> Here in Norway sweets are banned from pre-school and school in lunch boxes
This seems reasonable.
I remember seeing 'Supersize me' where kids were fed with junk food (e.g. pizza, chocolate bars, sodas) at school. Is that representative of American schools or did they pick the worst ones to make their point?
It varies by location and affluence. When I was going to a public elementary school in the midwest, in the very early 1990s, we had "pizza days" that happened once or twice a month but generally the food was fairly healthy.
I think they maybe had deserts like pudding sometimes. There were no sodas or junk food available at all. The drink choices were 2% milk, chocolate milk, or water.
What I do remember is the food seemed fairly low quality. Canned and frozen packaged stuff, never anything resembling fresh. Every kid got the exact same meal unless you had some medical exemption.
In high school there were some bad choices available in the menu. There were soda and junk food vending machines, but they weren't part of the normal cafeteria and I never had money for them. While there were unhealthy options, there were also many healthy options and you simply bought what you wanted. The freshness was maybe a step up from elementary school.
I think there may have been efforts to remove the vending machines since my time there.
> In high school there were all sorts of bad choices. There were soda and junk food vending machines.
I read a bunch of years ago in Branded by Alissa Quart of American schools where soda giants would fund equipment for the sports teams and provide free soda for the cafeteria. So the school would both have to pay for their own drinks in the cafeteria and refuse sponsorship of the sports team to avoid being involved with soda the companies. It just makes economic sense in that case to let the soda company rope the kids in.
It's been a while since I read it, and I can't verify the truth. For me, it sounds like schools should have no part in getting kids addicted to soda.
That is just sad. I think it is for good reason here in Norway that companies can not contribute to school funding. They try to keep private money out of schools, so that you don't end up with A and B schools because some parents are richer than others.
I think the corporate sponsorship you talk about here also means that the pressure to fund schools properly through taxes are taken away. It gets too easy to avoid taxes by getting others to pay.
> That is just sad. I think it is for good reason here in Norway that companies can not contribute to school funding.
I had a great High School class in genetics that would not have been possible without large donations of money and equipment from a local biotech company.
I have fewer problems with companies donating science equipment, computers, and the like. There have been occasional issues with corporate donated history books though...
I can see that happening. Hopefully it's less of a possibility now than it would have been when I was attending in the late 1990s.
I think at my school it was because staff wanted them, so why not have them available for the kids too? I don't think much thought was given to it, and even if there were it would have been framed as a matter of personal responsibility. Adults there would have not thought of their responsibility to teach children good eating habits -- that was for the parents.
Back when I was in middle school (mid-90's), I was on the student council, which was responsible for maintaining relationships with the junk food vendors (we used it to raise money for other projects). We switched from Coke to Pepsi during that time, and I remember them coming to us with a deal that involved them providing the vending machines, running some contests, and some other goodies for the school. All we had to do was give them exclusive access.
What a terrible menu. It has 'cultural poverty' written all over it. Food is a major manifestation of culture--food speaks volumes about the people who prepare and eat it.
What ends up happening is that the Feds fund school lunch at a level where you cannot say no as a district, but the hooks that come with the money make it difficult to do a better job.
At my highschool, pizza, hamburgers, and fries were regularly available options. Soda was available from vending machines. Milk was the standard beverage included with lunches, which included the option of either white milk, or sugary chocolate milk.
Exact same here. Greasy rectangles they called pizza, nachos, chocolate milk, soda, fries were all regular if not daily meals. What do you expect from 300lb adults who think their weight is the norm.
That's the bad part. Simple carbs from bread have high glycemic index and easily convert to body fat. Modern diets are composed of way too high amounts of carbs.
"I hate that" people think calories and weight is the primary gauge of health.
It's true weight is very often a negative health indicator because of the toxic nature of the diet that results in weight gain. However, losing weight is not always a sign of being more healthy.
Shutting down your liver, clogging your arteries, and generally filling your soft tissue and fat storage with toxins is not healthy even if you appear to be losing weight.
While true, I think this sentiment is vastly overstated. For the typical American eating the typical American diet, obesity is one of the biggest risks. It's right up there with smoking, except smoking is getting less popular and obesity is getting more popular.
Let's clear one thing up first: aside from a few issues like joint stress, it's not weight in general that's the problem; it's body fat. If you're a power athlete with significant muscle mass, you're going to be able to carry a lot of weight and still be perfectly healthy as long as it's lean weight. Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson shouldn't worry about his weight, despite having a BMI that's technically in the obese category. If you have a high weight for your height and you don't look like a professional wrestler, you should definitely be concerned about your weight.
Aside from the problems caused directly by excess body fat, carrying around excess body fat also makes it far more difficult and far riskier to exercise, which means all your other health indicators are going to go down south. Even mental health is pretty strongly influenced by exercise. Also, excess body fat is a far more difficult problem to solve.
I would say this is putting the cart before the horse. It's not excess body fat that is the source of health problems. It's the lifestyle (diet and movement) that leads to excess body fat (as one of the many symptoms of growing health problems) from choices.
In other words, baldness, obesity, sluggishness, headaches, etc... are not the source of health problems - they are the symptoms.
The Rock should absolutely be worried about his health, specifically his endocrine system as it is physiologically supranormal because of the cocktail of drugs he is undoubtedly on.
