I'm italian and I visited united states a couple of months ago. In my opinion the biggest problem is that you don't have decent food at affordable prices. Healthy food has nonsensical high prices and if you want something at a human price you don't have much choice except fast food. What a shame.
That's partly because much of the government subsides go towards subsidizing corn, ending up in high fructose corn syrup and all the junk food most people consume. It's quite sad, that everyone is so okay with this.
Personally, I try to eat as healthy as possible and use my nutrient finder (https://kale.world/c) to find high nutrient, low calorie foods, which end up being mostly beans, vegetables and fruits.
Wow - the rest of the thread aside, that's a fantastic nutrition tool.
edit: I just fed it one of the tasks I've found most frustrating - how to optimize protein:carbs ratio without resorting to meat. Most of the diet advice I've seen on that question is unhelpful, since it emphasizes for "enough protein" and not ratio. But this turned up exactly what I was after.
Agreed, the subsidized corn is also used as cheap feed for low quality meat. On the flip side fruits and vegetables receive the lowest subsidies. Plus the lower cost of unhealthy foods decreases demand for relatively more expensive healthy foods, lowering demand which drives prices up even higher. Tough to keep perishable foods when people don’t buy them as quickly. It’s a self reinforcing cycle to the bottom.
I'm curious about this. I lived in a predominantly Latino (mostly Puerto Rican) neighborhood of Brooklyn for a while a couple of years back. The supermarkets were full of fresh, cheap food, yet the customers (who were consistently overweight and often obese, including the kids) were piling their shopping carts up with terrible stuff -- sugary cereals (Froot Loops etc.), sugary drinks (sodas, fruit juices, Caprisun, iced tea), white bread, snacks (cookies, doughnuts, potato chips), tons of frozen microwave meals, etc. I never saw a shopping cart filled with anything healthy and unprocessed. And I realized that I was actually being very picky walking through this place. I had to ignore 90% of the stuff they stock their shelves with because it's unhealthy.
Places like Whole Foods have the same problem, of course -- it's also full of sugary drinks and cookies, except they're labeled "organic" and made with "natural sugar cane" or agave, or they're things low/no fat yogurt (containing more sugar than the full fat ones). You can get fat on Whole Foods groceries if you're not super picky.
Definitely seems odd on its face, but if you dig into it, you'll see that it's SO much more complex than simple access. Other factors include, but are certainly not limited to:
Time to prepare: fresh foods generally take a lot longer, and a lot more effort to prepare than processed foods. When you've got each available parent working two jobs then this is a huge barrier.
Knowledge of preparation: especially in immigrant populations, not everybody has access to the ingredients they're used to.
Knowledge of nutrition: it's not like life comes with an instruction manual, and if you got little to no nutrition education, you probably don't realize the impact of those empty calories.
Fussy Kids: people who appeasing fussy kids (yeah yeah yeah... the hardos without kids will say you should just force them to eat it. Life isn't so straightforward.)
Waste: this is a huge factor. If you've got a tiny amount of cash and you need to spend it on things that will ensure you wont starve, something that will potentially go bad in a few days is a risky proposition, so you tend to stock up on heavily processed shelf stable items.
Price: Cheap is in the eye of the beholder. You can get a whole bag of chips for the same price as 2 apples. When you have a REALLY borderline income, your "cheap" is a lot different than someone else's.
There's plenty of other factors. Check out the research on it for more info. Really interesting stuff to dig into.
> Fussy Kids: people who appeasing fussy kids (yeah yeah yeah... the hardos without kids will say you should just force them to eat it. Life isn't so straightforward.)
My friends with children basically fall into two camps: one camp that agrees with you and blames their kids, and the other camp that just feeds their kids healthy food because, like your pet dog or cat, can't drive to the grocery store when it refuses to eat its croquetas.
Spending time with the families of my friends, the real issue seems to be with the adults either giving in to their children because they don't want to bother, feeding their children boxed food because they don't have the energy, or feeding their children bad food because they themselves don't eat much healthy food.
It hurts to watch you child starve because they are being picky. I had a teacher tell me she didn't want to eat peas one night, so her father sent her to bed hungry. She woke up a few hours later, went downstairs to her cold plate of peas still on the table, and ate the whole thing.
