I work on OpenFoodFacts, and the big issue is simply the amount of saturated fats and refined sugars there are in a lot of processed foods.
Like, sure, people have to be held personally responsible to some extent, but it should also be on the government to properly regulate how foods are advertised. I really appreciate the Nutriscore system that’s being pushed for in Europe despite the flaws it has, and here in Canada they’ve been making some changes in how certain products are shown on shelves such as requiring labeling if they’re high in sugar or fats and changing the previous confusing labels for energy drinks with a more easy-to-read Supplemental Food Facts label.
End of the day though, if something is still being labelled as being “healthy” when it really isn’t, that’s all it takes to fool the average consumer unfortunately. Stuff like Lucky Charms shouldn’t be advertised to kids as “part of a complete breakfast”, and it’s absurd that a lot of “healthier” alternatives to certain foods are being advertised that way despite only being barely any better than the original product, like turkey bacon or veggie straws.
Lobbyists have even polluted the ingredient label on the back. Now they can list a brand name as an ingredient, then list the ingredients of that. This lets them disguise the most prevalent ingredients if they’re also part of the brand.
Water, oil, sugar, xantham gum, Bob’s secret spice (enough sugar so that if the label were truthful, sugar would be the second ingredient instead of the third, cinnamon, nutmeg).
I never used the ingredient list to determine sugar content, since there also is a table on the back with g sugar / 100 g product. Is that not printed on the products package where you live?
Like when Coke argued in court that no reasonable person would think Vitamin Water is actually good for you.
Yes, but I don’t remember if that was before or after Fox News successfully argued that no reasonable person would mistake them for a News Outlet
You can have something packed with sugars that says “NO FAT!” on the label, and otherwise intelligent people will think it’s healthy.
My brother-in-law eats a huge bowl of cold cereal every morning with skim milk… I drink a coffee with heavy cream or half and half and don’t eat breakfast. He’s a bigger guy that can’t figure out how to lose weight and I’m not anymore.
To be fair I can’t figure out what to have for breakfast. I have issues with low blood sugar recently so I’ve been having… Lucky Charms :/. I just need to cut calories elsewhere I guess
Overnight oats with protein powder and fruit, Chia pudding with fruit and Greek yogurt, eggs and whole wheat toast with guacamole or avocado, protein pancakes with fruit and Greek yogurt,
Something high in protein and with low glycemic index carbs.
You want something that will digest over a long time and release sugars and nutrients into the blood steadily, not something high in refined highly available sugars which hit the bloodstream all at once and spike blood sugar, then when it’s all used up your blood sugar dips back down sharply.
Mmmm. Scrambled eggs, whole wheat toast with real fruit jam, and then fruit or Greek yogurt should be good too then right? Because that actually sounds delicious.
Yeah, that would be ideal. The jam isn’t the best choice because of the sugar content, but you gotta have something to enjoy lol.
I figure there’s jam which doesn’t have tons of sugar and is more fruit based
Oats and nuts maybe? They’re filling and will last you quite some time.
Removed by mod
Oats cooked in full fat non-homogenized milk, toss an egg or two in near the end and stir well. Top with ripe bananas or blueberries. Stir in some honey, but not the pasteurized shit and avoid spring variants.
Edit: this (and variants) was my breakfast for a year at the age of 35 and I went from 90kg to 75. No lunch, only dinner around 6PM, only coffee in between. Admittedly I also biked 20-40km a day and did some dumbbell and calisthenics exercises.
It’s hard to find “fit” people anymore. Walking around some grocery stores is mind blowing. I honestly feel bad for people. The “food” we have is shit and life is getting busier and busier.
Something I haven’t seen other commenters bring up that can have a huge impact, is the overall lifestyles people are living.
The unhealthiest years of my life were when I was working 2 jobs and struggling to keep a roof over mine and my 3 kids heads. Stress and depression were huge problems and money was tight, so sometimes the little bit of dopamine or serotonin from eating a “treat” were the highlights of the day. Add to that, the guilt of not being around to cook regular meals for my kids lead to 1) making large amounts of food on my one day off that could be eaten as leftovers throughout the week or 2) easy convenience foods (frozen pizzas, boxed Mac and cheese, etc) that the kids could make when I wasn’t around.
Fast forward many years - my kids are adults taking care of themselves and I’m down to 1 good job that offers financial stability. My diet and health have completely changed. I actually have the time and energy to cook and plan better.
