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

[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.