A few articles...
Apr. 20th, 2004 01:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
About hunger in schools
About McDonalds trying to stave off obesity lawsuits
About "food insecurity"
About the "epidemic of obesity"
There is something very wrong here. Yes, I realize that many poor people are overweight because they subsist on unhealthy foods, but these people aren't the ones spending ridiculous amounts of money on slimfast or weight watchers or fancy gyms. It doesn't make any sense to me that we could have enough in this country for everyone to eat at least somewhat well, and yet have children going hungry. We're not living in the third world! We aren't suffering from a national famine either. At the risk of appearing somewhat more to the left than I generally present myself, I think it's fair to say that people in a civilized world have a basic right to eat.
And while I complain about this, there's people in the rest of the world who are actually starving. Things don't get better.
About McDonalds trying to stave off obesity lawsuits
About "food insecurity"
About the "epidemic of obesity"
There is something very wrong here. Yes, I realize that many poor people are overweight because they subsist on unhealthy foods, but these people aren't the ones spending ridiculous amounts of money on slimfast or weight watchers or fancy gyms. It doesn't make any sense to me that we could have enough in this country for everyone to eat at least somewhat well, and yet have children going hungry. We're not living in the third world! We aren't suffering from a national famine either. At the risk of appearing somewhat more to the left than I generally present myself, I think it's fair to say that people in a civilized world have a basic right to eat.
And while I complain about this, there's people in the rest of the world who are actually starving. Things don't get better.
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no subject
Date: 2004-04-20 03:59 am (UTC)Although I must say that I feel a distinct difference between my home country, Iceland, and the feel I am getting from the US on this. I think people here are getting fatter, but we do not consume much fast food. But we have changed our eating habits. We no longer eat the pure animal produce we used to eat in centuries past, but have now started eating carbohydrates a lot. IN particular from wheat and candies, and I think that this is what is doing us this disfavour, and it might very well be the same in the US, that the diet of people have changed from what their digestive systems are evolved to handle and that, combined with low mortality rates and lack of exercise is producing more unhealthy people that would in ages past not have survived. I think that the general lack of health is in many ways to be blames on this, we have deplugged natural selection.
This is of course something that is both good and bad, it would be better in a way, if we had simply changed natural selection, so that competent people, to live in this modern world would be on top, but with the way that it is run in the US, when you need all too much money to get properly educated, a lot of people are going to waste in the system, people that could bring great things to the world, but because they were born poor, they are not given a chance. I know f.ex. here, where it costs practically nothing to go to university of brilliant people that were born to poor families, but are now studying at the university alongside me. Even immigrants from the former Soviet Union are studying biology with me.