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.

Filed under: Politics and Social | Tagged: , , , , | 5 Comments »

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?

Filed under: News | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | 7 Comments »