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Originally Posted by Jetée
Keeping it short: last week, around Thursday or Friday, I caught a small segment of Public Access Television's TV 411. One of the small segments they ran was about nutrition, as well as how to better educate one's self when reading the ubiquitous black-and-white "Nutritional Facts" chart, found on nearly all prepackaged foods (by law). The point I was making, in contradiction to your oddly-superlative statement previously that such a statistic was appalling to your faculties, had to do with the 'common sense' practice put into use by a fair portion of the North American population.
Just because someone doesn't know that an average man's daily recommended intake of proteins should be 60-65 grams, (I didn't even know this "supposed" fact until last week) while a woman's should be closer to 50 grams per day, well does that make them any less worse for the wear, or unhealthier? It can stand to reason that it might be of benefit to some to keep this in mind, but not everybody needs to know this trivial concern of allotments, and certainly doesn't need to abide by them.
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I don't think it's all that important to calculate numbers and allotments. I think it's important to know what you're eating. The benefit of nutrition labels is that it's at least a snapshot of what's going into your body. This includes macro- and micronutrient values as well as specific ingredients. Much of the problem with diet-related factors regarding obesity is that people are either apathetic or oblivious to the fact that much of what they eat probably consists too much of corn and soy.
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For the most part, in my idealized picture of North American consumers and regular eaters: I think that if they are alive, can smile and seem generally well-fit, as do most of the thousands of people I see in a given day, then I assume that they can fend for themselves, and a have relative knowledge of the two rules: "eat a li'l bit of everything" and "it's fine in moderation".
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This could work to an extent. However, looking at someone is one thing and seeing "what's under the hood" is another. The fact remains that diabetes, heart disease, and cancer rates in North America are out of whack compared to the rest of the world, and a lot of that has to do with the Western diet. The problem is, not enough people are eating "a li'l bit of everything." Too many people are eating too narrowly: meat, corn, wheat, and soy. The emphasis on these things in various forms (including flour, syrup, and oil) is what's crowding out much of the other stuff: mainly other plants with far more nutrients.
To tie this back to the Meatless Mondays thing: it's about breaking patterns and habits. To think consciously about what constitutes a good meatless meal requires thinking differently than usual. Eating in moderation is good, as is eating diversely. However, not enough Americans are doing this. I read recently that something like 17,000 new "food products" are created every year in the States. Which is interesting. It's not that they're discovering new types of natural foods to grow. It's something else entirely, and Americans are literally eating it right up.