Thursday, October 25, 2007

Rising food prices to stop obesity epidemic

link
I saw this article quoted two places, exactly the same wording both times, so the above link is the one I went with. On to the commentary.
Food prices have been going up for years, it's a natural progression of rising costs (higher wages, higher fuel prices, etc). Hell, I'm not that old (born in 1953) and I can remember when gas was 45 cents a gallon, a loaf of bread was a quarter, and a pound of hamburger was 59 cents, and those are all prices back when I was 16 years old. Rising food prices didn't keep me from getting fat (as I got older and was on my own), nor did rising food prices make me get thinner (and that includes the years I was on welfare/SSI and got food stamps and had a child I was raising on my own). Rising food costs aren't going to make anyone thinner, unless it's because they're starving, and I'm sure that's just so healthy. All rising food costs do is hurt the people who don't have enough money for food right now, and that number of people isn't getting any smaller.
When are these idiots going to understand that fat people, on the whole, don't eat any more than thin people? When are they finally going to see that some people are meant to be fat, some are meant to be thin, and some are meant to be somewhere in-between? And that there isn't a whole hell of a lot that can be done to change any of it in any drastic way? You can't make a thin person fat, you can't make a fat person thin, not permanently. If you could, there sure as hell wouldn't be any fat people. Because I'll tell you what, in this fat-phobic society we live in, it's a hell of a lot easier to be thin than it is to be fat, so if there was a magic bullet, a lot of us would jump on it in a heartbeat, just to be able to walk down the street without having it thrown in our faces how unacceptable we are by other people, ads, stores, the media, etc etc etc.
But thin people have their own set of problems, and I'm not making light of that. Because even if you're thin, you still have to meet this ideal of young, toned, taut, tanned, blond beauty. No one, no matter their size, is without some kind of flaw, somewhere, and all these companies are so willing to make beau coup bucks off selling products to improve those "flaws", all the while rubbing our noses in the fact that we aren't perfect and they have just the cure for those imperfections. But every time you fix one supposed imperfection, they will find another, and another, and another, ad nauseum, for you to fix so they can continue to keep you fixated on their useless products. But that's a whole nother rant, for another time.

3 comments:

  1. So, this is absurdly wrong-headed -- hello, while most people aren't fat from overeating, some people are fat from being poor and only being able to get nutritionless prepackaged HFCS-laden crap (and those who aren't fat from it are still ill-nourished by it). Higher food prices will just increase the number of poor starving people. But check it: it's a bunch of libertarians and gold-hoarders, so... yeah. They've always been out of touch with the fact that some people don't have money. Actually, just put the period after "touch."

    Just saying you don't have to totally despair yet.

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  2. I highly doubt they will raise food prices on products like macaroni and cheese, ramen noodles and the assortment of other high-calorie, low-nutrition processed foods. The foods whose prices will rise most (and we've already seen this to a great degree) are organic products, vegetables and healthier foods.

    There is a reason obesity is greatest among those of lower incomes and it isn't because they eat more than the next person. It's because the unhealthiest foods are often the cheapest. Go to any low-price grocery store like Save-a-Lot or Audi, and you will see tons of processed and preserved foods, and very little fresh produce or healthy grains.

    If health is truly our paramount concern, we'd be better off making healthier foods and produce cheaper and more readily available.

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  3. FJ - absolutely, been there done that. And our grocery bill is going up since I'm adding fresh/frozen veggies/fruits and cutting down on the rice/pasta/grains. Health isn't cheap, that's for sure.
    Rachel - yeah, I used to shop at Aldi's when I was poor because it stretched the food stamps a LOT farther (and we ate lot of pasta/rice prepared foods because they were cheaper).

    ReplyDelete

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