The Enemy: Cheese

I've blogged several times about the problem of Americans' increasing weight and waists. This is a national medical problem of epidemic proportions, partly because overweight is correlated with increased risk for diabetes and other diseases.

Nutritionists and other medical experts have, naturally, been looking for causes and a lot of candidates have been proposed. And doubtless what is going on is more than one cause working at the same time.

A few causes of increasing overweight and obesity in America (and other countries) which I find plausible are as follows (not in any particular order):

• Our increasingly sedentary lives (e.g., more time spent with TV, computers, video games).
  
• Increasing size of the portions served in restaurants.
• Advertising for food (especially for fast-food chains) on TV. When food items are shown to us, it makes us want to get up and grab a snack.
• Increasing consumption of soft drinks which, with their high content of sugar (or high fructose corn syrup) are known to contribute an increasing number of calories to our diets.
• People eating more of their meals in fast-food restaurants, where the food is high in fat, sodium, and calories.

Now, I have another trend in our diets to propose as promoting weight gain: cheese. Cheese is mostly fat (from the milk it's made from), and fat is much higher in calories than the other nutrients (protein, carbohydrate, and fiber) or constituents of our food.

More and more of what we eat seems to have cheese in it or on it. Nowadays you almost can't get any sandwich with meat or poultry that does not also have cheese in it. On some restaurant menus, it's difficult to find dishes that haven't got cheese. Statistics show that cheese consumption has been increasing in America. (According to Wikipedia, US cheese consumption has nearly tripled between 1970 and 2003.)

Cheese added to a dish adds much more fat and calories than you might think. Those multilayer hamburgers, with several beef patties and several slices of cheese as well, have calorie and fat values that are almost beyond belief—like a day's worth (or more!) of fat and sodium.

So we are tempted by these restaurant offerings, and—guess what! We don't resist. Maybe we need to start to think twice when we're ordering our food.

Update, July 23, 2011
I recently read an item in Nutrition Action HealthLetter, the publication of the Center for Science in the Public Interest (the people who periodically make the news with, for example, their exposés of movie-theater popcorn) that said precisely the same thing, about the prevalence of cheese in restaurant menu offerings. But remember, you heard it here first. They also say that the dairy industry persuaded restaurants to add cheese to their menu offerings.
And I want to confess, I love cheese--but maybe not in or on everything. I like to snack on cheese by itself, or eat it in a sandwich. Once in a while I'll sprinkle grated cheese on my pasta or use cheese in cooking. But I have cut way, way down, and also I sometimes buy reduced-fat cheese. (Some of them are pretty good.) But maybe I should be worrying about the sodium in cheese as much as the fat.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein

Tying Two Subjects Together

I've blogged about the modifications that car makers need to make to a European car model before that car can be introduced to the American market (usually because of U.S. regulations). And I've blogged, more than once, about Americans' obesity.

Here is a bit of news that ties those two themes together: Since the Italian automaker FIAT now controls Chrysler, they plan to sell the tiny Fiat 500 in the U.S. One of the modifications being made to the 500 for the U.S. is wider seats. Gee, I wonder why that's necessary.

Copyright (c) 2010 by Richard Stein

We Just Keep Getting Fatter

A news item about a week ago said that furniture manufacturers are bringing out wider chairs. Why? Because Americans are getting so fat, they can't sit on normal chairs anymore.

And airlines have official policies, now, for passengers who are very heavy and need two seats to accommodate them: the passenger now must pay for two seats.

These facts should be sobering to all of us, to put it mildly. Not to mention that we keep hearing the dismal statistics: two-thirds or Americans are overweight, and 38% are obese.

There is no mystery behind these phenomena. With the exception of a few individuals who have a glandular condition (e.g., hypothyroidism) or a genetic defect, the reason is very simple: we eat too much. Okay, to be a little more precise: we eat too many calories relative to the calories we burn. This means that we need to eat less (or eat less calorie-dense food), move around more (exercise), or both. And stop believing in any magic pills, either literal pills or magical diets.

Our food portions have gotten larger (think "supersize") and we are eating more food that is simply bad for us. I've blogged about America's overweight kids before. If you let them, kids will subsist on pizza, hamburgers, hot dogs, and junk food. And then sit and play video games or tweet on their computers.

I don't know if parents give their kids 5 bucks and say "go to McDonald's." I do know that too many moms take their kids to McDonald's, for lunch and even for dinner, or bring McDonald's or KFC home for dinner. Who wants (or has the time) to cook? So goes the argument. If you care to look into it, a food item like a double cheeseburger has an astonishing number of calories. Bad enough two meat patties, instead of one; but we want to make it quite a bit worse with a slice—no, two slices--of cheese.

