Feed the world! just not too much.....

Wow, what a surprising, shocking and sad headline.....
Obese now outnumber hungry, says Red Cross


15% of humanity is hungry while 20% is overweight!!! Amazing. Absolutely amazing. I'm not surprised that the percent of obese people is that high, I'm surprised that it is greater than those that are hungry. And as the article indicates "excess nutrition now kills more than hunger." POW

There's a continual humanitarian effort to feed the starving - think of parts of Africa - but seemingly nothing is being done about the perils of obesity. Excuse me while I step up on my soap box.... Much has been made about the impending health care crisis in the US. However, we've not seen anything yet until we are faced with the oncoming epidemic of obesity related diseases that will increase rapidly over the next several years. The prime threat being diabetes. It has to stop. The government can now tax tanning salons as part of the Obama health care reform because they increase skin cancer. Not that I agree with that, but why isn't the government doing more to proactively get the upper hand on the growing (pun intended) problem of obesity? And I'm one that would rather see less government than more. But in this case, something has to be done. Or we're all going to be paying for the result in the form of higher health care premiums and taxes.

 

You fine young Cannibal, you.

 

I am in the middle of producing a documentary that deals with this very subject.

The big secret in the US is that the US, on a per capita basis, spends a heck of a lot less that any other nation on its food. The reason goes back to the Nixon administration's re-tool of the farm bill. Food is cheap in the US because of a constant surplus of very cheap corn and soy. These two staples are in just about everything.

The result is a glut of processed foods that are high in sugars and other carbs. Have a look at this piece of video:


Carbs are your enemy.

Here is another video to watch:

 

You may like them, but in the quantities they are currently consumed by the vast number of people, they are not good for you. They are just more sugar, overtaxing your system and making you fat.

 

http://www.lifeanddebt.org/

if you want to understand how the game works, watch this film. it's much easier to get your head around it via a case study than it is via statements about global policy. i found versions of it on-line...search up the title. in the case of ja--in what the film covers---the Problem insofar as food is concerned is dairy. it follows from massive us subsidies to dairy producers. the consequences of those subsidies are made quite clear in this film--which is from 2001---but you see the circle. map that onto the other major monocrops in the united states and you'll get a handle on things. note that the crap the us sells at less than cost aren't great nutritionally. the results are no surprise.

like snowy said, the obesity problems that are being encountered are a direct result of us imperial policy. welcome to the world. welcome to the many reasons people aren't necessarily sad to see the american empire declining. it doesnt have to be this way, either domestically or internationally. all this follows from policy choices. there's nothing inevitable about it.

 

Oink oink.

Also speaking for the United States, the way our living spaces are designed—car-centric and largely lacking in public transportation infrastructure anywhere other than larger metropolitan centers—doesn't help either. When you have to get everywhere you need to go behind the wheel of a car and have the option to stop for two big macs and a venti mochaccino in every other strip mall, that whole obesity thing isn't going anywhere without more work than most Americans are likely willing to do.

 

Carbs are not the enemy, high blood sugar is the enemy. You can eat boatloads of carbs without causing huge blood sugar spikes, if you eat smart. The reason it's such a problem is the high levels of junk carbs in damn near everything we eat (HFCS anyone?). Plenty of vegetables get almost all of their calories from carbs and how many fat vegetarians do you know?

The biggest problem with the food industry in the US is (like most other problems in the US) the corrupting influence of lobbies and corporate cash, whose principal concerns have nothing to do with keeping people healthy or serving us healthy food. I mean, the existence food libel laws absolutely baffles, except in the context of our current political system.

 

Carbs are sugar when they get processed by your body. And eating boatloads of carbs is not smart.

Watch the videos posted above.

Sugar is poison for your body.

 

I did watch the video's, before I posted.

My degree is in biology; I'm well aware of what happens to carbs when you eat them. Perhaps, more so than most other folks. Sugar is not poison, it is essential for living and your body's preferred fuels source. You know what else causes death when your intake is too high? Water. I could make a video all about the dangers of water and it wouldn't make water bad for you. Saying 'sugar is poison' is not sincere. Yes high blood sugar is toxic, but that is not the whole story. Low blood sugar is lethal as well and cutting carbs out can have serious negative consequences for health. The key is balance, maintaining your blood sugar at healthy levels.

What is bad for your weight & health is large sugar spikes or too much sugar, too fast. This is especially true if it happens repeatedly over a long period of time. If you eat balanced meals that contain plenty of fiber as well as fats and proteins you won't get those big spikes because it changes the the way you digest food.

