|
Read the rules in the OP before posting, please.In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up! NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action. |
On June 20 2013 06:32 JonnyBNoHo wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 06:10 Klondikebar wrote:On June 20 2013 05:54 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 05:51 aksfjh wrote:On June 20 2013 05:47 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 05:41 aksfjh wrote:On June 20 2013 04:49 Danglars wrote:On June 20 2013 04:30 Stratos_speAr wrote:On June 20 2013 04:25 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 04:18 Klondikebar wrote:
[quote]
I like how when people blame poor people for being poor they throw around the world choice like it's appropriate in any way other than the most technical sense.
Yeah, poor people "choose" to eat fast food but when you can't afford nicer food, there's no grocery store anywhere around your neighborhood, and you don't have time to cook anyway...wtf else are you gonna eat? Why would there be a fast food restaurant but no grocery store nearby other than the collective personal preferences of the neighborhood? "Collective personal preference." When it comes to something like food (a necessity), you take what you can get. The consumer doesn't strictly dictate what is available. And yes, even if there is a grocery store around, it is true that healthier foods tend to be noticeably more expensive than cheaper foods, which is a huge factor when talking about obesity rates among the poor. Going from calling food a necessity to talking about obesity rates is hinting at the economic reality. The rarity in America is the urgent need for food, the desire for food more often becomes counterproductive and dangerous when we're talking about the poor. Try telling an economist that there is an objective and quantifiable need for this or that. Armed with choice, they choose fatty fast foods at high enough rates to be a statistically significant part of the obese in America. This is a choice despite all the government's education pushes for healthy eating in many programs. We've seen more and more assistance be tilted to healthy foods, but the second you have a dollar and a choice, the healthy foods by and large are not the choice. May I suggest that if fatty foods from KFC, McDonalds, and others didn't taste so darn good, this would not be a problem? If those carrots and zucchini were akin to adding opium hash to a meal, you'd be seeing a lot more healthy poor walking around (Poor being a relative term in this sense, and not an absolute term, since your average poor person in America has 2 color TV's and satellite/cable) First, I can't believe people stick "color tv" as some sort of luxury good poor people shouldn't have access to. I really think many of you literally think poor people should be working 100 hours a week, and when they aren't working, either cooking or studying to "get ahead." You treat leisure for somebody making less than $20k a year as some sort of sin, unless maybe it's sitting around a radio in a dark room. I'll tell you right now, the taste of the food isn't as big of a deal. It's obviously a factor, but not the entire story. For an adult, fast food is a choice that is cheap, work-free, and convenient. You do nothing more than pay the cashier and you receive a meal that fixes your hunger. There's no worry about proportions, which are decided for you, nor can you accidentally ruin the meal. There's also the case for timing, since bringing a meal home at 8 or 9 at night means kids won't be up until 11 eating, instead of having to start dinner that late. Poor people aren't choosing to eat fast food and be unhealthy because they like to engorge themselves more than the rest of us, but because it makes the most economic sense for now and the foreseeable future. Some of you dolts need to realize that these people aren't much different than us when it comes to aggregate desires and decisions. They are forced, in their situation, to make bad long-term decisions to get by in the short term. About the only choice they are given is to take a gamble and sacrifice what they can spare for a chance to move up 1 rung on the socioeconomic ladder in a lifetime, which doesn't look much different than the rung they are on. You lost me in the last paragraph. Are you saying their decisions are poor ones or good ones? They make poor choices naturally because of their situation, but if they sit down and draw the good choices to their natural conclusions, they see that their situation doesn't change much (nominally better, but not really better). That ignores the economic history. Their situation exists because the communities decided to favor the unhealthy over the healthy. Umm...and you're just completely rewriting economic history. Poor communities never decided to be unhealthy. They've always had to squeeze as many calories per dollar into their food as they can. As it became easier and easier to squeeze calories out of a dollar (i.e. fast food) yes they started eating too many calories BUT that doesn't change the fact that grocery stores aren't the answer. Time is still very valuable and groceries aren't practical. I'm not sure whether you're deliberately skipping my posts or just missing them but I list many reasons why grocery stores don't work other than the price tab. The obesity / unhealthy food issue is a recent thing. Every issue you listed existed prior to concerns over obesity. Walking to a grocery store was always a pain. Cooking food always took time. The introduction of fast food meant that people could make the bad choice to trade health and money for convenience. And they did so in droves.