Start reading the nutrition information labels on the food you bring home. Request (if necessary) calorie information at McDonald's, KFC, Starbucks. Know what you're putting into your body. Besides calories, we are taking in way too much fat, sugar, and salt. These food components are in a sense addictive, and fast-food vendors and junk-food makers have made us into unhealthy-food addicts. On the addictiveness of junk food, see this link:

http://www.dailyfinance.com/story/study-says-junk-food-is-as-addictive-as-heroin-or-cigarettes/19417741/

or this British article about a book by David Kessler, former U.S. Commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/dietandfitness/7541646/Old-fashioned-hunger-doesnt-come-into-it.html?msource=MAG10

The nutritional advice, which (if we've been listening at all) we've heard over and over, is to eat more vegetables. And it's true. I guarantee (or any diet/nutrition professional can guarantee) that if you eat plenty of celery, carrots, and other fruits and veggies, you can't possibly be fat. Note, salad is not okay if you're going to pile on the dressing, nor veggies if you're going to drown them in butter.

Yogurt, a few decades ago, was usually eaten only by "health-food nuts." Today it is very popular. But will it help us to slim down? Those flavored yogurts are sweetened and have twice the calories that plain yogurt has. Eat plain, fat-free yogurt. Personally, I like the taste of plain yogurt. I never eat those flavored ones because I don't think that the sweeteners go well with the natural tart taste of yogurt.

People tend to think that anything healthy has to taste bad, or that healthy eating habits are too austere and their food just won't taste good. It's not true. There are plenty of books, magazines, web sites and so forth that can show you how to have tasty but healthy food.

And don't forget that eating less calorie-dense food is only half the story. The other is more exercise. I notice how many people take the elevator instead of climbing the stairs in, say, the public library. Even to go just one floor. There's the amusing but all-too-true story of the thirty-something who takes the elevator to his/her health club and then uses the stair-stepper machine. And he or she never even thinks about the contradiction there.

And don't drive around and around trying to find the closest parking space at the mall or supermarket. Make a point to park a little further away. You need the exercise. Believe me. Or believe your mirror.

Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein

Television makes us fat

You've probably heard over and over—it's even discussed elsewhere on this blog—that Americans are increasingly becoming overweight and even obese. There's been a lot of discussion among experts as to what the causes are.

I want to suggest that television is at least one possible cause. No, I don't mean the inactivity of sitting and watching TV; I mean the advertising of food on television.

Just to make a very rough and random sample, in three or four days of my own televiewing, I saw commercials for some half-dozen fast-food chains (one of them at least four times), one for yogurt, two for sausages (one of those at least twice), ice cream, a pancake house, raw chicken, baked beans—and paper plates, piled high with food to show that they can hold it. This is not an exhaustive list. The Fourth of July is approaching so the sausages and paper plates are to be expected, I guess.

My theory is that watching food commercials—seeing the sponsors' food items shown, often in close-up, in their best make-up (and that's not totally facetious: food is doctored for still photography, as in magazines, and I'm sure something similar is done for TV) so as to look as appetizing as possible—doesn't this make us hungry? Some social scientist needs to do a study to show just how often seeing a TV commercial for food makes the viewer get up during a commercial break and go to the refrigerator. Meanwhile, I've got this bit of advice: the next time a food commercial comes on, showing that double cheeseburger, quickly change the channel, look away--anything but watch it and start to salivate.

And then there are the cooking shows on TV and other food programs. I know that those make me hungry, maybe more so that the food commercials. I'm pretty much immune to most of the food commercials because I almost never eat fast food and I eat almost no red meat. So because of how I have conditioned myself, that close-up shot of a big, juicy burger isn't going to do it for me. But I'm in the minority.

Update, June 28, 2012
Yesterday the TV news reported on a study done by the University of Southern California that shows that TV ads for fatty foods make the viewer crave fatty foods. I feel this shows that I was right in what I said in 2009.
Copyright © 2009 by Richard Stein

Our Overweight Kids

Probably everybody knows that there's an obesity epidemic in America. Something like a quarter of Americans are obese and, if you add in the percentage who are simply overweight, it comes to about a third.

It's also been widely mentioned that there is an obesity epidemic among America's kids. One reason for this is thought to be kids' lack of exercise: too much time spent with TV, computers, and video games. To lump all these together, public health officials urge parents to limit kids' "screen time."

But diet has to be a factor, too. Americans' consumption of soft drinks is enormous. Liquids in our diet—probably excluding soup—don't fill us up, so they just add calories.

If they are allowed to do so, kids will virtually live on hot dogs, hamburgers, and pizza. The very large component of our diet that fast food represents has to be one reason why we've gained a lot of weight.

When it comes to kids, the question is what responsibility the parents have for kids' poor diets. Certainly when they're big kids, and they go to the mall on their own or gather with friends after school (in my day it was the soda fountain, but who has even heard of a soda fountain in the last, what? 40 or 50 years?), they are outside of parents' control. But with younger kids, I think the parents are responsible. How many moms, when their husbands are working late and not coming home for dinner, take the kids to McDonald's or some place like that? I personally almost never eat in places like McDonald's or Burger King, but if I go to the mall and eat in the mall's food court, I see parents eating with their kids. There are healthier choices, but I see them feeding their kids pizza, hamburgers, tacos, and so on.

Again, with older kids, preaching to them probably will do no good; but where parents could have a positive influence on what their kids eat, they're not doing a good job.

The consequence is that these kids may develop Type II diabetes and other illnesses associated with overweight even while they are in their teens. It's tragic. And it's all preventable.

Copyright © 2009 by Richard Stein