I’m not saying this to shift blame or responsibility, but to bring a different experience. When I hear (hopefully well meaning) people suggest “just cook healthier meals” it strikes me about the same as “stop eating avocado toast and you could afford a house.”
Lack of free time to cook healthy food with a busier and more expensive life with salary raises that don’t keep up with inflation or layoffs for many people definitely doesn’t help. Healthy food ends up costing twice as much, if not more than unhealthy food. It’s a multi-faceted problem and should be treated as such.
I don’t think healthy food is necessarily more expensive, at least not if you know what you’re doing. My personal experience is actually the opposite.
The problem, as you mentioned is the time, and the emotional and physical labor of figuring out something the whole family will want to eat and cooking it. Those things are all expenditures in their own ways, but not financial.
Tell me a healthy meal I can make for the same 5 bucks that I can feed 4 people with by buying a red baron pizza.
You’re not feeding 4 people on a red baron pizza and no one is getting fat from sharing one with 4 people. Fast food is expensive, and so is pre packaged meals. To many people get home from work and just eat shit instead of learning to cook.
Steamed veggies are cheap, rice is cheap, beans are cheap, grab some seasoning and a pack of chicken breasts and you can eat good for a few days for less than a single trip to McDonald’s for 2 people now.
You’re not feeding 4 people on a red baron pizza
I guess the dinner I served saturday night was just a drug induced hallucination then, afterall… You seem to clearly know what I do and have done better than I do.
Cool, then everyone in your family must not be what they’re talking about in this thread since you probably don’t eat 5000 calories a day.
Love how everyone is like “beans and rice!” and totally ignoring the energy and time it takes to make such things. And not everyone is a fan of beans and rice. At the end of the day being able to have a slice of pizza may be the only bright spot when you’re living paycheck to paycheck.
and some combination of beans and rice is the only example they can come up with.
Who wants to eat beans and rice every single day for the rest of their lives?
Depends where you live in the U.S.
IME, it seems the coastal states have highest density of fit people.
I imagine it would be pretty easy to take the list of what people buy/eat and their health issues and see clearly what foods are causing what health problems.
I bet the average cashier would even be able to point out the worst products.
But never, ever, will that happen. Grocery store is full of dead animals and animal proteins and cancer look to go hand in hand. The other big one is sugar. People are hooked on it like cocaine.
Isn’t that mainly red meats that appear to have a relation to cancer? Correct me if I’m wrong but I believe poultry is fine and that seafood has even been shown to possibly prevent certain cancers.
red meat, any charred meat, chicken is reported back and forth often depending on things like who owns the media outlet or who funded the report. Fish is all over, its too broad a net to cast. Different types of fish from different parts of the world, Trillions of them are eaten every year.
With capitalism and the government entangled in the industry. I know they use propaganda to enhance their markets. My personal outlook on it is that the stance that cancer and animal consumption has solid findings. Our government (US) actively promotes the industry and subsidizes it with billions of $$$. Then on the cdc page they list red meat as a cancer causing carcinogen. In America, profits are #1. Cancer, heart disease, and diabetes are big money makers for pharmaceutical companies. JBS is a huge company. Owners are convicted criminals for bribing politicians. They raise animals in africa and california and then ship them to china. None of this has any concern about our health. For me, I have seen and read enough to make the decision to stay away from it. Anything to keep me out of the US healthcare system.
any charred meat
You’ll also find plenty of acrylamide in fried potatoes but somehow people don’t end up calling vegan diets cancerous.
Here we go again, giving no accountability. Yes, healthy food is more expensive, but that doesn’t mean fat people didn’t eat themselves fat.
The Internet will bend over backwards to ignore the algebra of calories. Base metabolic rates are basically identical between all humans. The lie of a “fast metabolism” is not why some people are skinny.
People are fat because they consume more calories than they burn. Blaming someone else doesn’t fix it.
“Oh gosh, I don’t drink soda and rarely eat treats, why am I still fat?” Because you eat too much for your daily expenditure.
You’re speaking from your very tiny corner of the world. I understand that there are people who fall under whatever you said, but a big chunk just don’t have the time to give a single fuck about how healthy their food is, or they can’t afford it money and time wise. Some people do multiple jobs and have kids. I get what you mean, though.
Yes, but not thinking about your food choices is the problem. If I get fast food, I don’t get the double quarter pounder, large fries, and a drink. I get a single cheeseburger and an iced coffee with only cream. People act like being hungry is torture, but if you meet your caloric needs, that should be enough.
Personally, I want to get drunk every day and all the time. My brain screams at me to go buy booze. I chose not to drink today.