Ghettoization was not some community choice where people were previously doing well but decided to live in a food desert: it is the result of intentional and unintentional polices that disfavor people who make bad choices like being poor or black.
|
2nd Worst City in CA8938 Posts
The problem with obesity and fast food is becoming much more of an obvious concern among poor youth. They have no income (only meager allowances, if even that), do not cook, and often do not have the means to get groceries, whether financially or physically. These kids are generally juggling around a few/several dollars a week, and tend to gravitate towards a cheeseburger a day as opposed to an apple because it's much more filling and satisfying.
In many areas, we have created an environment for our kids to rely on fast food. When they see that it is much more convenient and cheap (opportunity costs must be weighed in) to eat fast food (and generally more filling), of course they'll tend to lean towards fast food as opposed to groceries. You can say that parents should do a better job of forcing their kids to eat healthy, but low-income parents generally aren't afforded as much time and resources to keep tabs on their children. You can cook healthier dinners for them at home, but what they eat while they're out of the house and you're at work is mostly out of your hands.
One of the major problems with obesity is that it is similar to smoking cigarettes, in that the effects culminate slowly so that there is less awareness of the consequences. This is why trying to raise awareness amongst the youth about health and obesity is difficult, because they don't experience the consequences instantly and shrug them off. Though, eventually, the effects will be plainly visible, and by that time you're just the fat kid and your parents are labelled as horrible educators.
In the end, price and convenience plays a huge part in why obesity rates are so high and getting worse among the youth. In Japan, when you're eating out, portion sizes are incredibly smaller and more expensive to boot, so it is actually worth taking the time to go to the grocery store and cook, and kids don't have the luxury of eating crap as often. It is obviously possible to curb this problem if most people just decided to not consume so many calories a day, and in accordance with that, settle for a fruit or two instead of a burger, but who are we kidding? Humans are rational beings, and will always weigh the costs/opportunity costs, but in the case of obesity, with the physical costs initially hidden, junk food becomes that much more enticing of a choice. This is why I think it would be great if we could establish a junk food tax and use the revenue to subsidize fruits/vegetables and to make them more accessible, but that's not gonna happen any time soon so long as obesity is seen as only a product of choice and not a product of both choice and environment.
|
On June 20 2013 06:32 JonnyBNoHo wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 06:10 Klondikebar wrote:On June 20 2013 05:54 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 05:51 aksfjh wrote:On June 20 2013 05:47 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 05:41 aksfjh wrote:On June 20 2013 04:49 Danglars wrote:On June 20 2013 04:30 Stratos_speAr wrote:On June 20 2013 04:25 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 04:18 Klondikebar wrote:
[quote]
I like how when people blame poor people for being poor they throw around the world choice like it's appropriate in any way other than the most technical sense.
