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Comment by jsharpe | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if this is because sitting and watching TV tends to correlate with poor diet (lots of snacking on unhealthy things while on the couch), whereas it's quite difficult to eat bad stuff while moving around all the time.

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When I was a kid I used to skateboard around town about 8 hours a day, moving around all the time. I ate nothing but junk food during while doing this. What was I going to do, steam some brussell sprouts in the parking lot? It's more like existing in America tends to correlate with poor diet.

But on the other hand, you spent much more time skating around than eating, versus time on the couch is 100% available for mindless snacking.

I found just having access to high-quality ingredients at a reasonable price to be difficult in the US. More difficult than in Europe at least & waaay more difficult than in Asia (ok, one datapoint: China).

Having lived in the US, Europe and Japan and currently living China, I'd say that yes it's very difficult in the US, but in China it's rather difficult too... For example, I find it very hard to find good quality fish to cook (most of the fish you get here have a strange test I find)...

It's easy to find organic produce here but it's not that cheap (at least compared to Europe), and I'm not exactly sure if I trust it as much as I trust organic produce in Europe or Japan...

That said from my 6 month experience living in Rochester, US is much worse... (and don't talk to me about university "food" there)

I hear this all the time but when I lived in Japan and Germany I thought the food was expensive and the produce was of poor quality. Japan had cheap stuff like noodles, but vegetables and fruits were expensive. I've found the produce in the USA incredibly cheap and good most of the time.

IMO it is way easier to eat healthy in NYC than in any other place on the planet (and i've been to several).

NYC is technically not "America" though, so i'm not sure if I've raised a point of contention or simply bragged about how my city is teh awesum.

One of my first jobs was working at McDonald's. For a while I worked full time, 40 hours a week or more, all of it on my feet. I ate a LOT of their food, and this was back when they still cooked the french fries in beef lard.

During that time I never had any issues with weight gain, cholesterol, or blood pressure.

That depends. Sometimes you get stuck with 7 eleven food as a result.

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