I think this is definitely true, we need better health and diet education in the schools and cheaper fresh food in the markets. But I would also add that I think parents could play the most significant role in cutting obesity rates. Today it's not uncommon for parents to give their kids Pop Tarts, Doritos, and Pepsi on a daily basis... this has essentially become the default diet for American kids. I think a lot of parents feel that children are entitled to junk food and don't want to "deprive" them by requiring them to eat healthy.

Last week I traveled to Ohio to visit my family and was shocked to find what my brother and sister-in-law have been feeding my 3 year-old niece... sugary muffins for breakfast, a hot dog for lunch, and noodles with butter for dinner. Sure, she eats apples or green peppers for snacks, but healthy foods are merely accessories to her diet. The bulk of it, though, is comprised of nutritionally deficient junk. I worry that she'll end up like me one day.

I was also pretty shocked to see what my sister-in-law feeds my one year old neice. Sure, there's bananas, apples and yogurt. But, baby Maddie pretty much eats whatever the family is eating. If they're having sugary frosted sweet rolls (that packaged stuff from the grocery store - not the kind you bake from a tube), that's what Maddie gets. IANAP, but there is no way I would ever feed a one year old any kind of processed crap - I don't eat it, I sure wouldn't give it to a BABY.

Glory87, I have also been appalled to see what some people feed their kids... I visited one friend who took me with her to her other friends' home and they had their 15-month-old up running around in her diaper at midnight, feeding her pizza and coca-cola and arguing about why she wouldn't go to bed. I'm not a mother yet, so I guess I shouldn't criticize, but dang it was hard to see that.

Back on topic, though: I think the hard part about food is that we have to have it in some quantity to live. Other addictive things, like gambling, promiscuity, alcohol, tobacco, etc, we can eschew completely by willpower and therapy and prayer. Those are not necessary to life. Food is. We might just as well pledge to give up air and shelter. I think the fact that we cannot give it up completely is what makes it so hard to control when we do have it. IDK...

I kinda like that. It's not that it's bad to ever eat dessert or a rich dinner food, just like it's not bad to ever have wine. But it requires a certain awareness so you can have/do it in appropriate quantities.

This is the best thing I have read in a long time. Thank you!

I have tried to think of food as fuel for a long time, but this really puts it all in perspective.

Because food isn't just food. It's been turned into a metaphor for other things, largely through marketing. It's luxury. It's sex. It's loving kindness. It's comfort. It's a toy, a game, a sport. It's an enormous element in pop culture, and it's related to slang, music, TV, etc. And all this seems to have happened since we began extracting ourselves from its growth, cultivation & preparation. Because it's become so "other" & so apart from our daily lives & routines that we've turned it into something it's really not.

I think about this problem often: I'm a middle-class, college-educated single woman with a career, living in a highly urban environment. Yet I'm trying to eat & cook like a 19th century peasant woman in rural Italy or France. Sometimes the dichotomy is a gigantic pain in the ***. Food to me is a different issue & past-time entirely than it was to that woman. I can't completely go backward, much as I'd like to.

This.

Plus, almost everything we do for enjoyment or hobby (oustide of exercise) is linked with food. Go to a baseball game? Of course you have to get the beer and the hot dog. Going to the movies? Why yes, we get the big bag of buttery popcorn and a soda the size of our head. How do you celebrate an anniversary, birthday, graduation? With food. Even when my DH and I were discussing our vacation to San Diego, I said to him "There's two things we have to eat when we go: fresh seafood and authentic Mexican!" Every typical American holiday has some type of food... your Thanksgiving turkey, your Fourth of July hamburgers, your Easter ham!

We celebrate the beginning of life with food by bringing the new parents lots of frozen casseroles and take out... we mourn the end of life with food by gathering at the deceased loved one's homes with even more casseroles and booze.

Is it any wonder why we see these things as a negative sacrifice when we start and stay on our journey to lose weight?

I'm someone who sits down on weekends with the New York Times, the Sunday edition with the multiple sections, and it always fascinates me how large portions of the Travel section really could be transferred intact to Food & Wine (which they don't run on weekends -- Lifestyle covers that instead). When you travel, the thing is to eat the indigenous food, to participate in the local culture. This can be high-end food tourism, in the form of wine tastings & dining at multiple-starred restaurants & inns, or getting a cheese steak in Philadelphia or shoo-fly pie at a Lancaster County farmer's market.

Food is emblematic of the culture. Think of what the rest of the world considers to be "American food."