Yeah, poor people "choose" to eat fast food but when you can't afford nicer food, there's no grocery store anywhere around your neighborhood, and you don't have time to cook anyway...wtf else are you gonna eat? Why would there be a fast food restaurant but no grocery store nearby other than the collective personal preferences of the neighborhood? "Collective personal preference." When it comes to something like food (a necessity), you take what you can get. The consumer doesn't strictly dictate what is available. And yes, even if there is a grocery store around, it is true that healthier foods tend to be noticeably more expensive than cheaper foods, which is a huge factor when talking about obesity rates among the poor. Going from calling food a necessity to talking about obesity rates is hinting at the economic reality. The rarity in America is the urgent need for food, the desire for food more often becomes counterproductive and dangerous when we're talking about the poor. Try telling an economist that there is an objective and quantifiable need for this or that. Armed with choice, they choose fatty fast foods at high enough rates to be a statistically significant part of the obese in America. This is a choice despite all the government's education pushes for healthy eating in many programs. We've seen more and more assistance be tilted to healthy foods, but the second you have a dollar and a choice, the healthy foods by and large are not the choice. May I suggest that if fatty foods from KFC, McDonalds, and others didn't taste so darn good, this would not be a problem? If those carrots and zucchini were akin to adding opium hash to a meal, you'd be seeing a lot more healthy poor walking around (Poor being a relative term in this sense, and not an absolute term, since your average poor person in America has 2 color TV's and satellite/cable) First, I can't believe people stick "color tv" as some sort of luxury good poor people shouldn't have access to. I really think many of you literally think poor people should be working 100 hours a week, and when they aren't working, either cooking or studying to "get ahead." You treat leisure for somebody making less than $20k a year as some sort of sin, unless maybe it's sitting around a radio in a dark room. I'll tell you right now, the taste of the food isn't as big of a deal. It's obviously a factor, but not the entire story. For an adult, fast food is a choice that is cheap, work-free, and convenient. You do nothing more than pay the cashier and you receive a meal that fixes your hunger. There's no worry about proportions, which are decided for you, nor can you accidentally ruin the meal. There's also the case for timing, since bringing a meal home at 8 or 9 at night means kids won't be up until 11 eating, instead of having to start dinner that late. Poor people aren't choosing to eat fast food and be unhealthy because they like to engorge themselves more than the rest of us, but because it makes the most economic sense for now and the foreseeable future. Some of you dolts need to realize that these people aren't much different than us when it comes to aggregate desires and decisions. They are forced, in their situation, to make bad long-term decisions to get by in the short term. About the only choice they are given is to take a gamble and sacrifice what they can spare for a chance to move up 1 rung on the socioeconomic ladder in a lifetime, which doesn't look much different than the rung they are on. You lost me in the last paragraph. Are you saying their decisions are poor ones or good ones? They make poor choices naturally because of their situation, but if they sit down and draw the good choices to their natural conclusions, they see that their situation doesn't change much (nominally better, but not really better). That ignores the economic history. Their situation exists because the communities decided to favor the unhealthy over the healthy. Umm...and you're just completely rewriting economic history. Poor communities never decided to be unhealthy. They've always had to squeeze as many calories per dollar into their food as they can. As it became easier and easier to squeeze calories out of a dollar (i.e. fast food) yes they started eating too many calories BUT that doesn't change the fact that grocery stores aren't the answer. Time is still very valuable and groceries aren't practical. I'm not sure whether you're deliberately skipping my posts or just missing them but I list many reasons why grocery stores don't work other than the price tab. The obesity / unhealthy food issue is a recent thing. Every issue you listed existed prior to concerns over obesity. Walking to a grocery store was always a pain. Cooking food always took time. The introduction of fast food meant that people could make the bad choice to trade health and money for convenience. And they did so in droves.
I imagine it goes hand-in-hand with an increase in single parent households and a real decline in median wages (and below) since the early 80s. I'm looking into single-parent households to see how closely it relates, but I'm willing to bet there is a noticeable change in the 70s or 80s, which will track with obesity.
|
Finding actual nutrition in the US is tough. Even cutting out fast food, the quality of food at grocery stores is pretty atrocious. I'll spare my personal anecdotes living between the States and Italy, but from what I understand, basically the way food is processed and produced leaves very little nutritional value. Monoculture is one big example, and agriculture policies just compound the issue, making it easier to enable those kinds of practices (GMO etc).