I had a classmate in high school who ONLY ate pancakes and fries. He was from a wealthy family and his mother had various supplements she would put in the pancakes to keep him healthy. We went on a week long canoe trip where you obviously can't eat pancakes and fries 24/7. 3 days in, this guy is starving, and for the first time in his life had pasta, trailmix, and eggs.
Children don't have fully developed faculties for reasoning, you can't take a reasonable approach to solving pickiness. Things seem to taste better the hungrier you get, so I think the approach to pickiness is to starve them out.
My dad made me sit at the table until I finished my milk and peas. After waiting two hours to spite him, I then had to drink warm milk and eat cold peas anyways. I learned pretty quickly that the manipulation didn't work on him.
I have no doubt that a lot of parents have that "my little angel" syndrome that keeps them from disciplining their children, but notice how that doesn't free them from the responsibility nor allow them to blame their kids.
I can appreciate that I was really fortunate to have parents that put in that sort of effort. My mom would also cut up vegetables like turnips for us after school that we would scarf down. They set me up for a healthy lifestyle as an adult that didn't take much effort on my part.
I know a lot of people didn't have those kinds of advantages, so they especially don't come naturally for them once faced with raising children and having to make those decisions themselves.
I wonder if it is a good approach to force children to finish their plates?
Seems like not. There are some studies [0][1][2] that show parental control over food intake may result in children's (mostly girls') obesity since it teaches children to ignore their satiety/hunger mechanism and thus overeat.
It may lead to the situation that once grown up, they could keep this habit of leaving the plate empty no matter how full they feel.
It's really super easy to judge people from the outside, especially with parenting. None of these decisions are made in a vacuum, and especially in low-income immigrant populations, there are many factors at play. When you've got a double digit food budget in which you can't waste a penny, no spouse around to help, and 3 kids who all need help with their homework, then fighting a nightly battle over eating food that takes longer to prepare and you could barely afford to begin with is probably a lot less important.
Maybe the reason is that in a large part of the US, there isn't a strong home cooking culture. You can really tell the difference if you walk into a Daiso store (japanese dollar store). The variety of cooking-related gadgets and trinkets is mind boggling. In japan, they also do home economics (cooking) in school and culturally, ability to cook is often portrayed in media as one of the "checklist" qualities when looking at a romantic partner.
No instructions on the label of a pak choi, and no industry gain from suggesting recipes using it, since it would just be rice, cheap meats and/or other vegetables. Blue Apron and similar services might be superfluous for some, as well as expensive, but they at least inspire people to use more basic ingredients. I don't know where one starts to educate people in making "real" food. New/old school subject?
Way back when, there used to be home economics but that was really oriented toward the women who were clearly going to get married and cook for their husbands/families. As gender roles changed, home economics pretty much went away.
Well it depends but most granola has more fibre than fruit loops which means it is healthier because it has a lower glycemic load. Even so—not a huge fan of sweetened granola.
I was in Bologna not too long ago and I was baffled by how fresh, high quality ingredients are available at affordable prices. I've seen similar quality ingredients in the Bay Area but they charge an arm and a leg for it. I don't know how the Italians do it or why we Americans have such a hard time doing something similar.
That's a good question. I think it has to do with a lot of food that are not calorie dense and more likely to satiate you simply taste better fresh and not so great past a certain age. On the flip side, foods that tends to taste good for a long time also tend to be calorie dense and some studies suggest aren't likely to trigger the signals for satiation.
Healthy food isn't expensive. You can buy chicken breast for $3 to $5 a pound. You can buy a head of lettuce for $2. Oatmeal is dirt cheap. Most vegetables are less than $3 a pound.
It may be true that these ingredients are available in certain markets for those prices, but that isn't accounting for a significant portion of the true overall cost of healthful eating.
Healthy food tends to spoil, and if you're not able to go shopping multiple times a week and have unpredictable availability for meal preparation, you're going to see a lot of spoilage. If 30% of your fresh produce ultimately spoils, your actual cost is 43% higher.
Healthy food requires a degree of planning and execution which takes time and focus. Finding healthy options which are appealing for 3x meals a day is a lot of work if you aren't happy with 1 or 2 standbys every day.
