My wife and I try to do this too, but it’s easy for us because (a) there are only two of us and (b) we have top-20th-percentile take home pay.
I find it uncomfortable to lecture working class parents about what they should feed their three kids when ground beef is four bucks a pound, a medium sized cauliflower is three bucks, and navel oranges are a buck each.
On balance, most people I know who carefully watch the carbs and don’t fret too much about fats seem to be thinner and healthier than those who do the opposite. Not to say that your family’s history does not differ.
I’ll second this. My dad was an elementary school teacher and mom was a library volunteer. We ate well, and had no shortage of fresh fruit, but good meat and good veggies weren’t and aren’t cheap. We ate a lot of pasta, chicken, occasionally pork, and stuff that came out of cans. Beef & fresh veggies were dependent on sales. Of course, here I am in 2018 cooking semi-paleo Weight Watchers type food for a household, and chicken breasts are a staple and beef is a no-no.
Some actual data (from the CDC):
NOTES: Age-adjusted by the direct method to the year 2000 U.S. Census Bureau estimates using age groups 20–39, 40–59, and 60–74. Overweight is body mass index (BMI) of 25 kg/m2 or greater but less than 30 kg/m2; obesity is BMI greater than or equal to 30; and extreme obesity is BMI greater than or equal to 40. Pregnant females were excluded from the analysis.
It’s interesting that the rate of overweight is pretty stable; it’s just the rate of obesity that’s gone up. If everyone were just getting shifted up the chart I would expect a more uniform change, but someone with more statistics background might know better about what to expect in a situation like this…
You bring up an interesting point: Are the obese of today the skinny of the 70’s? We’re still statistically overrun with Baby Boomers, right? So…the Baby Boomers were dominating the 70’s, and now they’re dominating the current stats. The majority of them were young and skinny, and now they’re old and obese.
Going along with the idea that there may be multiple reasons for a rise in obesity rates:
Another thought is that a number of medications have weight gain as a possible side-effect, and it seems like we’re a much-more medicated society than we used to be. (I don’t have any statistics, just tossing the thought into the mix here.)
I blame corn, especially in the US. US corn subsidies totaled $106 billion between 1995 and 2016. Corn is used to produce high-fructose corn syrup and also it is used as fodder by the livestock industry, making meat cheaper. Rich farmers seem to benefit the most from government subsidies. Corporate welfare to make us unhealthier, but no universal health coverage. Your tax dollars hard at work to benefit the few and screw the rest.
Testify, Uncle. This is exactly my situation - I can afford to feed my family traditional meals made from traditionally harvested, traditionally bred crops. It is not cheap and consumes a significant quantity of my income. Listening to people in my economic class claim poor people are fat because they choose to eat the wrong foods makes me angry.
“the biggest challenge when eating surströmming is to vomit only after the first bite, as opposed to before”
– Wolfgang Fassbender
Read somewhere that circa the 1950s the typical family spent some 25% of their income on food and something like 10% on housing; now it’s basically reversed. (Wish I could find good sources for this…)
Presumably this is part real estate speculation and part wacky agripolitics. If you try to buy food like it’s midcentury (minimal processed food, buy vegetables grown locally, etc.), you’ll hit 25% of your income easy.
You sound like a good candidate for a food dehydrator. It’s the one food preservation thingy we don’t have, but will need to get within the next year due to the addition of fruit plants to our landscaping.
Ugh. I tried this. Friend brought it to our shared flat. Opens the tin can. Under water. In the bath. In a bucket full of cold water. Big window wide open. Doors closed. Well more than 200 m2 flat, shared among six plus partners. All doors were closed. All opend quickly afterwards, and all windows, to get it out.
The olfactorial horror.
The sheer olfactorial horror.
You could have named it, and brushed it’s teeth, I guess.
The taste, however, was surprisingly mild, slightly garlicky, and forgettable.
If you ask me why Scandinavians are slimmer: they possibly must vomit every time someone opens a tin of this stuff in the vicinity of, say, 5 km?
There’s abundant evidence of this, so I formally named a logical fallacy after it many years ago. The “nutritionist fallacy” is when you ignore evidence that your categorical solution is not applicable to the entire category. The canonical example is believing that a single diet plan can be optimal for all human beings; this belief is the foundation of most dieticians’ praxis, although thankfully not all nutritionists embody the fallacy.
That surstromming stuff. I had to look it up. It made me think it has altered the cultures of region it has been inflicted on.
Did the Vikings become such excellent sailors in an attempt to get away from it?
Children, hearing what will be served for supper, would run away to eat weeds or small woodland creatures instead of surstromming, leading to adventuresome palettes
Airing out the house during inclement weather would cause the occupants to burn more calories to stave off hypothermia.
