I watched the Supersize Me tonight. Very disturbing. The guy’s liver basically shuts down after eating nothing but McDonald’s for a month. <\/p>\n
He talks about many reasons why the growth in fast food in America and it’s incumbent obesity in the US. Increased marketing to children, the addictive quality of the foods, it’s low cost are all factors. One thing he touches on very early on in the film and never comes back to, is how his mother cooked meals for him every day. He was a healthy guy before he went on his Mac Attack. This leads us to believe that his mother was a positive role model for him in helping him choose healthy eating habits. He contrasts this to the rise in obesity currently, saying that families eat out more often now than they used to. 40% of meals are eaten outside the home was the figure quoted. When they do eat in, it’s frozen or prepared foods.<\/p>\n
I think it would be an interesting study to see how the growth of women in the workforce parallels the growth in obesity in the US. Working mothers don’t have time to plan and prepare healthy meals for their kids. So they either eat out at places like McDonalds, order pizza, or thaw out a tv dinner for their children. <\/p>\n
Now it is very in vogue to fault McDonalds for causing the obesity in this country. But who is feeding their children? Who is teaching them, at a very early age what to eat?<\/p>\n
In one interesting bit of the movie, he estimates that children see 10,000 ads for fast food and sugary cereal in a year. He compares this to the number of meals that the parent could prepare for them in a year, 1000. He says, see — parents don’t stand a chance against that much advertisement. But look, as the parent, you can tell your child what to eat. You can turn off the TV. You have control of the stick and<\/em> the carrot, even if McDonalds does have a pretty appetizing carrot.<\/p>\n Don’t get me wrong, I like a good egg mcmuffin every now and again. Some of my fondest memories figure under those golden arches. When my Grandma Katie took me out to the McDonalds drive-through, when I attended the grand opening of McDonalds in Virginia Beach complete with a half pipe and a bmx crew, my first Monopoly game piece, and my family’s mass migration to Alaska where we marked each passing state by the quality of their McDonald’s restaurant. But it was a treat. We didn’t eat it every day, we were lucky if we ate there once a month. <\/p>\n I also am not sure relegating women only to housework is a good idea, either. But for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. In this case, we have done nothing to replace the role of woman as the center of a stable household that taught their children good eating habits. The schools have certainly not done their part, as shown in Super Size Me. Whether it is the man or the woman or a meal preparation service, if you can afford it, healthy eating habits must start at home.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I watched the Supersize Me tonight. Very disturbing. The guy’s liver basically shuts down after eating nothing but McDonald’s for a month. He talks about many reasons why the growth in fast food in America and it’s incumbent obesity in the US. Increased marketing to children, the addictive quality of the foods, it’s low cost […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/meherenow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/meherenow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/meherenow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/meherenow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/meherenow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/meherenow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/meherenow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/meherenow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/meherenow.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}