The healthy food options are also usually twice the cost too.
ditch all the sugar drinks and drink plane old water, like out the toilet.
Rice and beans can be made in 1000 different ways. $1/lb uncooked.
Eating out is almost never a healthy option.
Healthy and expensive don’t correlate in my outlook. I spend less eating better. Factor in not eating out and my pockets are fat, but not my ass.
Eating out is almost never a healthy option.
This is a big deal people often don’t realize. Even something as simple as an alfredo pasta will have way too much butter in it when you order it at a restaurant. (Why do you think it tastes so good?) An entire stick of butter for a single serving is quite common.
Not only is cooking for yourself significantly cheaper than ordering food, you are also significantly more aware of the calories you are putting into the food.
Even something as simple as an alfredo pasta will have way too much butter in it when you order it at a restaurant.
Hell no. It will have too little and probably doesn’t contain proper parmesan, either. Also it’s not actually simple, it’s minimalist, but hard to actually get right – Italian cuisine in a nutshell. I almost wanted to say “and be extended by starch slurry” but then realised that pasta water vs. starch isn’t really something one should complain about, if anything that’s a fault of sub-par noodles… anyway:
The butter unhealthy / saturated fat unhealthy thing is due to plant fat manufacturers trying to sell hardened fats as healthy giving us the wonders of trans fats, flanked by the sugar industry’s “fat makes fat”. While I’m at it the cholesterol stuff is the equivalent of “dead firefighters found at conflagration site, thus, abolish the fire department”. Not to mention that dietary cholesterol has no correlation to blood cholesterol. And how could I forget the tobacco industry which was very successful in blaming the cardiac arrest epidemic on anything but smoking by concern trolling the scientific process.
There’s processed foods which are perfectly fine but as an experiment try avoiding anything that has been invented in the last 100 years or so for a while and observe the difference. There’s certainly restaurants around which cook like that but it’s not going to be the ones people with two jobs eat at.
Oh and I don’t think the science is completely in yet but it seems that the “gluten intolerance” epidemic is due to increased use of glyphosate directly before harvest to make wheat grow faster: It’s not the gluten but some people’s stomach just don’t take the residue as well as others. So YMMV on being able to get proper ingredients for that experiment.
But I’m sure the free market will fix everything.
Too many people think eating healthy means broccoli needs to be 100% of your calories.
I prefer plain water myself. Not your bougie plane water.
The planes collect it as they fly through clouds. Imagine drinking water that’s touched the ground…
Ground is almost 100% dirt. Drinking groundwater is just asking for trouble.
“If you want to be healthy, you must suffer and just eat beans and drink toilet water”
What a great argument for healthy living.
Go into the produce isle for once, veggies are cheap…fish and chicken is cheap. A single trip to McDonald’s for 2 is like $25 or more now. You can get like 6 or 7 whole chicken breasts for that price and have money for potatoes and fresh veggies.
Until you go on vacation to a “poor” country where it suddenly costs virtually nothing.
Are Avocados a conspiracy?
If you need to eat half as much it kind of works out though.
This is so fucking false its hilarious.
It’s cooking – cooking is cheaper. Cooking anything is cheaper than buying boxes.
Cooking costs time and energy, which not everyone can afford.
Just a few things come to mind :
- Lobbyists stopping sugar taxes.
- Big Pharma and health industry making tons of money.
- European Union being very tolerant about pesticides.
- Supermarkets putting candy close the counters where parents with kids are in queue.
- Lots of people spending most of their time on mobile phones only exercising the muscles of their eyes.
I am happy that an organisation like Foodwatch exists : https://www.foodwatch.org/en/foodwatch-international
- US restaurant portions are humongous. I thought it was exaggerated until I passed through, God damn that’s a lot of food.
My wife and I share an entrée and an appetizer here in the US because there’s no way anyone is meant to eat our portion sizes. We tip well to not look cheap, but Jesus Christ I don’t need a full rack of ribs and 5 lbs of french fries.
We tip well not to look cheap. LoL
I know, I know. The most American sentence of all time.
- Normalized obesity
- Healthy at every weight culture
- Unacceptable to discuss personal accountability
I keep getting into it with people I mostly agree with. Yes, it’s fucked up that we add HFCS to everything and that corporations have weaponized addiction, but we can fight back.
Healthy at every weight culture
This one irritates TF out of me.
Too many people who are outright unhealthy being told they’re ok.
Overweight kids lead to sick adults.
