Quote: (12-10-2011 06:05 PM)All or Nothing Wrote:
Quote: (12-09-2011 02:32 PM)basilransom Wrote:
False. Obesity has been linked medically to infertility, but that doesn't mean obese people have fewer babies. For whatever reason, obese people have more children. FWIW, the same people who are too stupid and lazy to stay skinny are often too stupid and lazy to prevent getting knocked up.
False, it isn't that people are too stupid and lazy to be skinny in the U.S. It is that it costs more money to be skinny than it is to be fat in the U.S. Our government subsidizes corn to an extreme extent. So much so that corn and its deadly offspring, high fructose corn syrup, has become a part of the vast majority of foods sold in supermarkets and restaurants. Corn has been proven to have little health value if not a negative one, and high fructose corn syrup has been proven to be extremely detrimental to health and one's metabolism. On top of this potatoes are also highly subsidized by the U.S. government. Potatoes, high in their starchiness and low in nutrients, also generally hurt one's health.
The bolded portion is false - to eat an
ideal diet, it might be expensive. But the typical American could eat healthi
er and save money by improving his diet - simply drink tap water instead of sugary drinks. But Americans drink hundreds of cans a year each.
And middle-class people eat fast food more than poor people do.
Part of the problem is all the misinformation. In the grand scheme of things, fruits and vegetables are fucking irrelevant. In terms of weight, that is. You aren't fat because you aren't eating them, and you aren't skinny because you are eating them. If you're talking about obesity, fruits and vegetables are irrelevant. They will also never be the core of your diet either, unless you're counting tubers as vegetables. The problem is the quality and quantity of your calories.
Processed foods, especially highly refined carbohydrates and sugars, are easy to eat in massive quantities. They don't fill you up as much as a simple potato or steak would. Regardless of the merits of those latter two, it's just a lot fucking harder to get fat when you're eating minimally processed foods.
An apple is 100 calories. So is a cookie, of a certain size. But how often do you eat more than one apple at once? Have you ever eaten more than two in one sitting? So even if the apple is as bad for you as a cookie, you'd never eat it in the quantities you would a cookie. Apple sauce, apple cider, etc are different, because you easily
could eat them in large quantities.
Try downing a shake at Coldstone's, and then eating the same amount of calories in potatoes - you'd have to eat 6 lbs of taters. It's no fucking wonder you get fat when you eat food that is un-filling despite having so many calories.
There may be other factors as well, eg, if grains are particularly bad, but that's icing on the cake in my eyes, when it's just so easy to eat a lot without feeling it.