Healthy food is extremely hard to find on the go. If you don't have a kitchen at your disposal generally you are shit out of luck for finding something that is truly healthy. So for example, the quality of my diet is highly inversely correlated with the amount of travel I am doing in a given month.
Making unhealthy choices more expensive through taxes is extremely regressive for many of these reasons.
>Healthy food tends to spoil, and if you're not able to go shopping multiple times a week and have unpredictable availability for meal preparation, you're going to see a lot of spoilage. If 30% of your fresh produce ultimately spoils, your actual cost is 43% higher.
That's not at all true. I eat healthy, lots of vegetables, beans, lean meat,and so on, and I go shopping only once every two weeks. Apples keep for weeks, ditto cauliflower in the refrigerator, kale, cabbage, tomatoes, and so on. Meat you can freeze. Dry beans keep forever, and plus there is canned goods.Plus flavorings like salsa in a jar. I waste virtually nothing.
And it is cheaper than living off of processed foods, unless you are living off of pure starches like macaroni and cookies.
You do know have to know how to cook. Nothing fancy, just the basics like boiling beans, chopping vegetables, mixing together a bunch of things to get something that tastes reasonably good. And it does take time.
The issue, as you suggest, isn't so much that healthy food isn't available at a reasonable price but that turning it into meals may be challenging for someone working two jobs and lacking a proper kitchen. I don't think anyone can seriously dispute that. I just think it's mostly a mistake to lay the problem solely on prepared and fast food--which often isn't actually all that cheap.
As for travel, yeah. I started doing a lot more a number of years back and it took me a while to get more disciplined about it. I find it's more about regulating my intake than eating healthy per se. I try to avoid eating just because some food has been laid out for me. And I tend to keep things to one or two full meals a day.
you're suggesting that humanity has historically had easier access to healthy (fresh) food as they went shopping multiple times a week? I doubt this. What makes you think there was improved transportation options or significant amount of free time ?
And you call that cheap.... In my country most vegetables cost below 1$ per kilogram, which is 6 times cheaper. I think this has to do with EU policy of subsidies for farmers.
I haven't seen 0.80 EUR/kg in Germany for vegetables, so I wonder where you live. I've assumed vegetables are rather cheap in Germany due to very high competition. Lettuce is around $1.85 a piece, carrots are 1 EUR/kg or 1.50 EUR/kg when organic. Karfiol is 2 EUR/kg here.
The cheapest discounters (Aldi) are little bit cheaper.
Cheapest I've seen in a UK Lidl was a kilo of carrots discounted to 20p. I can't see how that could possibly pay for any of the supply chain but I'll take it.
Up here in Scotland I think we have a good illustration of how obesity can be a cultural problem, especially linked to alcohol. There's a reasonable amount of healthy food available but the traditional preference is all fat, starch and sugar.
I partially agree with you guys substaining that there were cheap healthy things, but for my experience they were exceptions. I could find very rarely vegetables at affordable price and at decent quality together. Or they were cheap, or they were decent. And a head of lettuce at 2$ is a high price. As exceptions examples, avocados were good and cheap.
No, that sounds about right. At the normal grocery store in my area, for example, cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage are $1.99/pound right now, celery is $1.49/pound. Asparagus is much more expensive, I think around $4.99/pound.
I cheat by shopping at the local Korean grocery store instead, prices are much cheaper but you have to sort through the produce to make sure quality is up to par.
If you're buying non-frozen leafy greens that have been sitting around before getting sold a great deal of nutritional content has degraded and you can definitely taste it.
Vegetables aren't subsidized the same way corn is.
In the Midwest chicken is often $2 a pound. Vegetables vary a lot, but $3 a pound is about right for perishable stuff other than greens (which are more expensive). Carrots and onions and the like are way less than $3 a pound.
A little OT: The price for food in Germany are to my knowledge one of the lowest in the world compared to the average income.
This trend of food getting cheaper all the time has led to a real „industrialised“ agricultural sector in Germany. This effect is good for the consumer because an egg costs like 15 euro cents, but it is horrible for the environment and especially for the animals. You just can‘t produce so much cheap food without tremendous sacrifices.
Food prices here in Germany indeed are very low. In my experience this has another bad side effect. Many people expect food to be that cheap and don't even consider buying 'good' food for higher prices (even if they can afford it).
