Told to Eat Its Vegetables, America Orders Fries | Hacker News Reader

Told to Eat Its Vegetables, America Orders Fries

nytimes.com

26 pointsgrellas52 comments

How about looking at the cost? In America, grains, sugars, and meats are subsidized in myriad ways, directly and indirectly.

It seems to me, when I was a child, salads were less expensive than meat. But it's almost starting to become the opposite.

>People know that vegetables can improve health

More like: we were cajoled and coerced into eating vegetables by our parents, who were in turn cajoled by their parents, etc.

We then spend the rest of our lives rationalising this uncritical acceptance, which isn't the same thing as knowing something.

It's even arguable that vegetables were critical 100 years ago, but no longer in days when you can get your fiber from breakfast cereal and vitamins in the form of a pill.

Not just our parents:

http://www.fruitsandveggiesmatter.gov/

This site is a production of the Produce for Better Health Foundation, founded and funded by the Produce Marketers Association.

Like the meat producers don't do the same thing?

Is there an eatbeef.gov?!

You'd be surprised how much government money goes into marketing agricultural products in general, including various flavors of meat. Strangely, nobody ever talks about cutting any of these programs.

http://www.ams.usda.gov/AMSv1.0/ams.fetchTemplateData.do?tem...

What was surprising was seeing the marketing take the form of the Centers for Disease Control offering health advice.

The Stonesoup cookbook was featured here in June: http://thestonesoup.com/blog/2010/06/a-free-e-cookbook/ I've switched almost entirely to that book — 5-ingredient, 10-minute recipes. It is quicker than eating out, and my veggie intake has tripled.

I suspect that if people knew how to cook vegetables properly, consumption would increase dramatically. Ask your vegan friends for some recipes.

Obviously I'm not a controlled study, but I've found weight loss is easier since I made a habit of eating a large serving of vegetables at least once a day. And I don't worry about what I have to do to make them desirable--soy sauce, salad dressing, salt and butter--just so long as I'm mostly eating veggies at the time.

"Eating vegetables is a lot less fun than eating flavor-blasted Doritos," said Marcia Mogelonsly, a senior analyst for Mintel, a global marketing firm. "You will always have to fight that."

Just offer flavor-blasted veggies: Outback Bloomin' Onion. Hashbrowns with onion and red pepper. Etc. I eat more veggies these days than I used to and that is part of my approach. Veggies don't have to be bland.

I'm pretty sure potatoes and other starches are not included in the definition. I don't think hash browns are the solution, though they make for a delicious problem.

My understanding is potatoes are a vegetable and very nutritious in their own right, which is why they were a staple of the Irish diet until the potato famine (by staple, I mean you could practically raise a family primarily on potatoes and some poor families basically did just that). I do understand why french fries and potato chips are considered "junk food" but I don't think that changes the fact that potatoes are a vegetable.

If you get a login wall from the above link, try going through Google and clicking the first result: http://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1CHMG_enUS291US301&so...

"We have to make the healthy choice the easy choice," Dr. Foltz said.

That's the ticket. Implementation over theoretical qualities.

I eat a salad pretty much every time I'm in a restaurant with a salad bar, but rarely otherwise.

Does anyone have a non-paywall link?

Changing the 'Referer' HTTP header to http://news.google.com/ or similar punches through many of these registration walls, like NYT, WaPo, FT, etc.

On Firefox, the RefControl extension works well.

Got one. http://www.ndtv.com/article/world/told-to-eat-its-vegetables...

You can always try my reader http://viewtext.org/article?url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.nytimes.com...

Anytime you come across a paywall link on NYT's site, just remove the "/glogin?URI=" and query string from the URL, and you can usually brute through it.

>Dr. Jennifer Foltz, a pediatrician who helped compile the report. She, like other public health officials dedicated to improving the American diet, concedes that perhaps simply telling people to eat more vegetables isn’t working.

Jesus, you didn't know this? Really?

I have been bombarded with "this is healthy", "this is not healthy", "you should eat so much of this, so much of that, only a little bit of this" ever since I was four, possibly earlier. Same goes for all the calls to exercise, the cute campaigns to "exercise 30 minutes a day", "take the stairs", etc, etc, et fucking cetera.

So why, after all this time have they still not realized that the reason I (and mostly everybody else) don't exercise isn't that we don't know we should, it is that exercising sucks, getting sweaty takes time and then you have to clean up again, getting back and forth to the gym, etc.

The same thing goes for eating healthy, although it is _slightly_ ofset by carrots, which are very tasty.

The presumption that people need to eat a lot of vegetables is perhaps flawed:

http://www.second-opinions.co.uk/why-eat-5-portions-1.html

Population studies haven't really shown a clear benefit from eating a lot of vegetables.

The benefit is that you don't become overweight and obese. I lived in Korea for a year and those people know how to eat vegetables. They are filling and low calorie which makes it less likely for the sedentary person to put on weight.

It's not a direct link though. I can stuff my face with nothing but donuts for weeks on end and never put on an ounce of weight. Which is probably as irritating as someone who can't lose weight.

It is a direct link because I am talking about calories. There is a myth that there are people who can eat whatever they want and not gain weight. Everyone has a base amount of calories to work from and if you go over that amount you gain weight.

