Being the well-traveled person that I am, and very interested in knowing what people do to pass time, there are some interesting observations pertaining to this post I can state.
1. The United States is the only country where poor people are overweight. While they may be techncally malnourished, they are obese. In most Asian cultures, fat is seen as the sign of achieving something in life.
2. American restaurants serve the biggest portions of food in the world. If you get a chance to go to Europe, Australia, or Asia, compare the size of their Whopper® or Big Mac® with an American one. I remember in Indonesia, at McDonald's, all the food was on about a 3/4 scale, including the regular hamburgers and fish sandwiches.
3. The rest of the world watches the United States. Their children emulate American children. When I taught school in Indonesia, many of the kids I taught tried to act like the kids they saw on TV in U.S. sitcoms and dramas. Many of the kids on TV just sat around (Indonesia only got the TV shows, the U.S. didn't want to keep--we got the sitcom that Lyle Alzado did, a few years after he died.)
4. The study of nutrition is a relatively new field of study. In my study of popular history, I have gleaned that it wasn't so important what you were eating, so long as you were full when you finished.
5. Also, from my study of popular history, the healthiest the United States ate as a nation was in the 1950s and 1960s. Sugar was not so much a part of the diet then. If a child wanted to eat something sweet, he or she would go to the local malt shop and get only one thing. Now, thanks to mega-stores, such as Sam's Club and Costco, we have the contents of what an entire grocer in 1933 had in our individual homes. That in itself leads to many of these problems.
Now I am only stating these things as observations, not criticisms. I mean I represent almost everything unhealthy on this list. I mean, I can remember in school one year they said, "It doesn't matter what you eat for breakfast, so long as you eat and get full." A few years later they denounced all the sugar we were eating.
Now, I am afraid of the idea of
censoring what we eat, as some of the more political bloggers have stated in other pages on other sites. But we can teach good nutrition the same way we teach about the evils of smoking.