E.g. I buy ecological eggs (not the 'supermarket-ecological' ones) and they cost about 45 cents a piece. That's at least 3 times the usual price.
I don't think access to raw calories is the problem here, given that we're talking about people being _overweight_. Broccoli provides considerably more satiety per calorie than Doritos, to say nothing of the difference in healthfulness.
I would add that many Americans seem totally unaware that junk food is bad for them and for their kids. Even in well-educated families, I would see kids drinking soda and eating snacks all the time. As I understand it, it is also a political issue, food corporation have huge marketing power and any attempts of regulation draw big protests (free will / nanny state arguments).
My ex has a degree in biology, yet can't understand that feeding the kids box mac-and-cheese and pasta multiple times per week (because it is easy to prepare) is what's making them fat, not just the portion sizes. So yeah, what you describe is real. I'd take it one step further though - not only do most Americans not really understand the content of their food, but most can't cook. They have really no understanding of how to plan means, shop for meals, or prepare meals quickly. So then you throw in long working hours and commute times and they feel compelled to reach for food that is fundamentally unhealthy.
I would suspect most kids learned to cook because a parent was home doing all the cooking, and when they got home from school they would be expected to assist with meal prep.
With both parents working, less time to prepare meals, we are raising a generation who on average has a lot less first-hand experience with how to cook, and certainly how to cook healthy balanced meals.
Here's what's weird for me... my mom came from a traditional farm family - so she really knew how to cook. She was also a home economics teacher for many years, so she taught middle schoolers how to cook. While I remember vaguely being in the kitchen with her as a kid, I really don't remember her ever teaching me anything in particular. It certainly wasn't an every-day thing for me to help with meal prep. But, today I'm a really good cook and have done the majority of meal prep for my family (3 kids) both in and out of being in a two-adult household. I guess what I'm saying is -- I agree with you, but I also think that too many adults cop out on "I don't know how to cook!!!!" when it is actually not that hard to figure it out. Anyone can make a salad, throw some veggies in a wok, make some rice and beans, etc. The healthiest meals are in many cases the easiest to make, but somehow people think it is even easier to grab that frozen lasagna out of the freezer.
I watched a good youtube video that compared the 7/11-level food available in japan vs america and was convinced that this is one of the biggest issues.
What's the healthiest thing you can get in a 7/11 in the States? An apple? One of those shitty packaged sandwiches that has a slice of ham with a mysterious wad of splooge? A hotdog that's been turning on the spit all day?
Then you realize this is how it is every step of the way. It's a cultural problem. With a lot of the world trailing right behind.
You can blame everything on personal choice, and that might make you feel good, but that doesn't help us solve systemic issues.
I live in Mexico now which has some of the worst obesity issues as well due to their soft drink consumption. They just had a president that was the ex-president of Coca Cola.
> It was during the Fox's leadership of Coca-Cola Mexico that Coke became Mexico's top-selling soft drink, increasing Coca-Cola's sales by almost 50%.
But Mexico still has healthy enough food that's readily available. Getting a bag of chips from 7/11 has to compete with a just-as-cheap taco stand right outside. I find it easy to eat pretty healthy here for that reason. I love some tacos and nopal salad.
Meanwhile in Austin you can't even find a taquero outside of East Riverside.
And, of course, the lack of walkability in the US is horrifying. I don't ever want to live somewhere where I can't walk to a fruit stand or cafe ever again. I think of any time I've felt dullness in my life and every time it was at a point in my life where I had to drive everywhere. Like playing an open-world game and only using fast travel, missing out on all the small interactions that turn out to be the spice of life.
For whatever reason, there seems to be a gap in the US between convenience store and full-fledged grocery store. There are various mostly non-chain markets in many cities but, for the most part, you either have pretty much junk food or you have to find a big grocery store. In London at least there are a lot more of the Sainsbury Local or other chains that don't have the selection of a bigger store but aren't just junk either.
It's the walkability again. If I'm getting in a car, I may as well go somewhere that will have everything I could possibly need.
Also, I do feel the store you mention, and similar ones, are de-emphasising veg in favour of higher margin packaged/processed items. Although, they are wildly optimised for each store placement so it is difficult to tell.
