It's Gotten Harder to Lose Weight- And Not for the Reasons You Think

[Nay]

128. What Emma said! It's useless to blame individual people because our whole culture

shoves bad food and bad habits at us at every turn, just for its own profit. It encourages everyone to eat 6 times a day (keeps your metabolism high!), to eat on the run; keeps crummy food low-priced (McDonald's) and good food high-priced (veg, fruit); extols a work culture of sitting 60 hrs a week; pays little attention to structural fixes that encourage exercise (sidewalks, local parks, bike paths, inexpensive gyms).

Why aren't healthier habits of all kinds encouraged by the culture? Because this culture is not a real culture -- it's a commercial venture in which any cultural habits of years past (eat only 3 meals a day of real food, desserts are for Sunday dinner) are wiped out if they interfere with profitmaking. The whipsawing effect of jerking people from one pole to another (from "you have to be skinny!" to "Have this KFC and a Blizzard shake too!&quot not only sells junk food, but also diet schemes, pills, exercise videos. The sellers win either way. The French, for example, have had a real culture that vilifies snacking and eating on the run, plus they walk a lot more, so they've avoided obesity up until now; a slow rise in weight is coinciding with the introduction of fast food outlets and the breakdown of the old ways.

Add in the huge rise in the number of kids who won't eat anything but chicken nuggets and French fries or other industrial food. I now know adults whose taste buds and food habits are so degraded that they still eat like toddlers (pizza, candy, chicken nuggets, etc). I'm 64 and that's new in my experience: adults in my childhood and early adulthood did not eat like that. This means that a whole generation has been turned away from what we would all call normal food, all so that industrial food producers can make tons of money.

You cannot expect the majority of the members of a 'culture' to ignore what its culture tells it to do. Every anthropologist and social worker knows this. The idea that we will all individually decide to dump a large part of our 'culture' is just a way to make it the fault of each individual, which allows the sellers to go their merry way.