What the fuck is wrong with this country, part 68.

[elfs]

Seattle is considering requiring all restaurants to include a "nutrition facts"-like label next to every meal on the menu. As I was driving into work this morning, I heard local talkshow host Dave Ross (710 KIRO) discussing a newspaper article in the PI recently about how restaurants are fighting back. One of the stunts the restaurants pulled recently was to hire a man for 30 days to eat out morning, noon, and night in Seattle, to get all of his nutrition from restaurants, to demonstrate that one could do that, remain healthy, and even lose weight.

"And then," says Ross, "At the bottom of the article is a quote from his dietician. Welllll! I said, if you can afford a dietician of course you're going to lose weight! But for you and me and Joe Average, and I don't have a dietician, believe me, it's a whole lot harder! We don't have any idea!"

I don't normally get angry at talk show hosts. I know they get paid to act stupid (or, in Limbaugh's case, to be stupid). But this one absolutely infuriated me. Jesus fucking Wonder Woman (yeah, let that image percolate through your brain, it'll relieve the tedium), after forty years of "eat less, move more" and all of the other nutrition information we've been given, do people really need to hire a dietician tell them, "Don't eat at McDonald's every freaking day?" and "Don't supersize that," and "Don't stick the entire damn Denny's Ham & Cheese omelette down your gullet" and "For Gods' sake, the Starbucks Frappucino is a milkshake and you should treat it like a dessert and have it maybe once a week‽"

You do too have "an idea." You've got a simple one. Eat less, exercise more. Ignore it at your peril.

Comments

[anthologie.livejournal.com]

To some extent. But, for example, if you could afford to eat at Carmelita (the vegetarian fancy-pants restaurant in Seattle, which is amazing and delicious) three times a day, I bet you'd still gain a lot of weight. What they lack in animal protein they make up for in butter and cream and oils and such.

[antonia-tiger.livejournal.com]

I have a few health problems that are diet affected.

I don't know how you would set the limits, but some marker for fats or refined sugars makes some sense. Here in the UK, outfits such as MacDonals have been providing basic dietary information for decades, but they're a uniform product. How do you manage if you're running a fancy hotel restaurant, with neither uniform product nor some central office working out the figures.

(This is a reason to think that health legislation tends to disadvantage the smaller businesses.)

[elfs.livejournal.com]

I'm not objecting to the basic premise that one should know what one is eating; I'm objecting to the host's premise that "Joe Average" is incapable of making conscious and meaningful food decisions for himself, especially after all the nutrition information that's been drilled into our heads since Sesame Street, and that he's incapable of figuring it out for himself even after reading the article the host cited.

IAWTP

[scyllacat.livejournal.com]

Obligatory Dietary Button response: If one can't tell his emotions from appetite from hunger, he should practice only eating when his stomach growls or aches mildly, and stop when full, or in 20 minutes. After a while, one will not only know HOW much to eat, he will feel cravings for protein, fruit, vegetables, water, and other nutrition. People's diets can be self regulating if they would listen to their bodies.

I, too, am infuriated when people blame government, restaurants, processed food manufacturers, or others for things that should be their responsibility.

[jenk]

Never mind that there's an easy way to control every bite you put in your mouth, should you wish: it's called "cooking".

[tehrasha.livejournal.com]

I find it ironic that Limbaugh would agree with 99.9% of what you just said. :)

[mundens.livejournal.com]

I feel everyone should be aware of the latest research on what causes hunger (which in turn causes obesity) and how to stop to it. This transcript of a radio interview with Dr. Robert Lustig, Professor of Paediatric Endocrinology at UCalSF, covers the basics pretty well.

To summarize that article in a very basic way, fructose increases insulin production which in turn makes you hungry, so you eat more. Also fructose, unlike glucose, is metabolised like a fat. Fructose is a major component in table sugar, corn syrup, fruit and soda drinks, and any food that uses sugar, like donuts and cakes.

While I agree that personal responsibility is a good thing, a lot of the argument for regulation is that food producers, like cigarette companies, are well aware of what they are doing, which is increasing fructose content, to make you hungrier, so you buy more.

Eating until you don't feel hungry any more (as scyllacat mentions above) just doesn't work for most people who do not already control their diet in some way, because in many cases the food you eat is designed to make you feel hungrier!

[kengr]

Elf, "Eat less, exercise more." is an all too common catchphrase.

One that is a *very* sore point for folks who have gained large amounts of hard to lose weight to to medical problems.

Among other things "eat less" can cause the body to shift to "famine mode". Which means that from then on you'll be more apt to gain weight than you would if you hadn't restricted your food intake so much. This is one of the reasons why yo-yo dieting is so bad for you.

[elfs.livejournal.com]

How commonplace is a medical condition such that, if you're already eating more than your daily metabolic load, reducing the calorie count to a lower but stil over your metabolic daily load is going to shift you into famine mode?

I can understand if someone is fighting weight gain due to a medical issue like diabetes; you're already under a doctor's care. (Even then, I'm not convinced entirely; two of my friends have gained weight after their Type-2 diagnoses, but only one is honest enough to admit that it happened because she "didn't want to" follow the doctor's diet and exercise advice; the other still uses the word "couldn't.") Most of the obesity in this country is not due to medical complications: most of it is due to people shoving too much food down their own throats voluntarily.

[pteryxx.livejournal.com]

I'd also point out that Joe Average does NOT in fact have a clue about the nutritional content of food. They see 'salad' and think it's healthy, but don't realize there's fat and sodium loaded into the little packets of dressing and the breading on the chicken strips. There's a reason the big chains heavily advertise food with names like 'Premium Chicken Breast Strips' - to capitalize on the masses' misconceptions about nutrition. I've personally taught classes of college students that didn't know their cans of pop had more sugar than their candy bars until I pointed it out - and THAT is already on the labels. You and I know the Starbucks drinks are milkshakes, but where did we find that out? I read a food expose online. Not exactly something the 30-ads-per-day crowd is going to stray across, nor actively search for.

That said, forcing every single restaurant to provide stats for every single dish is just ridiculous. The megachains probably know that info already, but small local restaurants would be crippled, and they are most likely to have the best food. How about we only require nutritional stats from companies that spend more than $100K a year on television advertising? They could run them as sidebars like prescription meds. ; )

[elfs.livejournal.com]

You and I know the Starbucks drinks are milkshakes, but where did we find that out?

I watched them make it. Y'know, right there, on the back counter of the store, where they put in the ice and the milk and the... "What is that stuff?" Omaha proposes that it's my writely obsession with detail: "What is that? How do you make it? What's in it?"