to the same advertising as their peers, but they don't clamour for junk food or sugar cereals.

That's nice, and you must be very proud, but most children do not understand the intentional propaganda effect of junk food advertising. I still want junk food ads targeting children banning.

All advertising targetting children under 13 has been prohibited by law in Québec for over 30 years. Not just junk food.

Kellogg's was a vegan diet I think. And that's impressive considering that Besant and Bradlaugh were given a rough time of it for advocating birth control in Victorian England. Apparently wankers didn't give a toss. And not only that, socialism was considered a dangerous foreign influence then.

Pep became one of the first "fortified" cereals, with a spray of vitamins, beginning in the 1930s. 

And more recently,

<a href="http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/kelloggs-fortify-cereal-with-vitamin-d/">Vitamin D Council</a> wrote:

The Irish Universities Nutrition Alliance reports 9 in 10 children do not receive the recommended daily intake of vitamin D, which is 200IU/day in Ireland.

And the best part is the kids don't have to be circumcised or even swear allegiance to the empire. It's a good deal imho.

Most Canadians are vitamin D deficient, Fidel.

You don't change that by eating bland pap - or any cereal grains. The best preventative is eating a northern European breakfast side-dish of herring or liverwurst while hanging out naked in the morning sun in front of your sauna. There are no vegan sources that I know of.

All Kellogg invented was a means of processing. People have been eating grain cereals - cold and hot - for millennia. And if we are comparing doctor-invented variants, I prefer Dr. Bircher-Brenner's version: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muesli

And I have nothing against veganism, tender palates or religious dietary restrictions, but tying any of them to the cause of International Socialism and anti-Imperialism isn't really helping the cause much. It's certainly not a line I am interested in swallowing.

I don't think it would go over that well in much of the world either.

There's no need to get snippy, Fidel - my point was, from my perspective, that advertising and peer pressures to eat junk is given more weight than I really think it has.  Lagatta is right in that it's the education about food and what to do with it that lends itself to better eating habits overall.  Eliminating ads targeted toward kids (which are actually banned or limited - Treehouse, for example, is a TV channel for young kids that carries no advertising at all, although YTV, aimed at older children does) will only go so far - it's the adult attitudes to junk food that have to change first. 

How?  Don't know.  Overly earnest government programs don't seem to be working. 

Timebandit wrote:

There's no need to get snippy, Fidel - my point was, from my perspective, that advertising and peer pressures to eat junk is given more weight than I really think it has.  Lagatta is right in that it's the education about food and what to do with it that lends itself to better eating habits overall.  Eliminating ads targeted toward kids (which are actually banned or limited - Treehouse, for example, is a TV channel for young kids that carries no advertising at all, although YTV, aimed at older children does) will only go so far - it's the adult attitudes to junk food that have to change first. 

How?  Don't know.  Overly earnest government programs don't seem to be working. 

I think, Timebandit, that TV plus packaged and processed food was a marriage made in hell since the 1950's. I think Joe Goebbels never dreamed of the propaganda potential for broadcast TV and now the internet. And I think broadcast TV and the overall electronic and print media are a must for western election campaigns tainted by money. Biggest war chest wins as a general rule, and that same theme carries over into marketing and brainwashing them while they are young. 

Capitalists want their souls and while still in the cradle if possible.

I have sardine sandwiches every month. I use canned sardines, drain them out of the can, mash them up, add some green relish and mayo, and spread it on bread.

I've read that sardines are “health food in a can.” They are high in omega-3's, contain virtually no mercury and are loaded with calcium. I like them in sandwiches as I mentioned in an earlier post.

Sardines are rich in numerous nutrients that have been found to support cardiovascular health.

excerpt:

Promote Heart Health

Sardines are rich in numerous nutrients that have been found to support cardiovascular health. They are one of the most concentrated sources of the omega-3 fatty acids EPA and DHA, which have been found to lower triglycerides and cholesterol levels; one serving (3.25 ounce can) of sardines actually contains over 50% of the daily value for these important nutrients. Sardines are an excellent source of vitamin B12, second only to calf's liver as the World's Healthiest Food most concentrated in this nutrient. Vitamin B12 promotes cardiovascular well-being since it is intricately tied to keeping levels of homocysteine in balance; homocysteine can damage artery walls, with elevated levels being a risk factor for atherosclerosis.

Promote Bone Health

Sardines are not only a rich source of bone-building vitamin D, a nutrient not so readily available in the diet and one that is most often associated with fortified dairy products. Vitamin D plays an essential role in bone health since it helps to increase the absorption of calcium. Sardines are also a very good source of phosphorus, a mineral that is important to strengthening the bone matrix. Additionally, as high levels of homocysteine are related to osteoporosis, sardines' vitamin B12 rounds out their repertoire of nutrients that support bone health.

Many other so-called "ethnic" groceries also sell bones (used to make soup stock, of course). 

Pasta with sardines (and wild fennel, but you can use other, local herbs) is a common Sicilian dish, and in Morocco, they make a tagine (spicy stew) of sardine balls (duh, I mean like meatballs, not sardine testicles, which would be very small indeed...). Gourmet sardines can be very expensive, but I found a lovely kind here at a Kosher bakery that also sells tinned and smoked fishy things, tinned in olive oil, for a very good price. Things tinned in olive oil should be used for salads and such (sardines are common in salads in the Mediterranean, like anchovies).