Quote (Bazi @ Aug 2 2023 06:46pm)
Skimmed through but I’m sure I missed a lot of important posts so pardon if this point has already been mentioned
There is no doubt that given our access to wealth, the standards for our foods should increase to 1st world peers and we are clearly lagging
There are a couple main problems I can immediately think of that contribute to this but there are numerous issues we have
Food industry preventing necessary changes. How long was the low fat high sugar diet paraded, with absolutely full knowledge this was backwards. Several decades? Even now health literacy even amongst educated individuals remains poor, never the less lower socioeconomic tiers. Slowly changing but emphasis on slowly. Those naked brand juices that are so popular have 50+ g of sugar a pop. American college of pediatrics has placed juice in the same category as soda, albeit a couple decades late. High sugar is just one example, there are numerous carcinogens in our foods/drinks. In all of our lifetimes colon cancer screening guidelines will change to 40 and probably 35 because (from currently 45 and 50 a few years back) because of the alarming increase in colon cancer rates
Culture and accountability. Speaking broadly and generally, our culture is one to deflect accountability. Common across all socioeconomic tiers. We are stubborn to the core. It’s certainly complicated because billions upon billions of dollars over 40 years have gone into brainwashing a society, how do you really undo this? In medschool we ran a homeless shelter food services on Thursdays. The hits were pizza, lasagna. There was one time we made a health conscious chili , organic ground beef and cheese etc. the dude bringing the cheese separately was delayed so we got there with just the chili minus cheese. People actually preferred not to eat it and even when the cheese came word got out and they went to other shelters for their meal. I think we served less than 20 people and normally we would serve hundreds. So much time wasted that week ha. Because of shelter rules we were forced to throw away the food that was not eaten. Buckets of good quality chili in the garbage. We sneaked some to take back but had to throw away a lot.
This is just an anecdotal story but the food situation is layered with complexities and there isn’t just one problem
I would like to add that an obesogenic infrastructure adds to the problem.
One explanatory model could be, the social acceptance of overweight following the lack of necessity to transport by bike/on foot (or at all), which makes people less self conscious and thus easier seduced to eat unhealthy. But I'm sure if you think about it a little longer you'll find a lot of interaction between different factors. The promotion by the industries is surely a big one, although other 1st world countries have seen the same to some extend and I feel it cannot fully explain the effect we see.
The food service was an awesome thing of you to do in medschool
If people just leave because the food isn't to their liking perhaps they're not hungry enough
Are you keen on going into gastroenterology?