I read this thread:
http://www.icmag.com/ic/showthread.php?t=72483
And realized I had to write this thread rather than just post a reply.
You’ve all heard about it. There’s a pandemic going on in the Western world. Obesity increases faster than the polar ice is melting.
In rogue states such as Mississippi and West Virginia, the number of people considered obese are close to 1 out of 3, and the Department of Health and Human Resources (HHS) estimates that 64% of all Americans are presently overweight.
And it’s getting worse. Fast.
The culprit is junk food, and overeating. When you say junk food, most people think of fast food such as hamburgers, but it includes any type of food that is overcooked (cooking food ruins vitamins, fibers and the enzymes that the body needs to digest it) or saturated with fat, salt and sugar. Your grandma’s apple pie is also junk food.
Let’s use pizza as an example. It is presently the world’s most popular dish, and is served everywhere in various forms and sizes. Pizza consists of a flat bread made out of the least nutritious type of flour. On it you put some processed tomato sauce or ketchup, then a layer of fatty cheese (generally mozzarella), and top with scraps of meat, veggies or whatever. The whole thing is cooked in an oven heated at 450F/230º, in order to kill the few, surviving vitamins in there.
It is fat, salty and contains practically nothing that your body needs to function properly in terms of nutrients and fibers. You might as well just soak some cardboard, flavor it with curry and eat it. Comes out even. Compare it to if you would stuff that pizza into a mixer, run it with some water into a solution and feed it to your plants. They would soon croak from lack of vital nutrients. Your body is a somewhat more complex machine than a plant, but you eventually croak from this type of ‘non-food’ yourself.
Fat, overweight or simply junk food eating people contract the following ailments and diseases:
• Hypertension
• Dyslipidemia (high total cholesterol)
• Type 2 diabetes
• Coronary heart disease
• Stroke
• Gallbladder disease
• Osteoarthritis
• Sleep apnea and respiratory problems
• Some cancers (endometrial, breast, and colon)
Not to forget a lousy sex life, or no sex life at all. Heart attack is the #1 death cause in the world, and the #1 premature death cause in the western world. Junk food (together with alcohol and Tobacco) is the #1 cause of heart attack.
Which means that people that potentially could live long and healthy lives eat themselves to illnesses and death, simply because they are unwilling or unable to distinguish ‘good’ food from ‘bad’ food.
Who provides the ‘bad’ food? The food and restaurant industry simply looves pizza (still just the top of the ice berg).
It is extremely cheap to make (high quality vegetables, fruit and meat is expensive because the raw products are expensive), while people for some strange reason accept to pay high prices for the finished product. How much do you pay for a take-away pizza today? At least $10. Probably cost around a dollar or less to manufacture. That’s good profit. Only plumbers and Cocaine drug lords have a better profit ratio.
In terms of addictiveness, junk food addicts psychologically. You develop bad eating habits successively, and at the same time as you develop that craving for fatty/salty/sugary foods, you often develop a dislike for non-fatty/salty/sugary foods.
So, let’s bring this together into a conclusion.
Junk food is a drug, if you accept the reasoning that psychological addictiveness is a form of addictiveness. In any case, it is a really bad 'habit'.
Junk food makes you physically ill and kills you prematurely.
While the junk food industry profits greatly from manufacturing and selling junk food, junk food costs society astronomical amounts of money in terms of hospitalization, medication, lowered productivity (fat people are less fit to work), etc.
We’re talking about the most dangerous drug the industrialized society has ever encountered. The ill-effects of crack, heroine or amphetamines cannot even be compared, and even mentioning Cannabis in this context would be utterly ridiculous, since it never killed or made anyone sick, and wouldn’t cost society a cent if billions of taxpayer’s money weren’t pumped into a fictive “War on Drugs”.
So my question to the ass-hats that pretend to run America is:
What is the difference between a drug dealer that stalks the schoolyard, and the candy machines you find in the school lobby?
http://www.icmag.com/ic/showthread.php?t=72483
And realized I had to write this thread rather than just post a reply.
