slvoid

I was looking at the food pyramid the other day and I noticed a lot of people including the industry are following the food pyramid backwards.

In order of what we should be having the most:
1 (Most)- Bread, cereal, pasta, etc
2- Vegetables
3- Fruits
4- Milk, yogurt, cheese, etc
5- Meat, eggs, nuts, etc
6 (Least)- Fats, oils, sweets

Here's what I usually see people eating during the day and it seems it's also what a lot of fast food and processed food items are offering:
1 (Most)- Fats, oils, sweets
2- Meat
3- Bread, cereal, pasta
4- Milk, yogurt, cheese
5- Vegetables
6 (Least)- Fruits

That combined with the fact that more and more people drive every where, sit around at the computer all day, kids are choosing more inactive games than active, and are generally just plain lazy, is the reason why so many people are massively (and I mean it) overweight.

Don Woodson

Your assessment looks pretty accurate to me.
When I've thought about the state of our health I tend to look at it in terms of automation/mechanization vs. physical work out put/general health.
Me and most of my fellow americans are nowhere near as physically fit as say, Lewis and Clark, or Danial Boone etc.
The more we have machines doing our work for us, the weaker we become physically.
I often wonder in another hundred years, if we'll just be big bags of fat with wires sticking out of our heads.
We won't be destroyed by terrorists, earthquakes, or nuclear bombs.
Nay brother, we will be decimated by the evil quarter pounder with cheese!

timmhaan

on average, isn't it true that americans are living longer as time goes on? seems counter intuitive based on the horrible diets and inactivity that a lot of people live with. how can we be getting both healther (living longer) and unhealther (diet and no exercise) at the same time? any thoughts? i would think it has a lot to do with better medical practices, but the more i think about that i'm just not sure. lots of people don't even go to the doctor or have medical insurance.

Stubacca

Advances in medical science?

timmhaan

maybe. i actually just edited my post before to include this thought. looks like you responded while i was doing that...sorry.

Stubacca

According to US today, only about 15% of people in the US don't have health insurance.

I'm not sure that not going to the doctor would be an issue here. I grew up in a medical family (father and grandfather both doctors), but I virtually never go to a doctor. If I feel sick, I do, but check-ups really don't help much at all. If you waited until a yearly checkup to find strange lumps etc, it would probably be too late. You're better off testing for that stuff yourself regularly and going when you notice a problem. I do go to a doctor when I notice something strange going on with my body e.g. not just for a stomach bug or head/chest cold.

These days, if you have a heart attack, someone calls an ambulance, and more frequently these days they can save you. You notice something strange or start feeling crappy, go to the doctor, and more frequently diseases can be diagnosed earlier which often opens up better possibilities of treatment. There's a greater variety of drugs available to treat body neglect diseases e.g. blood pressure, heart disease. For those things that can't be cured easily e.g. cancer, there are plenty of procedures and drugs available to help prolong life. To a large extent, too, we lead lifestyles that are much easier on our bodies. The hard manual labor jobs of the past are getting rarer and rarer. Our bodies get an easier ride.

timmhaan

that makes sense...good response. i guess longivity and good health don't always go hand-in-hand. by all accounts my grandfather should have died long ago (multiple heartattacks, diabetes, high blood pressure, etc.), but after each operation he continues to live - although his quality of life is really low.

Don Woodson

It is true that we do live a lot longer, and generally healthier, but I believe that's only because of medical technology. And we know a lot more about our bodies than people used to. Health has almost become a matter of choice today compared to people from the past. Hardly anyone back then exercised on purpose, or knew what a food pyramid was. They just ate what they could when they could, and it usually meant doing a lot of hard physical work for it. And that hard work also meant a lot of injuries (and deaths). Today we have some protections from work place injuries and diseases etc.. Back then, if you broke your leg, you were pretty much SOL.
But then again, health is a matter of perspective. Back in the old days, a large gut meant you were healthy and well fed (I would've been a "hunk").

slvoid

What I'm still trying to figure out is why a big bulk of my relatives and ancestors in china lived on a very meager subsistance and most of them managed to live long after 70+.
I remember my grandparents biking 30-40km each way to the market to sell goods, carrying 30-40 kg on their single speed bikes on dirt roads. They had almost nothing back then. My grandmother's 76 now living in amerca. My grandfather smoked 1.5 packs a day and died when he was 74.

On another note, it's sad that more corporations don't feel a moral responsibility to pander healthier food and the public doesn't feel the responsibility to live healthier. I heard that almost 15% of our GNP's spent in medical expenses and coverage.

Pat

Well, that has been the trend for over 100 years, but it isn't guaranteed.

In the early 20th century, most of the increase of life expectancy wasn't because people lived longer, it was because infant and child mortality rates dropped. Remember they were talking "average" life span, so when a reasonably high percentage of people died before the age of 5, well that really brought down the average. Interestingly enough, nearly all of the increase was caused by improvements in public health and virtually none by medical intervention. Public health was stuff like quaranteens and sewer systems, uncontaiminated water, unspoiled food and so on.

The period during the 50s saw the introduction of antibiotics and quite a few effective vaccines. So what happened is communicable diseases as a cause of mortality became pretty unimportant. Also, people since the 50s have pretty much gotten adequate nutrition which was not the case before. Again, none of this stuff increased maximum life span. Things like cancer and heart disease became the major killers.