This isn't really a fair comparison: not a lot of people in the states buy food at 7/11, while it is much more common in Japan. With the volume that 7/11's do in the states, they can't really support bento boxes or whatever you'd find at the grocery store lunch counters (which, actually, are very comparable to Japan 7/11, but not as widespread).
I don't understand this. Rice, potatoes, vegetables are still cheap here. I guess if you're looking at restaurants, this is true. If you are with a group and have to go eat somewhere, they usually provide healthy options which are not too expensive compared to the unhealthy ones (though sometimes, that's just due to smaller portions).
Maybe you have a different experience, having just visited, instead of living here.
addendum: it also depends quite heavily on the area's cost of living, apparently. I just bought a sack of potatoes for $0.40/lb, whereas https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16448984 says potatoes in LA are $1.88/lb (nearly 5x as expensive).
I completely agree, but my thoughts are that it is biology in action -- people crave fats and sugars, and by themselves rice, beans, etc don't have much flavor. Or, the average American's palate has become so conditioned to sugar that they think those things don't have flavor. They have also been conditioned to think of meat as the go-to source for protein. Plus, frankly, there is a stigma of "rice and beans" being poor people food or even "ethnic" food in some circles, Ie: compare a meat / potato / bread heavy "traditional" American diet.
I found buying fruits and veggies in LA to be much cheaper than Seattle, unfortunately. Both are still cheaper than Switzerland (but then...what is cheap in Switzerland?).
yes. And beans. Beans are very cost effective, 1 to 2$ per pound or less. And they're very high in nutrients: Protein, Fiber, and countless micronutrients, super low in sodium and fat. They're easy to make too.
Decent by Italian standards is pretty decent. But if we're talking about fresh fruit and vegetables, go to any Asian market. Or Walmart. It's not that expensive.
There's few good reasons to be eating tripe if you live in a city or live in a 'food desert' (spare me) and have a car.
The real problem is the overabundance of crap choices crowding out the sensible ones.
Fresh food is top of the list. And three sub-sections are all 'fresh' something.
There's zero reason Walmart can't do the same. Except for the fact that Americans demand soda and 800 different types of cookies, so that's what they're supplied with.
Edit: this submission was bumped from first to the third page within minutes...for whatever reason. Comment to upvote ratio perhaps?
My local Walmart isn't my favorite store in the world to go to for fresh produce and meat. The selection and quality are generally inferior to a couple of local regular supermarkets. But I could absolutely shop for food there that isn't all highly processed.
The thing is that, as you suggest, the pre-packaged deli section is bigger than the unprocessed meat section. And then there's the soda aisle, the chip aisle, etc. Shelf space is hugely tilted toward "junk" and other highly processed food.
My regular supermarkets have lots of processed food too of course. (And nothing wrong with a lot of that in moderation.) But it's far less skewed than in the case of Walmart.
I find healthy food to be very accessible in the United States if you cook for yourself. Most of our grocery stores have huge varieties of produce and lean proteins are relatively inexpensive. I think eating fast food is becoming more and more common as well as people buying pre-made packaged foods to heat up at home which are often just as unhealthy as fast foods.
> Most of our grocery stores have huge varieties of produce and lean proteins are relatively inexpensive
It depends on where you live. In the U.S. poor and working class neighborhoods often lack grocery stores. The only options are convenience stores where fresh, healthy food is very expensive, availability is limited, and quality is poor. I've read that the problem is on such a wide scale that it significantly impacts health. Cities work at attracting grocery chains to poor neighborhoods.
Try it yourself: Try shopping for groceries in a neighborhood with those demographics in your town. Or just layer a map of income with a map of grocery stores; I think I can predict where you will find the Whole Foods.
Shelf space at the stores seems to be shifting more toward prepared and semi-prepared foods. This comes at a cost of more carbs, sugar, etc. I interpret this trend as consumer choice, that people are preferring to spend less time cooking and preparing meals.
If you have a strong food culture that demands fresh ingredients (Italy) then the prices may follow.
An entire new science of how people shop developed in the past few decades. The centermost aisles are prime territory. So, the higher-margin, fast-turnover items get center aisles and medium height (easily seen) shelves. Wholesalers actually pay for placement rights for things like chips and soda -- that's why they are organized by brand rather than product.