 

Perhaps expecting metabolic disorders to determine the diets of those without them is short-sighted as well. Individually packaged junk foods are not consumed in moderation by the many they are vended to. Throwing up your hands takes almost as much energy as rolling up your sleeves. In other words, working off whatever you eat should be possible, & possibly an alternative to sitting around letting your body poison itself.

 

you have to contextualize this problem in different ways depending on the social situation you're talking about. in the united states, for example, there are lots of poorer urban neighborhoods that aren't terribly well-served by public transportation and that also have no retail options for healthy foods. in many such places, there aren't supermarkets at all. but there are fast-food places and it's cheap quick and easy. it's also obviously pretty lousy for you nutritionally. more generally, food distribution fits into the geography of class warfare american style---one of those realities that people don't like to look at. of course the class system is to some extent porous--but mostly it's not. there have been quite a few studies of the patterns of distribution of food in poorer urban neighborhoods---i'm familiar with some that were done on philadelphia. the patterns are likely different in ruralia, but i'm less familiar with how they play out there. one major difference is that it's pretty hard to live in ruralia without a car and access to a car changes things. insurance is extortionately expensive in cities, particular in "dangerous" areas, for example. but i digress. there's also problems with the foods that wic authorizes for purchase, which are disproportionately industrial/processed foods. if you're using food stamps, you're pushed into the industrial food chain. you might wonder why that is, really. there are other ways of doing things (for example, why not provide micro-credit for food co-ops?) but these are thumbnail indicators of sociological situations---the relations between these and individual choices is hard to determine. i suppose supermarkets would know, but that's not information that's correlated with much apart from demand patterns. so even if that data were available (i suspect its proprietary, but i don't know) it'd be long lists of factoids.

transnationally, you have versions of the same kind of patterns in the metropole. in the south, there's been a different pattern. life & debt is a nice little primer on the mirror world that separates what boojie tourists see from what they dont, what "reality" is for them as over against people who live there (in this case, jamaica), the ways in which us agricultural subsidies allow for systematic dumping of dubious goods---in the case outlined in the film, you watch the destruction of a local dairy industry, which cannot compete price-wise with a flood of powdered milk that arrives as a result of "free trade" agreements---which amount to license for american dumping of corporate agricultural over-production. you have similar problems with the excresences of the american hfcs system, with some meat, with rice, corn and other staples. the dumping of agricultural overproduction--underwritten by massive subsidies that conservatives tend to like so don't talk about when the blah blah blah starts about "spending"---destroys local agricultural systems and places countries already in difficult financial situations in a colonial relation to the north---often what you see is the conversion over of existing agricultural production systems to monocropping for export while in the same place people are stuck eating industrial shit from the north. the lever for this is so-called "free trade"---the figleaf in front of that is the whole neo-liberal bullshit discourse of "development" which is really more a discourse to rationalize intensified neo-colonialism...the "free trade" agreements are typically tied to loan packages from the imf and (again with reference to ja) the inter-american development bank---and so is tied into creating the debt spiral that's characteristic of countries that for whatever reason stay inside the rules of the neo-colonial system.

btw argentina told the imf etc. to fuck themselves a couple years ago. strangely enough, argentina's economy is doing far better than it was during the debt spiral days. even more strangely, you don't hear shit about that in the good ole u.s. of a. but i digress.

 

It's not enough to just 'like' this post, it bears being requoted, as well. The 'anti-carb' philosophy is bloated with hype and misinformation. You cannot live healthily without carbs. In fact, most of the foods that provide the most significant health benefits to us are some form of carbohydrate. Even the dreaded potato contains, not only carbs, but beneficial fiber, vitamins and phytochemicals, as well. Just don't pile the thing up with butter, sour cream and bacon bits and you'll be fine. There is something so uniquely western and perverse to the idea that, in such a scenario, it is the lowly potato that needs to be avoided.

The key is to eat a balanced diet, in appropriate portions and avoid processed foods. There is no mystery.

 

There are always mysteries between us. Agricultural subsidies don't top the list by any means. Producing more food than you can transport effectively denies the problem of hunger. If these "United States" believed more in feeding the world than in destroying their "enemies" they'd have less of them. Paying our proxies to contribute to our destructive efforts... I don't wish I had some Israeli strawberries right now, for instance. I'm >satisfied w/the grapes off my vine. & sunflower seeds. If we spent a small portion of what we do transporting weapons to transport food, I believe we'd be much better off.

 

OCM, the cost of transporting food isn't that big of a factor....

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/09/12/got_cheap_milk