This is an interesting thread.
The nagging question is WHY have Americans (kids and adults) become so darn chubby?
Does anyone truly think the blame can be placed on anyone other than the individuals who are simply eating too much?
Hmm??
I read this earlier today and I think it pertains to this thread.
Fat Foolishness
Posted 10/09/2009 06:14 PM ET
Obesity: A new study in Los Angeles refutes the theory that fast-food chains make the poor overweight. So the city should lift its ban on McDonald's and start letting Wal-Mart sell cheap, healthy groceries.
Ever since public-health data turned up the fact that low-income Americans have a weight problem, politically sensitive types have struggled to come up with explanations that avoid the stern, common-sense answer — that the poor do it to themselves.
It's said that healthy food such as fresh fruit and vegetables is too expensive, that the poor depend too much on fast-food outlets for their meals and that they have fewer local sources of cheap, healthy food.
There's some truth in that last of those arguments, but the inconvenient fact is that better-off people face mostly the same dietary temptations and, as a group, tend to be less obese.
The fast-food bugaboo, for instance, led the Los Angeles City Council last year to ban expansion by chains such as McDonald's in low-income, mostly minority South L.A.
Now comes a study by the Rand Corp., published in the journal Health Affairs, showing that the ban has no rational basis.
Rand researchers looked at the actual locations of fast-food outlets and found that South Los Angeles had relatively few of them, at 19 per 100,000 residents. They were much more highly concentrated, at 29 per 100,000 residents, on the city's affluent west side and, at 30 per 100,000, in Los Angeles County as a whole.
The study also analyzed a survey of 1,480 adults throughout Los Angeles County and found that rich and poor both said they ate about the same amount of fruits and vegetables. In South L.A., though, adults reported a higher intake of sugary or salty snacks and soft drinks.
"Bad eating habits" used to be the censorious term for such behavior. Now folks who scarf too much junk food are victims of something.
As mentioned, however, the people of South L.A. can make a legitimate claim that their grocery shopping is not as easy or cheap as it is in the richer parts of town. The area has few full-service supermarkets that offer plenty of healthy food like fresh fruits and vegetables at low prices.
Who's to blame for that? The marketplace obviously has something to do with it, but so do those same L.A. politicians and pressure groups who claim to be guardians of South L.A. people and their health.
Wal-Mart has long been trying to find a site for one of its "supercenters," which sell low-cost groceries along with Wal-Mart's other merchandise, in or near South L.A.
But supermarket unions and their political allies have kept the retailer out of the area. There are no Wal-Mart supercenters in the city of Los Angeles, and a union-led campaign killed one planned for Inglewood, just west of South L.A., in 2004.
We would not go so far as to say that the unions are making people fat. How much one eats and exercises are still matters of personal choice. But in this part of Southern California, at least, they do make it harder to shop for good food at a fair price
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=508637
Say it ain't so!
lol
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