However, some medical people are wondering if our new generations are going to live as long as some of their predecessors. The reason for this is diet and exercise are increasingly important for maintaining health especially as you get older. For most people, eating the wrong diet will result in heart disease or possibly diabetes. The rates of obesity in teens and children are very disturbing and people tend to get fatter as they age and become more sedantary and their metabolic rates slow. One wonders if in another 40 years, we will see poor life style choices being the major cause of premature death if it already isn't and I suspect it is. Of course, you can do virtually everything wrong and live a long, long time like Winston Churchill or you can do virtually everything right and still not live all that long. It is the luck of the draw.

rmwun54

That is because ignorant is bliss and a good many are having there cake and ice cream too.

stevetone

While I agree that many (most?) people are eating a crappy diet, I wouldn't put too much stock into the vaildity of the food pyramid. Apparently it was heavily influenced by "Big Food" when it was developed, and is coming up for another revision, again influenced by the food industry. (I know, I know, this sounds like one of those wacky conspiracy theories...).

MisterJ

Let me offer a couple of marginally related observations: Why do we see people eat fat? Well, fat is cheap, it's tasty, and it makes you feel full. That's the whole reason McDonalds (or insert any other fast food chain) exists. It's cheap, reasonably tasty, and it makes you feel full.

Second: Maybe the food pyramid is wrong, or maybe just misleading anyway. The food pyramid doesn't differentiate between simple and complex carb sources. And I think that has lead to an entire generation of Americans with an addiction to simple carbs and marginal blood sugar control. And I count myself in that group.

uciflylow

The way I see it, is that in a natural enviroment, fat, salt, sugar, and refined starches are the most difficult food sources to obtain. In our modern world these very things are plentifull and cheep!

This change has taken place in a short time frame, 200 years or so. Our bodies have had from the beginning of human time to adapt to this lack of fats, salt, and sugar, but we have not had time to adapt to the kind of diet most people eat today.

Now, just because someone LIVES 10 years longer. What is that last 10 years spent like? Let's take my Grandparents for instance. I had one Grandfather who smoked all his life, he had heart attacks and strokes, medical treatment kept him alive but his quality of life suffered. He lived into his early 80s. His wife lived 10 years longer, but the last 7 she didn't even know who she was!
On my fathers side neither smoked. His father lived into his early 80s but died after a short illness. He was active, by active I mean on a tractor feeding cows, up untill 2 weeks before his death. His wife lived 10 more years and developed Alzheimers the last 7 before passing.

Tell me if I am wrong. It seems to me that those numbers can be deceiving. There should be some way to count in quality of life. Are people living longer with a better quality of life, or are they just living longer?

Just this past week we had a 33 year old in the ER with a heart attack. Over weight, smoker, inactive life style! This is the very reason I quit smoking years ago, lost 50 lbs, and became a cyclist!

leconkie

[QUOTE=Don Woodson]It is true that we do live a lot longer, and generally healthier....


I'd dispute the healthier part, but it depends how far back you want to go. When man discovered agriculture his bone density and general fitness level decreased markedly. Nowadays so many of us are walking around in a virtual coma, physically, while our brains go nuts about stupid things like which new cycling computer to buy 3 months from now when we get paid. And what most of us think of as bread is actually wheat-based garbage, force-injected with water and hydrogenated fat to keep it from crumbling. Good bread, proven for 24-48 hours is hard to find, but divine. Pasta also differs greatly in quality, but wholemeal stuff is 10 times better for you than the usual stuff. Dairy products are a definite no way. Cyclists I'm sure have on average much more health awareness than the average guy, but we are still nothing compared to the beings who once had to fight for their life every day. The oldest known method of hunting involved chasing a gazelle until it died of exhaustion. How many of us could do that even once?

slvoid

On a bike? Plenty!

Heh actually I read in some recent issue of Life or TIME or something devoted to obesity that back then, they not only had to hunt for their food but they also had to drag its ass back to the cave and prepare it, which took a lot of time. Plus it wasn't like they were stuffing themselves everyday. Most days they'd spend roaming around looking for food constantly just to keep themselves fueled everyday, none of this breakfast, lunch, dinner stuff. Plus animals they chased down were usually lean meat high in protein with like 3% fat, nowadays, if you find meat, it's usually 20-30% fat. The meat that the average couch potato gets in their burger is usually 25% recycled newspaper, 25% recycled sneakers and 50% cow scraps that came from a fat cow not much more active than the person consuming the meat to begin with.

margoC

People should follow the food pyrimid upside down. Have y'all ever added up the amt of food the food pyrimid recommends! That's why the low carb diets work, people are eating way too many carbs for the amt of activity they do.

capsicum

You mean a Royall with cheese?

So I'm in the lunch room and a coworker was reading the back of his cracker box, long story short he thought the stuff at the top was supposed to be most important because its at the top. FYI he's not the cruchiest cracker in the box but he isn't forest gump either. I didn't say anything, mostly because I'm tired of correcting his dumbass all the time(I mean all the time), the serving numbers are right there next to it figure it out jackov.

slvoid

Would that be murder if you told him that he's right and to go ahead and eat everything at the top half of the pyramid?

"Saved your life lenny! That egg sandwich would have slowly killed you by cholesterol..."

lachanck

It just seems like you haven't kept up to date on the latest information. Life expectancy is supposed to be gone down for the first time in decades as the weight of americans go up. The weight epedemic is a recent phenomenom. You will see more over weight people in the younger generations than the older, and the trend continues. Gen X will probably have a much shorter life expectancy than the baby boomers and so on. IF people continue this trend.