Diet Rant

I was at the convention center here in Pittsburgh yesterday for the Annual Tekkoshocon Anime convention.    Somewhere in the middle I took my youngest to a birthday party at a bowling alley in the North Hills.    Guess what food was available for purchase in both places.   Hot dogs,  fries,  burgers,  pizza,  nachos with cheese and other assorted culinary treasures.   I am not averse to the periodic gastronomic dive into Pizza or fries but in neither place was there anything remotely healthy to eat (or drink for that matter).     This is how Americans eat,  and this is why we are by far the most obese people in the world.   According to one source (and we all know how much we can trust the internet),  30.6% of Americans are obese    Obesity Stats  and I am sure that this does not include the sort of pudgy overweight types.    I lived in Switzerland for two years and I do not remember ever seeing a heavily obese person in that whole time .   Go to any mall in the US and you won't have enough fingers and toes to count them.

I wonder why people get that way and I think  (and I have no empirical data to back this up) there are a number of reasons.

Too much processed sugar products  like packaged cakes and cookies
Too much fatty meats
Too little exercise
Too little time or energy or initiative to cook but rather an over-reliance on prepared foods
Salty Snacks  like potato chips and tortilla chips
Too much cheese
Not enough vegetables, fruits and legumes
Soda  (though I am amaze how many heavy people drink diet sodas)



Go to the supermarket and watch was is being check out.   How many people have their carts full of boxes and packages and how many have theirs full of bags of vegetables and fruits.     What we are eating is killing us.

What is our response to this.   Diet drinks,  diet fads,  binge dieting.     None of this goes to the core of what is wrong.   We need to take stock of what we put in our bodies and think about everything that goes into it.    Fries and pizza and cake can be on your diet but they should be few and far between.   We should eat 20x the number of bags of spinach than chips we eat  (there are 2000 calories and 91 grams of fat in one bag of popular tortilla chips ).  We should read every prepared box of food we buy to know how much sodium and saturated fats are in them.    Almost every meal needs to be mostly vegetables and should contain at least 2 cups of raw vegetables.    

Enough ranting..