|
On June 20 2013 06:52 HunterX11 wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 06:32 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 06:10 Klondikebar wrote:On June 20 2013 05:54 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 05:51 aksfjh wrote:On June 20 2013 05:47 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 05:41 aksfjh wrote:On June 20 2013 04:49 Danglars wrote:On June 20 2013 04:30 Stratos_speAr wrote:On June 20 2013 04:25 JonnyBNoHo wrote:
[quote]
Why would there be a fast food restaurant but no grocery store nearby other than the collective personal preferences of the neighborhood? "Collective personal preference." When it comes to something like food (a necessity), you take what you can get. The consumer doesn't strictly dictate what is available. And yes, even if there is a grocery store around, it is true that healthier foods tend to be noticeably more expensive than cheaper foods, which is a huge factor when talking about obesity rates among the poor. Going from calling food a necessity to talking about obesity rates is hinting at the economic reality. The rarity in America is the urgent need for food, the desire for food more often becomes counterproductive and dangerous when we're talking about the poor. Try telling an economist that there is an objective and quantifiable need for this or that. Armed with choice, they choose fatty fast foods at high enough rates to be a statistically significant part of the obese in America. This is a choice despite all the government's education pushes for healthy eating in many programs. We've seen more and more assistance be tilted to healthy foods, but the second you have a dollar and a choice, the healthy foods by and large are not the choice. May I suggest that if fatty foods from KFC, McDonalds, and others didn't taste so darn good, this would not be a problem? If those carrots and zucchini were akin to adding opium hash to a meal, you'd be seeing a lot more healthy poor walking around (Poor being a relative term in this sense, and not an absolute term, since your average poor person in America has 2 color TV's and satellite/cable) First, I can't believe people stick "color tv" as some sort of luxury good poor people shouldn't have access to. I really think many of you literally think poor people should be working 100 hours a week, and when they aren't working, either cooking or studying to "get ahead." You treat leisure for somebody making less than $20k a year as some sort of sin, unless maybe it's sitting around a radio in a dark room. I'll tell you right now, the taste of the food isn't as big of a deal. It's obviously a factor, but not the entire story. For an adult, fast food is a choice that is cheap, work-free, and convenient. You do nothing more than pay the cashier and you receive a meal that fixes your hunger. There's no worry about proportions, which are decided for you, nor can you accidentally ruin the meal. There's also the case for timing, since bringing a meal home at 8 or 9 at night means kids won't be up until 11 eating, instead of having to start dinner that late. Poor people aren't choosing to eat fast food and be unhealthy because they like to engorge themselves more than the rest of us, but because it makes the most economic sense for now and the foreseeable future. Some of you dolts need to realize that these people aren't much different than us when it comes to aggregate desires and decisions. They are forced, in their situation, to make bad long-term decisions to get by in the short term. About the only choice they are given is to take a gamble and sacrifice what they can spare for a chance to move up 1 rung on the socioeconomic ladder in a lifetime, which doesn't look much different than the rung they are on. You lost me in the last paragraph. Are you saying their decisions are poor ones or good ones? They make poor choices naturally because of their situation, but if they sit down and draw the good choices to their natural conclusions, they see that their situation doesn't change much (nominally better, but not really better). That ignores the economic history. Their situation exists because the communities decided to favor the unhealthy over the healthy. Umm...and you're just completely rewriting economic history. Poor communities never decided to be unhealthy. They've always had to squeeze as many calories per dollar into their food as they can. As it became easier and easier to squeeze calories out of a dollar (i.e. fast food) yes they started eating too many calories BUT that doesn't change the fact that grocery stores aren't the answer. Time is still very valuable and groceries aren't practical. I'm not sure whether you're deliberately skipping my posts or just missing them but I list many reasons why grocery stores don't work other than the price tab. The obesity / unhealthy food issue is a recent thing. Every issue you listed existed prior to concerns over obesity. Walking to a grocery store was always a pain. Cooking food always took time. The introduction of fast food meant that people could make the bad choice to trade health and money for convenience. And they did so in droves. Ghettoization was not some community choice where people were previously doing well but decided to live in a food desert: it is the result of intentional and unintentional polices that disfavor people who make bad choices like being poor or black.
I'm not seeing the distinction. It's not a choice but a product of many choices?
On June 20 2013 07:11 Souma wrote:
The problem with obesity and fast food is becoming much more of an obvious concern among poor youth. They have no income (only meager allowances, if even that), do not cook, and often do not have the means to get groceries, whether financially or physically. These kids are generally juggling around a few/several dollars a week, and tend to gravitate towards a cheeseburger a day as opposed to an apple because it's much more filling and satisfying.
In many areas, we have created an environment for our kids to rely on fast food. When they see that it is much more convenient and cheap (opportunity costs must be weighed in) to eat fast food (and generally more filling), of course they'll tend to lean towards fast food as opposed to groceries. You can say that parents should do a better job of forcing their kids to eat healthy, but low-income parents generally aren't afforded as much time and resources to keep tabs on their children. You can cook healthier dinners for them at home, but what they eat while they're out of the house and you're at work is mostly out of your hands.
