My dinner last night – a green salad with olive oil, sun dried tomatoes and goat cheese, roasted chicken with buttered brussels sprouts. What did I see everyone eating at Universal Studios Halloween Horror night later on??? Soggy Pizza, processed hot digs, ice creams, cotton candies, junk, 48 oz sodas and 2/3 the people there were fat! I felt great, slipped into my 31 jeans and size small teeshirt (hard to find now) and had to wiggle my way through all the obesity – by the way, saw several people getting kicked off the Mummy Ride because they were too fat, a few others the assistants had to come over and SHOVE IN THEIR fat to make the security bar go down. One of the obese guys was screaming on his way out profanities at the kids working the ride who made him get off.
We have become a pathetic, ignorant society, devoid of science, art, creativity. And we are paying the price and will continue to. Peopel have a CHOICE – even if they must eat fast food. Here, in LA you can go to El Pollo Loco and get roasted chicken with veggie or salad…..or go across the street to McDonalds and eat mostly processed carbs and rotten, rancid oils……everyone, deep inside knows what would be a better choice for them. Many are just too lazy, depressed, ignorant, sugar addicted and complacent to care.

If people ate more healthily, exercised and stopped smoking wouldn’t that make the “aging population problem” worse?

If instead more people ate more (spending $$$), smoked more (spending $$$) and died younger, not long after their most productive years, wouldn’t that solve the problem?

Eat, Drink, Smoke and be Productive. Then die for your country and future generations ;).

Yes, those who smoke may die in expensive ways, BUT you can always tax tobacco to pay for it. Those who don’t smoke and live longer, would eventually still die, possibly in expensive ways too.

Having both a full-size freezer and large pantry (converted closet) help, because I have storage space and can freeze leftovers for later so we don’t get sick of eating the same thing.

In the summer we eat lots of salads and veggies and meat grilled in fruit-based marinades, and in winter we eat a lot of chili and soup with lots of veggies and beans (which is also a great way to stretch meat). This is almost always cheaper than eating processed food of any sort and keeps us lean and mean. We have also avoided the obesity epidemic to which so many of our friends (who tend to eat out a lot) have fallen prey.

@ Cathy – There’s some confusion here between “healthier food” and “whole unprocessed food”. There’s no purely nutritional reason to buy organic or “whole” or “natural”. That $.99 can of tuna – if you buy the can with tuna in water, not in oil – has essentially the same nutrition content as a $12 tuna steak of the same weight. Frozen veggies have essentially the same nutrition content as fresh, and many canned veggies are so close as to make no difference (although you need to watch the salt content of some canned veggies if you have blood-pressure risks.) Go ahead and eat the white bread for lunch (it’s not poison); just have whole-grain cereal for breakfast a couple times a week.

The “processed” food that can be problematic is the pre-cooked stuff – tv dinners and such. It’s perfectly possible to eat healthily on a budget – you just need to sort out which advice is truly about nutrition, which advice is geared toward more esoteric concerns like farming practices, and which advice is just trendy lifestyle nonsense.

Thanks for caring, you idiots.

We don’t eat the way we evolved. We eat a wide assortment of fats, sugars, starches, carbos, and meats whatever, every meal. When we were evolving we ate one thing, looked for more, ate something else, looked for more etc.

I’m not sure there’s a better way to go about this, but this doesn’t seem like it’ll be terribly effective.

If the local growers have plenty of shares available on a consistent basis (that is, if they’re growing more than they’re selling), they’ll be MORE than happy to work with you on the prices. Farmers markets are easily overlooked for some reason–many people don’t realize that they have a ton of locally grown food right in their neighborhood that they could be getting and instead assume the grocery store is their only source of sustenance. Many urban and city areas have farmers markets as well.

As far as eating healthy goes, I personally find it very easy to purchase healthy foods and stay in shape. It just takes a certain level of common sense in your purchases. For instance, if you don’t buy junk food, you won’t have any junk food to eat–this kind of food shopping mentality will really cut down on unnecessary eating when you get a craving for fatty snacks like potato chips.

One thing that more people should do, in my opinion, is to check the caloric content of the foods they’re eating and compare that content to the number of servings in the box. There is a LOT of nutritional information to consider when deciding what to buy or eat, but even if you only look at caloric content, that’s the best start you can make to begin a healthy eating regimen. Keep an eye on that “# of servings in container” amount–sometimes it can be misleading to only look at the calorie content. If a little snack says it only has 100 calories per serving, keep reading–it will likely say that it has 2.5 or 3 servings in the container. That snack is now 250 or 300 calories.

If you really want to get healthy, start a food diary. Even if you aren’t sticking to a specific diet, just writing down and looking at what you eat throughout the week can really cause a shift in the way you eat. When you look back at your food diary at the end of the day and you see a lot of unnecessary snacks and get guilty, you’ll find that you start cutting down on poor eating habits just out of the desire to keep your diary clean. Weird, but it worked for me.

Of course, these are all simply my opinions from my own experiences. I am in no way, shape, or form a dietitian or farmer and my words should not be taken as gospel. Everyone is different and every body has different requirements!

Chris, Here’s a little hint, buy a head of lettuce and the other vegetables separately it’ll be cheaper than the $4 bag of salad. Well, aren’t you the king of snark! Sometimes buying a prewashed bag of lettuce is cheaper than buying a bunch of romaine, especially if there are only two people in a household eating it and/or those people have busy lives and can’t make their own pasta, bread, etc. However, I do agree with you that unhealthy foods should have a tax to help subsidize either the health costs associated with a bad diet and/or help subsidize the costs of healthier choices.

All, if you’re fortunate enough to have a Trader Joe’s close to you they have much better prices and much healthier options for almost all of your grocery needs. I’m a huge fan and they’re the only reason I can eat healthy and not go broke.

Attempting to control people via taxing is disgusting. That’s just like telling people that “sad” music should cost more regardless of personal preference. Let fat people be fat, they obviously don’t care enough to do anything about it.

fresh whole grain pasta is $4 a package, Fresh baked whole grain bread? – make your own it’s cheaper.

A salmon filet in the grocery store is $10 a pound – Get a fishing pole… OK even I’m not that crazy. Really what they should do is tax the unhealthy foods and use that revenue to make the healthy ones cheaper.

Yes whole food is generally much better than processed food, but some whole foods are bad. Some whole foods are better than others and may benefit from some sort of rating system, maybe even this one, painfully shortsighted as it is.

http://www.hsph.harvard.edu//nutritionsource/what-should-you-eat/