You’ve all heard about it. There’s a pandemic going on in the Western world. Obesity increases faster than the polar ice is melting.
In rogue states such as Mississippi and West Virginia, the number of people considered obese are close to 1 out of 3, and the Department of Health and Human Resources (HHS) estimates that 64% of all Americans are presently overweight.
And it’s getting worse. Fast.
The culprit is junk food, and overeating. When you say junk food, most people think of fast food such as hamburgers, but it includes any type of food that is overcooked (cooking food ruins vitamins, fibers and the enzymes that the body needs to digest it) or saturated with fat, salt and sugar. Your grandma’s apple pie is also junk food.
Let’s use pizza as an example. It is presently the world’s most popular dish, and is served everywhere in various forms and sizes. Pizza consists of a flat bread made out of the least nutritious type of flour. On it you put some processed tomato sauce or ketchup, then a layer of fatty cheese (generally mozzarella), and top with scraps of meat, veggies or whatever. The whole thing is cooked in an oven heated at 450F/230º, in order to kill the few, surviving vitamins in there.
It is fat, salty and contains practically nothing that your body needs to function properly in terms of nutrients and fibers. You might as well just soak some cardboard, flavor it with curry and eat it. Comes out even. Compare it to if you would stuff that pizza into a mixer, run it with some water into a solution and feed it to your plants. They would soon croak from lack of vital nutrients. Your body is a somewhat more complex machine than a plant, but you eventually croak from this type of ‘non-food’ yourself.
Fat, overweight or simply junk food eating people contract the following ailments and diseases:
• Hypertension
• Dyslipidemia (high total cholesterol)
• Type 2 diabetes
• Coronary heart disease
• Stroke
• Gallbladder disease
• Osteoarthritis
• Sleep apnea and respiratory problems
• Some cancers (endometrial, breast, and colon)
Not to forget a lousy sex life, or no sex life at all. Heart attack is the #1 death cause in the world, and the #1 premature death cause in the western world. Junk food (together with alcohol and Tobacco) is the #1 cause of heart attack.
Which means that people that potentially could live long and healthy lives eat themselves to illnesses and death, simply because they are unwilling or unable to distinguish ‘good’ food from ‘bad’ food.
Who provides the ‘bad’ food? The food and restaurant industry simply looves pizza (still just the top of the ice berg).
It is extremely cheap to make (high quality vegetables, fruit and meat is expensive because the raw products are expensive), while people for some strange reason accept to pay high prices for the finished product. How much do you pay for a take-away pizza today? At least $10. Probably cost around a dollar or less to manufacture. That’s good profit. Only plumbers and Cocaine drug lords have a better profit ratio.
In terms of addictiveness, junk food addicts psychologically. You develop bad eating habits successively, and at the same time as you develop that craving for fatty/salty/sugary foods, you often develop a dislike for non-fatty/salty/sugary foods.
So, let’s bring this together into a conclusion.
Junk food is a drug, if you accept the reasoning that psychological addictiveness is a form of addictiveness. In any case, it is a really bad 'habit'.
Junk food makes you physically ill and kills you prematurely.
While the junk food industry profits greatly from manufacturing and selling junk food, junk food costs society astronomical amounts of money in terms of hospitalization, medication, lowered productivity (fat people are less fit to work), etc.
We’re talking about the most dangerous drug the industrialized society has ever encountered. The ill-effects of crack, heroine or amphetamines cannot even be compared, and even mentioning Cannabis in this context would be utterly ridiculous, since it never killed or made anyone sick, and wouldn’t cost society a cent if billions of taxpayer’s money weren’t pumped into a fictive “War on Drugs”.
So my question to the ass-hats that pretend to run America is:
What is the difference between a drug dealer that stalks the schoolyard, and the candy machines you find in the school lobby?
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