My mother was an excellent cook, we had a huge garden growing up. We had vegetables and/or fruit for every meal. My dad painted houses and often traded work for sides of pork, beef or chicken. Nothing processed, just plain old fashioned food. Junk food was a rarity. Peanut Butter was a luxury. We had kool aid maybe once or twice a year, because sugar was a luxury. At Christmas we splurged, and when we visited Grandma there was usually "a (1) pop" for each of us....yet I was fat. I ate a lot of "good food". I wasn't born fat but I quickly gained weight as an infant. I was always bigger than the other kids. I see skinny little kids running around that survive on pop and chips. I don't think "food" is always the problem. I think that some people are just born this way.

Interestingly, back when I was born, smoking was totally socially acceptable, and women routinely smoked during pregnancy. I was born addicted to nicotine....like a crack baby. My mother (now deceased from lung cancer)used to tell me how I could never get enough formula, (she didn't breast feed). I remember her telling stories of how I would cry and cry until she would feed me, and I would eat so fast and furious that I would spit it all up, and cry for more. I sometimes wonder if my food addiction didn't start out as a nicotine addiction...trying to get a fix as young as a newborn.

See, I thought about this, too. I was a kid in the 80s, and my dad lost his job when I was around pre-school/kindergarten age. We lived on a large plot of land, and my dad (having grown up on a farm) grew a HUGE garden full of veggies, and we had a fruit tree orchard as well. So when he was out of work and just consulting, we ate a lot of fresh fruit and veggies from the garden. Kraft macaroni and cheese was a luxury... I didn't grow up on junk food. My family did not "reward" with food, we rarely kept soda in the house or things like ice cream or potato chips. But I was just always a bigger kid growing up... my problem wasn't the food, it was that I was lazy and laid around all the time instead of being active. Later on in life, the problem became being lazy AND the excessive eating!

I, too, don't think food is always the problem, but I think it's often the problem... and probably more often than not. Certainly, there are people who get fat eating healthy food, but we can't deny the overwhelming role that ubiquitous junk plays in the skyrocketing rates of obesity in America.

Food has tremendous motivational power, as Glory rightfully pointed out in the first post, and I think the problems associated with that are exacerbated by the modern junk food diet that we now feed ourselves and our kids. Of course, there are many factors involved in the drive to eat, and unfortunately it's impossible to address all of them (especially those that are biological/genetic in nature). But that doesn't mean we are powerless when it comes to food.

The main point of my previous post was that eating healthy is hard enough without being fed a steady stream of junk food at a young age. I think parents can do a lot to help their children develop a "normal" relationship with food, which gives them a fighting chance to be healthy adults.

Great thread and how fitting since I've been struggling with temptations all week. I don't know what it is I have a nice tasty grilled chicken breast in my fridge along with a thick lentil stew for lunch but I don't want it. All I can think of is yummy treats like cake...mmm cake.

Glory - Food does taste good!!! It just sucks when you are craving foods that aren't the best choice for your body.

Wish I had something more productive to add

I definitely agree that parents should be educating their children - I used to be an infant teacher, and got so tired of how it was our job to teach kids behaviour, respect, not to do drugs, not to go off with strangers etc, the parents had no responsibilities - but I mean that we need a huge adult education programme too, one that treats adults like sensible people, not one that talks down to them with cutesy cartoons.

Especially where I used to live, so many adults just had absolutely no idea about nutrition, and that's scary.

I think it's much harder to raise kids up on a healthy diet now than it was even 20 years ago. When I was growing up, everyone in school had sandwiches and other mostly-healthy stuff in the lunches their parents packed; but "snack" types of foods are utterly common and peddled hard in the grocery stores now, and weary parents feel compelled to buy that crap for their kids. Yeah, Lunchables, I'm lookin' at you: You're the devil.

The food environment as a whole has changed incredibly for the worse in the last 20 years.

Sure, but it really is up to parents to both model behavior and dictate what can and cannot be eaten.

My 1st grader takes the exact same thing to school for lunch & snack every single day. (Yes, he's a bit OCD, LOL!)

Cinnamon swirl sandwich (WW cinnamon bread with country crock spread)
baby carrots
red grapes
small snack (100 calorie goldfish or cheez-its or pretzels)
2 Hershey kisses :-)
half-pint bottle of water

Sure, I'd like to see a bit more variety, but he knows the difference between a "snack" and what is part of a meal. It's a parents' job to teach it.