One of the major problems with obesity is that it is similar to smoking cigarettes, in that the effects culminate slowly so that there is less awareness of the consequences. This is why trying to raise awareness amongst the youth about health and obesity is difficult, because they don't experience the consequences instantly and shrug them off. Though, eventually, the effects will be plainly visible, and by that time you're just the fat kid and your parents are labelled as horrible educators.
In the end, price and convenience plays a huge part in why obesity rates are so high and getting worse among the youth. In Japan, when you're eating out, portion sizes are incredibly smaller and more expensive to boot, so it is actually worth taking the time to go to the grocery store and cook, and kids don't have the luxury of eating crap as often. It is obviously possible to curb this problem if most people just decided to not consume so many calories a day, and in accordance with that, settle for a fruit or two instead of a burger, but who are we kidding? Humans are rational beings, and will always weigh the costs/opportunity costs, but in the case of obesity, with the physical costs initially hidden, junk food becomes that much more enticing of a choice. This is why I think it would be great if we could establish a junk food tax and use the revenue to subsidize fruits/vegetables and to make them more accessible, but that's not gonna happen any time soon so long as obesity is seen as only a product of choice and not a product of both choice and environment.
The environment in this case is a product of choices. Fast food is convenient and abundant because people in the past chose to eat there a lot and business owners responded by offering more.
|
On June 20 2013 07:16 aksfjh wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 06:32 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 06:10 Klondikebar wrote:On June 20 2013 05:54 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 05:51 aksfjh wrote:On June 20 2013 05:47 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 05:41 aksfjh wrote:On June 20 2013 04:49 Danglars wrote:On June 20 2013 04:30 Stratos_speAr wrote:On June 20 2013 04:25 JonnyBNoHo wrote:
[quote]
Why would there be a fast food restaurant but no grocery store nearby other than the collective personal preferences of the neighborhood? "Collective personal preference." When it comes to something like food (a necessity), you take what you can get. The consumer doesn't strictly dictate what is available. And yes, even if there is a grocery store around, it is true that healthier foods tend to be noticeably more expensive than cheaper foods, which is a huge factor when talking about obesity rates among the poor. Going from calling food a necessity to talking about obesity rates is hinting at the economic reality. The rarity in America is the urgent need for food, the desire for food more often becomes counterproductive and dangerous when we're talking about the poor. Try telling an economist that there is an objective and quantifiable need for this or that. Armed with choice, they choose fatty fast foods at high enough rates to be a statistically significant part of the obese in America. This is a choice despite all the government's education pushes for healthy eating in many programs. We've seen more and more assistance be tilted to healthy foods, but the second you have a dollar and a choice, the healthy foods by and large are not the choice. May I suggest that if fatty foods from KFC, McDonalds, and others didn't taste so darn good, this would not be a problem? If those carrots and zucchini were akin to adding opium hash to a meal, you'd be seeing a lot more healthy poor walking around (Poor being a relative term in this sense, and not an absolute term, since your average poor person in America has 2 color TV's and satellite/cable) First, I can't believe people stick "color tv" as some sort of luxury good poor people shouldn't have access to. I really think many of you literally think poor people should be working 100 hours a week, and when they aren't working, either cooking or studying to "get ahead." You treat leisure for somebody making less than $20k a year as some sort of sin, unless maybe it's sitting around a radio in a dark room. I'll tell you right now, the taste of the food isn't as big of a deal. It's obviously a factor, but not the entire story. For an adult, fast food is a choice that is cheap, work-free, and convenient. You do nothing more than pay the cashier and you receive a meal that fixes your hunger. There's no worry about proportions, which are decided for you, nor can you accidentally ruin the meal. There's also the case for timing, since bringing a meal home at 8 or 9 at night means kids won't be up until 11 eating, instead of having to start dinner that late. Poor people aren't choosing to eat fast food and be unhealthy because they like to engorge themselves more than the rest of us, but because it makes the most economic sense for now and the foreseeable future. Some of you dolts need to realize that these people aren't much different than us when it comes to aggregate desires and decisions. They are forced, in their situation, to make bad long-term decisions to get by in the short term. About the only choice