As I just said, I CANNOT gain weight. It is simply impossible. I am not alone. I have been 9 1/2 stone for the last 10 years.

There have been studies that found people who were skinny thought they were eating more calories than they really were and that obese people thought they were eating less. I don't want to get into your specific issues here but it would be impossible for the average sedentary person not to gain weight eating the Michael Phelps diet. Calories matter.

EDIT: I guess the people that believe calories don't matter and weight gain/weight loss is genetic want to down vote this to hell. Oh well!

OK, here is the study:

http://www.diet-blog.com/08/neat_how_everyday_movement_keeps...

"In a study, sedentary lean and overweight people were fitted with "magical" underwear which monitored every movement of the body. Subjects were fed 1000 calories above their weight maintenance levels. People who can activate their NEAT don't gain fat when overfed, while those who don't switch on their NEAT were gaining literally 10 times more fat..."

-- Which implies that people indeed exist who eat more than standard calories and never gain weight.

Yes, but that's not what the people who responding in this thread are saying. They are saying that they can NEVER gain weight no matter how much they eat. The study clearly says something different in relation to NEAT:

"About 30% of a person's daily expenditure comes from NEAT. (The other portions are from basal metabolism and thermic effect of eating). Those who are active have higher percentages of NEAT. This is the factor we have control over."

Bytes matter. If you put more bytes in a program it's going to do more than a program with fewer bytes. It's that simple.

I recall studies that show people with high metabolisms burn-off the calories with small motions/nervous habits but that's a bit different.

Anyway, if you try to argue against someone's personal experience, you should at least provide links to your claims rather than asserting the claims exist.

>it would be impossible for the average sedentary person not to gain weight eating the Michael Phelps diet.

Seems like it would be pretty impossible for the average sedentary person to eat the Michael Phelps diet in the first place.

Hey Atomical, I've seen a similar study before, but can't find it. Could you point me to it?

For other interesting studies on health: http://delicious.com/ramitsethi/health

I guess the people that believe calories don't matter and weight gain/weight loss is genetic want to down vote this to hell. Oh well!

Calories do matter, but it is not nearly as simple as you're trying to make it out to be.

Genes play a huge role. For most people, playing the game of watching what you eat and counting calories makes sense, but for others, it's not so clear cut. For example, my dad (a molecular biologist) is studying the effects that certain genes have on the weight of mice. The details escape me (and aren't relevant here), but the takeaway is that your genetic makeup will predispose you to weighing a certain amount, and some mice/people will be fat even if they eat very well, and others will be skinny even if they eat very poorly.

Hence, for some people (but not everyone), managing their weight requires more than just counting calories.

I don't know how you can say that. Some medical conditions (like cystic fibrosis) are well known for typically causing people to be unable to adequately gain weight. My son was put on prescription enzymes and gained 20 pounds in a year after getting diagnosed. This was quite a large weight increase since he only weighed 103 pounds at the start.

Different bodies do different things with the same resources.

Peace.

"Who ya gonna believe, me or your own eyes?" (Groucho)

I eat as much as I can, often twice as much an average person - it typical for me to have two helpings in a meal where most people have one.

I have never gone over 145 pounds and I am 6' tall. I cannot gain weight, period. And I'm not alone as other posters mention.

You know, I find most skinny people who say they can't gain weight grossly overestimate the amount that they eat. (myself included)

It is not a myth at all. I am like points, I've been the same weight for several years, and while my diet has changed a whole lot, my weight has not.

I can eat a stick of butter and I won't gain a pound (unless the butter weighs a pound..). My body simply won't store the extra energy, it uses what it needs and the rest goes out the end. It is a tad frustrating because I am a bit underweight as well.

Me too...but we are unusual in having such fast metabolisms, and are lucky to live in age of plenty.

Also, being skinny doesn't mean your arteries won't harden.

How old are you? Because if you are young, that makes sense. I used to not gain weight no matter what I eated until I hitted my thirties. Now I have to watch what I eat.

32. Still no signs I'll ever change weight... Maybe when I get to 50 :)

You win ;-)

Being overweight and obese is caused by eating too many calories. No really. If you don't believe me you can get the very long exhaustive scientific treatment of the subject over here: http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/www/hackdiet.html

I also recall this blog post from 2009: http://t-a-w.blogspot.com/2009/11/myth-of-5-day-people-never...

Sorry I got to "British socialized medicine destroying UK" and gave up on that one.

  I'm not afraid of zucchinis, but I just don't know how to cook them.

This is just sad. So many people are failing at something as basic and fundamental as eating.

Most vegetables are good if you just slice them up, steam them briefly, then sprinkle a little salt on them. If you don't feel like doing anything more ambitious this only takes a few minutes.

I just put them straight on the grill next to whatever I'm making. My wife does the more complex stuff when needed but that sometimes make me feel dumb. I can figure out most things on my own but cooking is something I just have no interest in learning.

You can eat a lot of veggies - zucchinis included - raw.

s/eating/cooking

No, I mean eating. Part of eating is knowing how and what to eat. As discussed in the article, they're not eating vegetables and are choosing to eat things like fries or potato chips instead. You don't even need to cook most vegetables to eat them. In fact, for many vegetables it's better (nutritionally) if you don't cook them.

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