Good thing in Ontario we have ol’ Dougie fixing out healthcare system by privatizing the fuck out of it /s
Surely Pierre Pollieve will save us all when he’s elected! /s
FML we are so lost.
Yeah, none of this is based in reality dude. Look at our movie stars, any magazine, and people on TV. This shit isn’t normalized.
Yep, way to many people over eat, and it has nothing to do with what’s in the food, people are just super seditaty these days and eat constantly.
Clicking the downvote button doesn’t magically make me wrong. There is a reason that you can eat straight Twinkies for a month and watch the calories and still lose weight. You’re not smarter than physics.
Bitching about down votes doesn’t magically make you right. You’re being downvoted because what you said is idiotic.
It has a lot to do with what’s in the food. Sure, if you eat nothing but 1500 calories of Twinkies every day, when you were eating 3000 balanced calories, you’ll lose weight.
That is about 12 Twinkies. Not even an entire box of Twinkies. And that’s all you get to eat in a day.
It would be much easier to reduce calories if half of them were from vegetables and the other half from meat. Feeling hungry has a lot to do with why diets fail. You can’t just apply physics to the human body and expect emotional and hormonal changes not to have an impact on the choices that human makes.
would be much easier to reduce calories if half of them were from vegetables and the other half from meat.
you’re saying like eating twinkies is the only option. Veggies and meat are in every market. Are people generally this stupid that they think they have to only eat junk food?
I think SupraMario has a good point - people (over)eat and they sit all day, every day. Personally, I eat a shit ton - but I also burn a shit ton, about 900 calories extra daily through exercise. If i didn’t exercise I would probably overeat, too. We need to get people off their asses.
73% of all of the food sold in the US is considered ultra processed, so no it’s not just Twinkies, but at this point unless you’re only buying neat and vegetables, you’re buying something that is lower in nutrients and bound to make you feel more hungry than you would if you ate something nearly identical that you made yourself.
Getting up and moving is great, I’m not discounting exercise. You do not lose weight by exercising. You lose weight through diet control.
You do not lose weight by exercising. You lose weight through diet control.
you lose weight by CICO. You either restrict calories in, or increase calories out, it does not matter.
73% of all of the food sold in the US is considered ultra processed, so no it’s not just Twinkies, but at this point unless you’re only buying neat and vegetables, you’re buying something that is lower in nutrients and bound to make you feel more hungry than you would if you ate something nearly identical that you made yourself.
agreed. But it’s not too difficult - buy some zuchinni, potatoes, tomatoes, onion, garlic, eggplant - dice it up, put in a pan, salt, pepper, nutmeg, together with whole, skin on chicken, roast for 45 min and you have a delicious nutricious meal. It’s literally 15 minutes of prep and it feeds a whole family at once. Everyone can do it. There’s no need to buy any processed food.
See my first comment, applying physics to the human body and ignoring the hormonal and psychological impacts is going to lead to failure. It is much more like treating addiction than anything else.
Naa I’m being down voted because people want the easy way out, all the time. You’re the same type that runs with the Healthy at any size. The same groups that promote that sudo science bullshit. No where did I say it was healthy to eat Twinkies and lose weight, but acting like people are fat because of the food that’s offered is a fucking cop out.
Actual studies have been done on this. You’re not only wrong but you’re scientifically wrong.
Eating ultra processed foods are not only unhealthy, they also cause you to eat more than you would if you were eating exactly the same thing with real food.
An argument you’ll note that is not only consistent with my guest comment, but actually argues for people doing more work than they’re likely doing to lose weight.
Literally every point you made was incorrect.
Subjects were instructed to consume as much or as little as desired.
The study also lasted 2 weeks and had less than 40 people in it. This is a bullshit study, we know people are going to eat ultra processed foods because it tastes good. Hell I’m guilty of it even, I will eat an entire pizza on my own if I don’t stop myself. This study should say, people lack will power to not eat free fast food… it’s a complete nothing burger of a study.
Ah yes, the age old, “I know better than an actual scientist because their science disagrees with my feelings”
I run approx 5k a day because I overeat lol. Only way I keep from being 300 pounds.
I also eat around 4-5k calories a day, but I own a farm and probably walk damn near 5-10 miles a day. Just checking the mail requires a 1 mile walk.
I envy you.
Been a lot of hard work getting here but yeah it’s been worth it. Just be willing to live further out from a city is the main drawback but I’m older now and no longer give a shit about socializing with most people lol, this was one of the reasons the wife and I moved further out. My loudest neighbors are frogs and bugs and wildlife at night. And sometimes our rescue cows and pigs but that’s a given.
