Comment by lobster_johnson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lobster_johnson | Hacker News Reader

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lobster_johnson

I'm curious about this. I lived in a predominantly Latino (mostly Puerto Rican) neighborhood of Brooklyn for a while a couple of years back. The supermarkets were full of fresh, cheap food, yet the customers (who were consistently overweight and often obese, including the kids) were piling their shopping carts up with terrible stuff -- sugary cereals (Froot Loops etc.), sugary drinks (sodas, fruit juices, Caprisun, iced tea), white bread, snacks (cookies, doughnuts, potato chips), tons of frozen microwave meals, etc. I never saw a shopping cart filled with anything healthy and unprocessed. And I realized that I was actually being very picky walking through this place. I had to ignore 90% of the stuff they stock their shelves with because it's unhealthy.

Places like Whole Foods have the same problem, of course -- it's also full of sugary drinks and cookies, except they're labeled "organic" and made with "natural sugar cane" or agave, or they're things low/no fat yogurt (containing more sugar than the full fat ones). You can get fat on Whole Foods groceries if you're not super picky.

Definitely seems odd on its face, but if you dig into it, you'll see that it's SO much more complex than simple access. Other factors include, but are certainly not limited to:

Time to prepare: fresh foods generally take a lot longer, and a lot more effort to prepare than processed foods. When you've got each available parent working two jobs then this is a huge barrier.

Knowledge of preparation: especially in immigrant populations, not everybody has access to the ingredients they're used to.

Knowledge of nutrition: it's not like life comes with an instruction manual, and if you got little to no nutrition education, you probably don't realize the impact of those empty calories.

Fussy Kids: people who appeasing fussy kids (yeah yeah yeah... the hardos without kids will say you should just force them to eat it. Life isn't so straightforward.)

Waste: this is a huge factor. If you've got a tiny amount of cash and you need to spend it on things that will ensure you wont starve, something that will potentially go bad in a few days is a risky proposition, so you tend to stock up on heavily processed shelf stable items.

Price: Cheap is in the eye of the beholder. You can get a whole bag of chips for the same price as 2 apples. When you have a REALLY borderline income, your "cheap" is a lot different than someone else's.

There's plenty of other factors. Check out the research on it for more info. Really interesting stuff to dig into.

> Fussy Kids: people who appeasing fussy kids (yeah yeah yeah... the hardos without kids will say you should just force them to eat it. Life isn't so straightforward.)

My friends with children basically fall into two camps: one camp that agrees with you and blames their kids, and the other camp that just feeds their kids healthy food because, like your pet dog or cat, can't drive to the grocery store when it refuses to eat its croquetas.

Spending time with the families of my friends, the real issue seems to be with the adults either giving in to their children because they don't want to bother, feeding their children boxed food because they don't have the energy, or feeding their children bad food because they themselves don't eat much healthy food.

It hurts to watch you child starve because they are being picky. I had a teacher tell me she didn't want to eat peas one night, so her father sent her to bed hungry. She woke up a few hours later, went downstairs to her cold plate of peas still on the table, and ate the whole thing.

I had a classmate in high school who ONLY ate pancakes and fries. He was from a wealthy family and his mother had various supplements she would put in the pancakes to keep him healthy. We went on a week long canoe trip where you obviously can't eat pancakes and fries 24/7. 3 days in, this guy is starving, and for the first time in his life had pasta, trailmix, and eggs.

Children don't have fully developed faculties for reasoning, you can't take a reasonable approach to solving pickiness. Things seem to taste better the hungrier you get, so I think the approach to pickiness is to starve them out.

My dad made me sit at the table until I finished my milk and peas. After waiting two hours to spite him, I then had to drink warm milk and eat cold peas anyways. I learned pretty quickly that the manipulation didn't work on him.

I have no doubt that a lot of parents have that "my little angel" syndrome that keeps them from disciplining their children, but notice how that doesn't free them from the responsibility nor allow them to blame their kids.

I can appreciate that I was really fortunate to have parents that put in that sort of effort. My mom would also cut up vegetables like turnips for us after school that we would scarf down. They set me up for a healthy lifestyle as an adult that didn't take much effort on my part.

I know a lot of people didn't have those kinds of advantages, so they especially don't come naturally for them once faced with raising children and having to make those decisions themselves.

I wonder if it is a good approach to force children to finish their plates?

Seems like not. There are some studies [0][1][2] that show parental control over food intake may result in children's (mostly girls') obesity since it teaches children to ignore their satiety/hunger mechanism and thus overeat.

It may lead to the situation that once grown up, they could keep this habit of leaving the plate empty no matter how full they feel.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2045650/

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11358344

[2] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2384361/Leading-nu...

It's really super easy to judge people from the outside, especially with parenting. None of these decisions are made in a vacuum, and especially in low-income immigrant populations, there are many factors at play. When you've got a double digit food budget in which you can't waste a penny, no spouse around to help, and 3 kids who all need help with their homework, then fighting a nightly battle over eating food that takes longer to prepare and you could barely afford to begin with is probably a lot less important.

Maybe the reason is that in a large part of the US, there isn't a strong home cooking culture. You can really tell the difference if you walk into a Daiso store (japanese dollar store). The variety of cooking-related gadgets and trinkets is mind boggling. In japan, they also do home economics (cooking) in school and culturally, ability to cook is often portrayed in media as one of the "checklist" qualities when looking at a romantic partner.

No instructions on the label of a pak choi, and no industry gain from suggesting recipes using it, since it would just be rice, cheap meats and/or other vegetables. Blue Apron and similar services might be superfluous for some, as well as expensive, but they at least inspire people to use more basic ingredients. I don't know where one starts to educate people in making "real" food. New/old school subject?

Way back when, there used to be home economics but that was really oriented toward the women who were clearly going to get married and cook for their husbands/families. As gender roles changed, home economics pretty much went away.

The funny thing is, Froot Loops has no more sugar per equivalent serving than most granola which people naively assume is more "healthy".

Well it depends but most granola has more fibre than fruit loops which means it is healthier because it has a lower glycemic load. Even so—not a huge fan of sweetened granola.

I compared them them [1] with a random granola product [2] available from Whole Foods. Percentages by weight:

                Total carbs  Sugar  Fiber  Protein
  Froot Loops           86%    34%    10%     6.8%
  Granola               72%    18%    14%    10.0%

Froot Loops definitely loses here. The granola has half the amount of sugar.

[1] http://smartlabel.kelloggs.com/Product/Index/00038000391187

[2] https://www.instacart.com/whole-foods/products/25454-kind-he...

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