The doctor who does my physicals commented that he considers weight to be maybe the fourth or fifth thing he looks at when considering your basic health. Being overweight is bad, but because it's so overemphasized (and so easy to see), people ignore some things that should go in front of it.
(Though one imagines that if one is not willing to change one's diet or exercise habits to lose weight, the odds of them willing to do it to lower blood pressure or other such indicators seems low too.)
The McDouble/hamburger diet is a legitimate diet. You can dial in exactly how many calories you're eating.
To prove a point a few years back, I ate nothing but pizza and diet Pepsi for several weeks and lost weight. 2 supermarket pizzas was something like 1800 calories.
As someone who would like to lose about 50lbs I have a lot of questions. Mostly I'd like to know how you determined your resting metabolic rate. I've started working out a little and adjusted my diet a lot but I kinda feel like I'm fumbling around in the dark.
I lost about 60 lbs on Phentermine, then gained 10 lbs back, then lost about 15 lbs just dieting, and then gained about 10 lbs back.
Phentermine made it a lot easier because I didn't feel hungry, even when I was. But other than that, the same techniques applied: I used a calorie counter and tried to stick to the recommendation that it gave.
After using it a month or 2, I realized that its numbers were slightly high for me, and cut my max allowed calories a little further and started losing weight.
If you're wondering what your number is, the easiest way is probably just to follow what some tool tells you (I used Weight Watchers, then SparkPeople) and adjust the calories according to whether you are losing weight or not.
One caution: There is a rather large gap where you go from gaining weight to maintaining weight to losing weight. The area where you maintain weight is pretty broad. Finding that area is the first step, then slowly removing some calories until you start losing is the key, IMO. If you go too fast, you might remove too many calories and actually make it harder to lose weight than it should be. Your body will try to compensate for lack of calories.
I've lost weight many times without any exercise. The formula was pretty simple for me:
1) Eat on regular intervals. Don't starve yourself, but don't overeat. Typically you stop while you are a tiny bit hungry. The body is a bit slow on registering that you've had enough.
2) Cut out all sugary stuff, chocolate, ice cream, candy.
If you live in the US, it might be harder. My experience from living in the US was that it was hard to stay healthy there because
1) Almost all food contains some sugar
2) Served portions are usually way too large. And you buy things in too large quantities.
This means you might have to focus on cooking food from scratch at home to avoid the added sugar, and getting too large portions.
Don't cook larger portions to have left overs for later. You'll just eat more.
But if you are like me and can't be bothered to make food yourself, then buy EXPENSIVE food. This sounds silly but the thing is that when you buy cheap food, it doesn't taste well unless it is unhealthy.
Healthy food that tastes good is often expensive food. If you go to nice restaurants you tend to get smaller and healthier portions.
I waste a lot of money on food this way but it is just a trade off I've made. I rather waste money than get more unhealthy.
That will definitely work, but there must be some other factor at play. There are plenty of populations in the world that consume a lot of grain but do not necessarily suffer from increased rates of obesity.
They probably have cultures of smaller portions, less processed food, and less added sugar (especially drinks). Example: compare the size of a Japanese mosburger with a burger & fries meal in the US:
The more you can integrate moderate physical activity into your daily routine as a matter of getting things done rather than as a specific chore you have to do, the better. Cutting sugar consumption should also help. I'd start there and see what happens.
You can find online calculator to have an estimation of your metabolic rate. From there, subtract 500 kcal and count all the calories to eat everyday to make sure you're below your limite. A popular calories counting app is "fitness pal".
Two public schools I went to in the mid-west here had private pop vending machines installed up until like 6-7 years ago when people complained about them not being healthy. However what they replaced them with was 'vitaminwater' and fruit juice vending machines which contain just as many calories. In years before then they did hold out for awhile on pop machines but eventually gave in because kids would just stop at a nearby gas station or party store and bring pop in anyways.
Pizza wasn't uncommon but it wasn't like take-out pizza, it was a real cheap basic version that had much less grease and fat. They would on rare occasions make 'real' pizza or have some kind of 'real' food that people would devour, but in general the lunch food was a grade or two lower in quality than the cheapest shit you can buy at walmart. In many schools it is literally the same food/supplier as our prison food so all of it was somewhat questionable in nutrient content.
No, that's 100% accurate, at least when I was in school in the 90s-2000s. It actually got worse, as the old government subsidized food staples were phased out (government cheese, flour, potatoes, etc), that actually had to be cooked, and replaced with Sysco frozen products. I'm not sure whether this was actually cheaper than buying real food, or it was laziness.
Also the school breakfast programs were catastrophic, in my opinion. Again, no real food, just packaged donuts and danishes and sugar-laden cereals. It was arguably better when we had snack time instead, with milk and a bag of pretzels or Goldfish and a piece of fruit.
My daughter's elementary school has soda machines in it.
In the US, we don't like to fully fund education with tax money, which means our public schools need other sources of revenue to fill the gap. Junk food vending is a large and crucial funding source.
This seems reasonable.
I remember seeing 'Supersize me' where kids were fed with junk food (e.g. pizza, chocolate bars, sodas) at school. Is that representative of American schools or did they pick the worst ones to make their point?