You give me hope for my future if I don’t burn out before then. I long for the small town life again as I get older.
Yeaaaah you’re probably getting into it cause your points don’t really have much merit and that can be frustrating. Like a simple look at when the obesity epidemic took off should have saved me from having to write this comment.
I’ve been about 160 lbs my entire adult life, last year I was getting close to 200 lbs and when my clothes stopped fitting I realized I needed to acknowledge my dietary choices. I’m not 25 or even 35 anymore so I had to figure things out and did some research on calorie management. I still eat pizza, burgers, drink beer, drink soda and enjoy candy. I’m just mindful of my calorie budget +/- 200.
This is my weight in kilos after peaking around 90 kgs last year I stopped recording my weight for a few months. Then I stuck to my “diet” and it wasn’t crazy hard to manage. I’m not an athlete, in fact, I live a pretty sedentary life. These results are from saying no to snacks, avoiding potato chips, and grabbing two pieces of pizza and freezing the rest instead of eating the entire pie.
That’s great and I applaud you, seriously. But we mercilessly bullied fat people in the 80s, 90s, 00s and yet obesity skyrocketed. And you should probably consider what health (note not healthy) at every weight (HAES) actually is before dismissing it. Like we should encourage people to be healthy even if they’re overweight. This is like addiction, we’re not going to moral police our way out of this health issue.
Yep we all eat too much. I started counting calories and found out that I was eating twice as much as I should have. It’s not obvious and every place serves big portions.
It’s not just that we eat “too much” but also that we’re eating too much non-nutritive foods. The United States has entirely too many so-called “food deserts” where people are unable to purchase healthy foods
I’m counting calories too, it’s not even the amount but it’s that some foods are total calorie bombs. You can pretty easily ingest a day’s worth of calories in a single meal at the restaurant without really feeling like you overate, but if I pay attention and select my foods properly I can feel like I ate plenty and be under 1500cal a day.
One of the subs I miss from Reddit was volume eating- it had tons of tips for low calorie high volume meals so you don’t feel restricted
I find the premade mixes from Birdseye (sold basically everywhere that has frozen food) to be a pretty good lazy way to get a big meal. Usually a decent mix of meat, veggies, and grain, but the whole bag (3 servings) is only like 600-900 kcal. Sometimes it feels like an obscene amount of food for the calorie count.
Not bad for what’s basically a microwave dinner.
Personally I am a broccoli freak and as fresh produce it is much cheaper than frozen at least where I’m at.
Plus daikon radish is also available here cheap and that surprised me.
A lot of roast veggies and soups make for a budget friendly filling low cal meal.
Try recipes of levante cuisine. It’s healthy, low of calories & fat and eco-friendly.
https://amazingfoodanddrink.com/classic-dishes-levantine-cuisine/
I’ve been counting calories for the last few months, and that was my big realization as well. I could have easily put down a single meal at a restaurant which is my entire (or more) daily intake now.
More than anything it’s just awareness.
I was eating twice as much as I should have.
how do you define what a “should have” amount is?
Bought a kitchen scale, bathroom scale and used the “lose it!” app to count calories. Lost weight.
I just used an online calculator. It said something like 1500 kcal a day for my activity level to maintain weight.
I don’t really count calories, but I do look to get a general idea of what a meal or a snack is. Sometimes I’m way over, sometimes I’m way under, it’s all about balance and being in the ballpark.
They likely used a metabolic calculator online, but if you track your Total Daily Energy Expenditure you can get a more accurate, personal estimate.
Capitalism has brought prosperity and wealth to rational actors across the entire globe!
It’s really frustrating, in my country not only are we the most obese in the region, we’re also the most diabetic. A huge double whammy that’s burdening the healthcare system
Let me guess, UK?
Nope, Malaysia
Thank you for the recommendation! I actually make some of these without realizing- one of my go tos is sheet pan shawarma bowls.
But we can’t seem to feed all children 3 meals a day in the US.
While I think we should be able to, particularly for growing children, I’m not so sure that 3 meals a day is a healthy diet.
Or at least it’s hard to find small enough meals to be reasonable to eat three of in a day, short of making it yourself.
Breakfast, lunch and dinner. Is that too much?
For me? Yes. At least I gain too much weight. I generally do one or two and still get told I’m overweight by my doctor, despite one of those “meals” being like a salad or a couple of bananas, despite also exercising. Always a bit hungry but still told to lose weight.
Too much nutrition!
It’s not too much nutrition, it’s too much food with little nutritious value