they are given is to take a gamble and sacrifice what they can spare for a chance to move up 1 rung on the socioeconomic ladder in a lifetime, which doesn't look much different than the rung they are on. You lost me in the last paragraph. Are you saying their decisions are poor ones or good ones? They make poor choices naturally because of their situation, but if they sit down and draw the good choices to their natural conclusions, they see that their situation doesn't change much (nominally better, but not really better). That ignores the economic history. Their situation exists because the communities decided to favor the unhealthy over the healthy. Umm...and you're just completely rewriting economic history. Poor communities never decided to be unhealthy. They've always had to squeeze as many calories per dollar into their food as they can. As it became easier and easier to squeeze calories out of a dollar (i.e. fast food) yes they started eating too many calories BUT that doesn't change the fact that grocery stores aren't the answer. Time is still very valuable and groceries aren't practical. I'm not sure whether you're deliberately skipping my posts or just missing them but I list many reasons why grocery stores don't work other than the price tab. The obesity / unhealthy food issue is a recent thing. Every issue you listed existed prior to concerns over obesity. Walking to a grocery store was always a pain. Cooking food always took time. The introduction of fast food meant that people could make the bad choice to trade health and money for convenience. And they did so in droves. I imagine it goes hand-in-hand with an increase in single parent households and a real decline in median wages (and below) since the early 80s. I'm looking into single-parent households to see how closely it relates, but I'm willing to bet there is a noticeable change in the 70s or 80s, which will track with obesity.
I'd agree on the single parent issue. Households have had their real incomes rise though. So I doubt the decline in wages aspect is that powerful.
|
2nd Worst City in CA8938 Posts
On June 20 2013 07:22 JonnyBNoHo wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 06:52 HunterX11 wrote:On June 20 2013 06:32 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 06:10 Klondikebar wrote:On June 20 2013 05:54 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 05:51 aksfjh wrote:On June 20 2013 05:47 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 05:41 aksfjh wrote:On June 20 2013 04:49 Danglars wrote:On June 20 2013 04:30 Stratos_speAr wrote:
[quote]
"Collective personal preference."
When it comes to something like food (a necessity), you take what you can get. The consumer doesn't strictly dictate what is available.
And yes, even if there is a grocery store around, it is true that healthier foods tend to be noticeably more expensive than cheaper foods, which is a huge factor when talking about obesity rates among the poor. Going from calling food a necessity to talking about obesity rates is hinting at the economic reality. The rarity in America is the urgent need for food, the desire for food more often becomes counterproductive and dangerous when we're talking about the poor. Try telling an economist that there is an objective and quantifiable need for this or that. Armed with choice, they choose fatty fast foods at high enough rates to be a statistically significant part of the obese in America. This is a choice despite all the government's education pushes for healthy eating in many programs. We've seen more and more assistance be tilted to healthy foods, but the second you have a dollar and a choice, the healthy foods by and large are not the choice. May I suggest that if fatty foods from KFC, McDonalds, and others didn't taste so darn good, this would not be a problem? If those carrots and zucchini were akin to adding opium hash to a meal, you'd be seeing a lot more healthy poor walking around (Poor being a relative term in this sense, and not an absolute term, since your average poor person in America has 2 color TV's and satellite/cable) First, I can't believe people stick "color tv" as some sort of luxury good poor people shouldn't have access to. I really think many of you literally think poor people should be working 100 hours a week, and when they aren't working, either cooking or studying to "get ahead." You treat leisure for somebody making less than $20k a year as some sort of sin, unless maybe it's sitting around a radio in a dark room. I'll tell you right now, the taste of the food isn't as big of a deal. It's obviously a factor, but not the entire story. For an adult, fast food is a choice that is cheap, work-free, and convenient. You do nothing more than pay the cashier and you receive a meal that fixes your hunger. There's no worry about proportions, which are decided for you, nor can you accidentally ruin the meal. There's also the case for timing, since bringing a meal home at 8 or 9 at night means kids won't be up until 11 eating, instead of having to start dinner that late. Poor people aren't choosing to eat fast food and be unhealthy because they like to engorge themselves more than the rest of us, but because it makes the most economic sense for now and the foreseeable future. Some of you dolts need to realize that these