The Obamas vs. a Junk Food Society
The First Lady is out plugging a new book “American Grown” to promote growing and eating vegetables, a personal bookend to her husband’s campaign to get voters on a healthier political diet.
As Mitt Romney comes under fire for dissing Planned Parenthood, Michelle Obama is on a campaign that also strikes close to home and, below the surface, has its own aspects of division by social, ethnic and economic class.
Obesity researchers long ago found that, beyond the question of cost, poor people tend to subsist on starchy diets—-beans and rice, pasta, potatoes—-for psychic reasons as well, the immediate rush of satisfaction that comes with them.
In recent years, fast food and sugared drinks have augmented those traditional ethnic sources, creating an overweight problem among the least privileged Americans.
As today’s Downtown Abbey crowd dines fastidiously on expensive meat, fish and baby vegetables, secure in its own sense of importance, millions are still filling their stomachs with nutritionally inferior stuff.
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Not only potatoes, beans and rice, but have you ever walked into the corner diner and ordered their special of the day for $3.99.
Out comes a platter of food enough to feed three people and have a doggie bag to go.
Walk into the snobs uppity restaurant that charges $30.00 and you can see 80% of the plate with a piece of meat large enough for 3 bites with a few pieces of vegetable sprinkled on top.
I eat a lot of crap. I’m trying to eat better now that I am getting older, but the more information I get about veggies and their importance in our diets I just feel more and more like a slob. The estimates of how much we can save ourselves in healthcare costs if we just change our diets runs in the the tens and hundreds of billions. Makes me wonder what it is about our nature that we can look at solid evidence for what is better for us and take the other path. Full disclosure, I also smoke. One of these days I’ll wise up.