Honestly I get it. Junk food can be addicting. If nothing else try to cut out the soda
The marketing we allow sure doesn't help.
I think cutting the soda goes a very long way. Soda is nothing but empty calories and I feel like I’d it’s so easy to just cut it from your diet.
Isn’t this what Michelle Obama tried to do? What would you (or anyone else wanting to pitch in) suggest for policies?
Jamie Oliver as well in the UK. People STILL hate him for trying to feed their kids better than they could. The strength of the desire in people to make life worse for themselves and everyone else makes me hate this fucking country.
I remember having an argument with a friend about algebra in schools. Her kid was struggling, so she said why does he need to learn it, he can just get a job like hers where it's not needed. Every other post of hers on Facebook was complaining about her crappy job.
There's a strange mentality here that we're all struggling, but nobody should be doing better. If someone does try, they get called out for it and shamed.
The problem with wealthy influencers like him is they always promote expensive food items with meaningless qualifiers. Local, organic, free range, natural etc don’t mean shit when you are broke. Teach people how to make healthy dishes with conventionallly grown foods you can buy at Walmart or whatever because that’s where the people who need help the most shop. Familiar foods, Vegetables. Beans. Rice. Lentils. Chicken. Nuts. Etc. not EVO, spaghetti squash, and “organic” chanterelles.
The upper middle class people who shop at Whole Foods don’t need a Jamie Oliver. And that’s what his target audience was/is.
They saw Jamie Oliver as elitist for trying to get kids to not eat shit. Did you ever see his program? It was abysmal what they were serving British schoolchildren in schools.
Make healthy food cheaper and tax junk food heavily. My dad recently moved to Ecuador and he’s eating like a king - fruit is like a 5th of the price there than it is where I am in the US.
Now I’m not expecting fruit at a 5th of the price lol, but making it reasonably priced at all would be a welcome change.
We have to hold the big monopolistic food industries accountable. Look at Hershey's, they have a ridiculous amount of lead in their chocolate and no one doing anything to push them.
Remember what happened when NYC tried to ban sodas? Yeah, good times.
Literally everything is a fifth of the price in Ecuador as it is in the US.
Healthy school meals, making healthy food cheaper, taxing junk food, but I think the most helpful would be to heavily limit advertising of junk food, especially advertising to children.
I really feel like heavy restrictions on advertising would genuinely help with a range of different issues in the modern world.
Start by reversing some of the bullshit decisions Congress made. Like how they decided pizza was a vegetable.
https://www.thejournal.ie/us-congress-rules-that-pizza-is-a-vegetable-282033-Nov2011/
It's a wonder Americans can actually get any good health advice when everything is a marketing gimmick or flat out lie. But when our own government is just rolling over while businesses legally poison the majority of the population is just insane to me. We don't have to stop individuals making their own choices to fight back against some of this insanity. And proper information is a good starting point. No more deceptive advertising. No more saying your cheese when you're not. No more "Wyngs" or other bullshit naming only designed to deceive.
I think the FTC should crack down on deceptive advertising too.
No more saying your cheese when you're not. No more "Wyngs" or other bullshit naming only designed to deceive.
But these are not the most pressing issues. Call your product whatever name you want, I just want to know exactly what's in it.
I agree that calling something "cheese" when it's "dehydrated oil shreds" or something is deceptive. Saw that today at Whole Foods. No, it's not healthier; it just doesn't have dairy.
Lack of dairy or gluten doesn't make things healthier. Those ingredients aren't replaced with air. They're usually replaced with something that sounds disgusting. But food companies don't want to put that on the package so they list what it doesn't have.
Regulate advertising. Ban ads targeting children.
Michelle Obama’s policies were stupid. Replacing ice cream with low fat ice cream that has more sugar doesn’t help anyone lose weight.
the my plate shenanigans was just replacing high calorie density foods with low density foods but obfuscated by using volume as a measurement.
they did nothing to address food deserts.
Did what? What the hell are we debating here, rotating your plate of vegetables? I don't get this meme.
This meme is saying instead of using shaming as a tactic to help make healthier choices to actually do something and change policies to help everyone achieve a healthier diet. Obviously it won’t reach everyone it’s not perfect, but that’s how I understood it
I've found that 9 out of 10 calls for "individual action" to solve a societal ail is only solvable by regulating large companies and industry. Most of the time, the companies themselves are the ones funding the campaign for individual action and awareness. ReMEMbEr tO ReCYcLE!
"Yeah, we should keep shaming parents for childhood obesity! Now, let's go on with more stimulus for High Fructose Corn Syrup..." 🙄
You don't have to eat the thing. Try eating the healthier thing.
Lol said like someone who doesn't understand kids.
It’s so expensive and time consuming to eat healthy, even more expensive if you want quality ingredients.
Meanwhile, junk food is quick, cheap, and tastes “better” because they just pack it full of sugar or have no regard for nutrition.
There’s really little incentive to eat healthy unless you’re making a conscious decision to be healthier.
Beans and rice is cheap as hell, easy to make, and it'll last for a week or two depending on storage options.
I'm really tired of the expensive angle on healthy eating. It literally takes 20 minutes of research to get around that issue.
