Quote:
Originally Posted by Jinksie
they also live very different lifestyles.
I was just talking about this recently with the owners of a thai restaurant (they're Hmong) that have become our friends. Kia (who has weight issues herself) was reminiscing about being a child in Thailand (her parents owned a meat market) and the food they would eat. She was talking about how cheap and good the food was, and that everyone ate so much more and more often than we do in the USA and yet no one was heavy there, but she laughed "we also walked down a mountain to get to the food, walk around all day and then walk back up the mountain afterward, and then the next day we'd do it again."
I think we often take exercise/work/activity level out of the equation. I think that in my own family, one of the reasons successive generations have been heavier than the prior, is not that we are eating far differently than previous generations (although sometimes that's true too), but also that we became much, much more sedentary. My parents were eating and cooking like they were taught to - as if they were still on the farm doing heavy manual labor all day.