Quote:
There’s no magic bullet on this. You simply have to cut calories and be vigilant for the rest of your life.
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He sums up his findings with that tidbit -- something that we already know. I could have told them that for free. Since the 50's & 60's, we have more high-calorie, cheap food readily available, so people are eating more. They really don't know how much they are eating (the calorie value, I mean).
Before that, people made and ate their food at home; plus many people had gardens and bought foods direct from farmers. They had to -- money was tight. They ate mostly whole non-processed foods. Obesity was rare. Even being overweight wasn't that common. I recall that there may have been only one student who may have been classified as obese, and only a few that were overweight (around 20 lbs).
Like the interviewer said, when I was growing up there were no fast-food places in our town. People ate out very rarely, if at all. I never had fries until my early teens; pizza until in my mid-teens; and hamburgers in my late teens.
I worked in stores during that time; and I remember how much the food products changed over the years. Even in the 70's when I worked in a grocery store, they didn't have a whole aisle for junk or bread products; just a small corner. Now there are whole aisles and aisles of the stuff. Whole aisles of pop; whole aisles of junkies; whole aisles of cookies; whole aisles of ice cream, whole aisles of baked goods, and so forth.
Our government (in Ontario, Canada) is now going to require that restaurants disclose how many calories are in all the foods they make. Sadly, we're just catching up to the US in this regard.
One of the most telling things for our family was this -- when we were children, we had 3 homemade meals a day; and small ones at that, with no snacking at all, and none of us were overweight at that time. All of us were normal weight children ... UNTIL ... we had more food available.
At first, we were just a little plump; but when we started working in stores where we had junk foods available to us, and the money to buy them, we gained a lot of weight. Then, add in the fast foods, and our weights went up even more.
There's where the problem started, but for many people today, this has become the "norm" for them -- they eat fast food and junk all the time. So, why are we so surprised that we have an obesity epidemic?