Produce gets moved to one end of the store (generally the end nearest the main entrance because produce is low priority for shoplifters.
> I'm italian and I visited united states a couple of months ago. In my opinion the biggest problem is that you don't have decent food at affordable prices. Healthy food has nonsensical high prices and if you want something at a human price you don't have much choice except fast food. What a shame.
We recently just spent a week in Spain. We went to the grocery store and bought a whole cart full of food for like 20 euros. I was blown away. The equivalent amount of food in the US would have easily been like 100 dollars, probably more.
My (potentially incorrect) impression was that the Common Agricultural Policy in Europe meant that the affordable food prices you get used to could just be the result of subsidies. So any country with different subsidies would have surprisingly high food prices and give you sticker shock, but that wouldn't really mean all that much, it's like the difference between paying for it in the store vs paying for it with taxes. Is this plausible?
Perhaps you're thinking only of restaurants, because healthy food is far cheaper than fast food or any restaurant food in general, but it does require going to any grocery store and then spending a few minutes cooking.
Meh, veggies, rice, etc. are super-cheap everywhere in the world.
It doesn't take money to eat healthy. It's not that fast food restaurants are the only choice is you don't have money. You can go to a grocery store and eat extremely healthy if you want to.
Those who eat at fast food restaurants all the time are more uneducated than poor (although both things might go hand-in-hand), and might not know how many calories are in a burger or more importantly sodas (I've seen people drinking liters every day).
You can buy an apple instead of a can of coke and save you both a few hundred calories and a few pennies. Nothing to do with money.
FWIW Vietnam War prisoners (Americans held in North Vietnam) strongly tended to live longer than their peers after release. Years without artificial light eating a basic diet and limited calories made a big difference, even without factoring out torture.
In contrast the starvation diet the Japanese imposed on their WWII prisoners (from Hong Kong in particular) shortened their lives quite a bit.
Yeah, all of those are single serving prices that you're looking at, and only the onion (and I guess lettuce if it's not romaine) is actually a vegetable. Potatoes are starches, the others are fruits (with higher sugar). They don't list much in the way of vegetable prices.
But, even given that; I can buy a head of lettuce for $1.40. Okay. Or, I could buy an 8 pack of little debbie snack cakes for the same amount. 5 servings of lettuce that has nearly no nutritional substance, and that I have to combine with something else anyway to make it palatable...or 8 servings of convenient, enjoyed food.
If I wanted crunch, I can get a giant bag of tortilla chips for $1, too. Why would I buy a head of lettuce for 40% more, when it takes more work, and more ingredients inflating the price even higher?
It was stated that the obesity crisis might be caused by the cost of vegetables (or otherwise healthy food). This is nonsense. I don't know why you're getting picky with definitions while that was just an example to prove that it's not as if an eggplant is $20 and a cheeseburger $1.
> Or, I could buy an 8 pack of little debbie snack cakes for the same amount. 5 servings of lettuce that has nearly no nutritional substance, and that I have to combine with something else anyway to make it palatable...or 8 servings of convenient, enjoyed food.
Right. I would never eat that, though. There are also plenty of ways to make vegetables palatable: eggplants with tomatoes with spices are very tasty, for instance.
I'm also not saying that junk food isn't cheaper, just that healthy food is affordable for everyone.
Not a lot of vegetables but eggs, sausage, and bacon are very common. But yes, if you’re vegan or at least prefer food that is more vegetable in nature you’ll have a tough time other than fruit.
I'm quite far from a vegan, but eating all you mentioned + waffles with syrup really is too much for my stomach. Some salad/tomatoes/cucumber next to that would have helped.
Honestly this is only slightly true. Beans are 2 bucks a pound, cabbage is 2 bucks a head, bananas are 50 cents a pound, chicken is 4 bucks a pound, lentils are 2 bucks a pound, broccoli is 3 bucks a pound, yams are 1.5 bucks a pound, green bell peppers are 1 each, peanuts are 4.5 a pound, etc.
You get my point but I think it's more of a culture and convenience thing.
I don't get this. You'll get just as fat with "healthy" food. People aren't skipping small portions of healthy food because it's expensive - they just don't want to eat it at all, or they want to eat enough of it to feel full and satisfied, which is going to make them fat.
