Food Revolution

Posted on April 13, 2011 by Michael

I just watched an episode of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution on ABC. It’s basically about this health food chef who goes around to schools in America to try and make a difference in what kids are eating. He started out in Huntington, West Virginia in the first season and apparently made a positive difference there – despite the resistance.

I didn’t see that first season due to my general boycott of shitty network television, but I did catch Oliver in an interview with Jon Stewart recently and I really liked what I saw. Since then I’ve added the show to my DVR recordings and watched the first episode of season 2 just tonight. The editing and format is a little bit all over the place, but the episode had some important information. Of course there were the staggering statistics of what kids eat every day/week/year in sugar/fat/pure feces, but there was also the fact that the L.A. school system will not allow the show to film in a single school. They claim they’re doing well and have nothing to hide, but a 2006 study says otherwise:

To determine the prevalence and identify demographic and socioeconomic correlates of childhood overweight, we assessed height and weight data on 281,630 Los Angeles County, CA, public school students collected during school-based physical fitness testing in 2001. Overweight prevalence was 20.6% overall and varied by race/ethnicity: 25.2% among Latinos, 20.0% among Pacific Islanders, 19.4% among blacks, 17.6% among American Indians, 13.0% among whites, and 11.9% among Asians. By using multilevel analysis, we found that school-level percentage of students enrolled in free or reduced-price meal programs was independently associated with overweight, after controlling for school-level median household income and student-level demographic characteristics.

I suspect there is a combination of stubbornness and special interests involved here. Companies make a lot of money off selling shitty food to kids, so it isn’t going to be easy to fix the epidemic. But it’s all the more distressing when the 2nd largest school district in the nation won’t even bother to acknowledge the problem.

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Your kid is a reflection of you

Posted on April 7, 2009 by Michael

It looks like Huntington, Virginia may be losing its title of most disgusting place in America. The new title holder will be…the rest of America.

A striking new study says almost 1 in 5 American 4-year-olds is obese, and the rate is alarmingly higher among American Indian children, with nearly a third of them obese. Researchers were surprised to see differences by race at so early an age.

Overall, more than half a million 4-year-olds are obese, the study suggests. Obesity is more common in Hispanic and black youngsters, too, but the disparity is most startling in American Indians, whose rate is almost double that of whites.

The lead author said that rate is worrisome among children so young, even in a population at higher risk for obesity because of other health problems and economic disadvantages.

“Economic disadvantages” is the biggest cop-out. It is wholly possible to eat healthy without spending a load of money on food. Beside that, it’s really quite easy for most people to go for a fucking walk, even if they do decide to have that diarrhea-inducing chalupa from Taco Bell.

Dr. Glenn Flores, a pediatrics and public health professor at University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, said the research is an important contribution to studies documenting racial and ethnic disparities in children’s weight.

“The cumulative evidence is alarming because within just a few decades, America will become a ‘minority majority’ nation,” he said. Without interventions, the next generation “will be at very high risk” for heart disease, high blood pressure, cancers, joint diseases and other problems connected with obesity, said Flores, who was not involved in the new research.

The thing is, the numbers released are alarming no matter the ethnicity or race. They are all absurd. No 4 year old should be obese. In fact, no person without an uncontrollable medical condition should be remotely close to obese.

Willingly fat and obese people are immoral monsters. They are willfully throwing away a human life due to laziness. This is hardly any different from being able to prevent a person from being shot in the face but deciding that the re-run of Seinfeld is just too good to pass up. Both instances are wastes of human lives due to being a lazy fuck-up. Overweight people who do not put forth any effort to become healthy and thus save a human life (their own) deserve absolutely no respect. These people should be helped as much as possible until it becomes clear they have no desire to be good individuals. At that point, they deserve all the scorn we would give an attempted murderer. If they die due to their obesity – without ever having attempted a healthy lifestyle – they deserve to be remembered as killers.

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Huntington, West Virginia: Most disgusting place in America

Posted on November 17, 2008 by Michael

Apparently, Huntington, West Virginia is the fattest town in America. And they don’t care.

As a portly woman plodded ahead of him on the sidewalk, the obese mayor of America’s fattest and unhealthiest city explained why health is not a big local issue.

“It doesn’t come up,” said David Felinton, 5-foot-9 and 233 pounds, as he walked toward City Hall one recent morning. “We’ve got a lot of economic challenges here in Huntington. That’s usually the focus.”

I’m really glad the reporter went ahead and did the research for this article. The very next graf:

Huntington’s economy has withered, its poverty rate is worse than the national average, and vagrants haunt a downtown riverfront park. But this city’s financial woes are not nearly as bad as its health.

I guess I shouldn’t expect a town that doesn’t seem to even discuss its horrid weight problem to do well with its economy. Health is one of the most important aspects of life, usually regardless of one’s priorities. By ignoring something so significant, this town has demonstrated its willful stupidity. That stupidity, in addition to America’s existing woes, seems to have spread to its economy. Of course, I say its “willful stupidity” because it seems doubtful one could ignore all the broken chairs, crowded rooms, and cracked sidewalks in such a fat, disgusting town.

This city on the Ohio River is surrounded by Appalachia’s thinly populated hills

This just makes things all the worse. This is hiking country. It doesn’t take much to go for a walk in the hills and mountains (not to mention just around the damn neighborhood). These people are wasting their health when they could truly exploit it to seek out the beauty that is the West Virginia landscape. The overweight residents of this town who plainly do not care about health are doing a disservice to themselves, to their children, and to the rest of their town. It isn’t that they overweight and thus bad. That isn’t true. It’s that they’re overweight and they do not care. That’s morally repugnant behavior. We do not want to treat other humans with such physical (or mental, for the matter) disdain, why would we want to do it to ourselves?

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