Yep it's total bullshit. What people are really saying is they're too lazy to prepare foods. Stir fry is cheap. Soup is cheap. Beans (refried, chili, black bean, etc.) & rice is cheap. All healthy.
Making lentil tacos tonight. Again, filthy cheap. Stupid simple. But tons of protein, complex carbs, fiber, vitamins, and minerals.
It gets much more efficient time-wise when you meal prep. Every improvement requires "conscious effort." we're just accustomed to bad habits because nobody taught us better.
Edit: I was a bit harsh on the laziness accusations. People are products of their environment generally and there are fair points regarding societal pressures. The body tends to take the path of least resistance and, well, this is the outcome.
I never liked this suggestion. Sure, dry beans and rice are cheap. When we tried to make beans, they came out tasteless and gross no matter what we tried. No matter what recipe we followed, they never tasted good. Rice is also cheap, especially when bought in bulk, but there's only so many seasoning or sauce sauce combinations until I'm sick of eating the same thing. Even if it's every other day, there's no way I'm eating the same thing. We did that with overnight oats because they are cheap and easy to prepare ahead of time. We did it so much, it makes me gag now and I'll never touch it again. On top of all that, I'm tired of cheap eating being reduced to the simplest possible foods imaginable and acting like people will eat them every or most days.
There's nothing more expensive and time consuming than being laid up in the hospital with cancer/heart disease/diabetes.
Missing the point that, you can't convince kids with that argument.
Taking a carrot and eating it is faster, easier and more convenient that "fast" food. It can also be thrown around in a bag all day and still taste the same. Same with apples and...
It is really easy to simply make the decision to not eat shit. You don't need to be an 8th degree vegan to be healthier.
It's so easy you guys 💁
Also: Exercising more? That's easy too-- Instead of not doing exercise, simply do exercise instead.
Saving money, same thing-- Simply don't spend it all and you're good.
Okay, we're on fire with these life-changing insights-- What pervasive personal responsibility problem should we do next?
Permanently Deleted
This meme is art
I do feel that parents share a responsibility. Then again, the parents are often also fat, so the cause might go deeper than overfeeding the kid
I reccomend reading Ultra-Processed People by Chris Van Tulleken. It explains how modern food is designed to be over consumed. Mind blowing book.
I have no idea what you're trying to communicate with this picture.
Let's be real here...we changed policy to enable obesity. The body positivity movement made it OK to be fat...Now over 75% of Americans are fat.
We did this one to ourselves.
If by policies you mean neoliberal economics, then you're correct.
The body positivity movement did jack shit compared to economic factors, so it frustrates me to no end when people talk about it more than the incentives to be unhealthy. Shaming and blaming not only doesn't work to dissuade unhealthy behavior, it makes societal failures into personal problems, refocusing the conversation away from the real culprits.
We hang ourselves, but capitalism gives us the rope and few alternatives.
The body positivity message is "others shouldn't shame you for your body". You may still decide you want to change your body through whatever means are available to you. And the policies the meme refers to are about regulation on food production and distribution.
I mean, it is the fault of the person buying the food. Healthy families don't eat fast food 5 times a week, and they don't shop in the middle aisles for all of their food. That being said, most Americans don't know how to cook or feed themselves properly and that's a failure of the education system. Well, it would be a failure if it wasn't part of the actual plan to dumb down Westerners.
Edit: holy shit, some of these comments. Yall are fucked. Eat a goddamn vegetable and look up a recipe once in a while, why don't ya?
One big issue is that many poor families don't have much time to cook. Yeah, there are things that can be prepared quickly and in bulk for later, but that's harder than some frozen meal or fast food. There's many socio-economic factors at play that need to be addressed.
I handle all the meal prep for my wife and I. You're not wrong about the middle isles, we hardly touch them anymore, we go from produce to meat to dairy/eggs and don't go much further in save for the occasional party. It's several hours out of my Sunday to make sure we both have enough meals to get through Friday, she's kind of helpless in the kitchen and depends on having something to quickly heat up.
This arrangement works for us.
I have no fucking clue what we'll do when we're feeding a child. A kid, who if is anything like me, will be incredibly picky to the point of regurgitation when something with an off texture touches their lips. I work nights, and my wife works days. We're both sensitive to carbs, which as adults is manageable but kids actually do need some.
Don't get me wrong, we'll figure it out. But we're fortunate enough to have decently paying jobs. We earn more than most do at our age, and when it becomes important we'll have access to childcare that most Americans don't.
Someone on even the median income in our area is going to struggle to eat the way we do. Someone working two jobs is going to really struggle to not hit the drive through several times a week. Someone feeding children is going to struggle even further.
My point is, you're fucking dense.
People need cheap food. Cheap food isn't healthy. People need food that doesn't take much time. Fast food also isn't healthy. Sure, there's a decent size of the population hitting the drive through exclusively due to laziness. That's not everyone, I'd argue it's not even the majority.
I get it, it's easy for you to stay home and cook when you're single living in your mom's basement, most of us moved out around college.
"the middle aisles" is a great way to phrase grocery habits