people aren't much different than us when it comes to aggregate desires and decisions. They are forced, in their situation, to make bad long-term decisions to get by in the short term. About the only choice they are given is to take a gamble and sacrifice what they can spare for a chance to move up 1 rung on the socioeconomic ladder in a lifetime, which doesn't look much different than the rung they are on. You lost me in the last paragraph. Are you saying their decisions are poor ones or good ones? They make poor choices naturally because of their situation, but if they sit down and draw the good choices to their natural conclusions, they see that their situation doesn't change much (nominally better, but not really better). That ignores the economic history. Their situation exists because the communities decided to favor the unhealthy over the healthy. Umm...and you're just completely rewriting economic history. Poor communities never decided to be unhealthy. They've always had to squeeze as many calories per dollar into their food as they can. As it became easier and easier to squeeze calories out of a dollar (i.e. fast food) yes they started eating too many calories BUT that doesn't change the fact that grocery stores aren't the answer. Time is still very valuable and groceries aren't practical. I'm not sure whether you're deliberately skipping my posts or just missing them but I list many reasons why grocery stores don't work other than the price tab. The obesity / unhealthy food issue is a recent thing. Every issue you listed existed prior to concerns over obesity. Walking to a grocery store was always a pain. Cooking food always took time. The introduction of fast food meant that people could make the bad choice to trade health and money for convenience. And they did so in droves. Ghettoization was not some community choice where people were previously doing well but decided to live in a food desert: it is the result of intentional and unintentional polices that disfavor people who make bad choices like being poor or black. I'm not seeing the distinction. It's not a choice but a product of many choices? Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 07:11 Souma wrote:
The problem with obesity and fast food is becoming much more of an obvious concern among poor youth. They have no income (only meager allowances, if even that), do not cook, and often do not have the means to get groceries, whether financially or physically. These kids are generally juggling around a few/several dollars a week, and tend to gravitate towards a cheeseburger a day as opposed to an apple because it's much more filling and satisfying.
In many areas, we have created an environment for our kids to rely on fast food. When they see that it is much more convenient and cheap (opportunity costs must be weighed in) to eat fast food (and generally more filling), of course they'll tend to lean towards fast food as opposed to groceries. You can say that parents should do a better job of forcing their kids to eat healthy, but low-income parents generally aren't afforded as much time and resources to keep tabs on their children. You can cook healthier dinners for them at home, but what they eat while they're out of the house and you're at work is mostly out of your hands.
One of the major problems with obesity is that it is similar to smoking cigarettes, in that the effects culminate slowly so that there is less awareness of the consequences. This is why trying to raise awareness amongst the youth about health and obesity is difficult, because they don't experience the consequences instantly and shrug them off. Though, eventually, the effects will be plainly visible, and by that time you're just the fat kid and your parents are labelled as horrible educators.
In the end, price and convenience plays a huge part in why obesity rates are so high and getting worse among the youth. In Japan, when you're eating out, portion sizes are incredibly smaller and more expensive to boot, so it is actually worth taking the time to go to the grocery store and cook, and kids don't have the luxury of eating crap as often. It is obviously possible to curb this problem if most people just decided to not consume so many calories a day, and in accordance with that, settle for a fruit or two instead of a burger, but who are we kidding? Humans are rational beings, and will always weigh the costs/opportunity costs, but in the case of obesity, with the physical costs initially hidden, junk food becomes that much more enticing of a choice. This is why I think it would be great if we could establish a junk food tax and use the revenue to subsidize fruits/vegetables and to make them more accessible, but that's not gonna happen any time soon so long as obesity is seen as only a product of choice and not a product of both choice and environment. The environment in this case is a product of choices. Fast food is convenient and abundant because people in the past chose to eat there a lot and business owners responded by offering more.
Fast food is convenient because it's fast food. It's abundant because yes, people chose to eat there a lot, but why they chose to eat there a lot is because of their environment. In other words, their choice is a product of their environment (what choice isn't...?)
|
On June 20 2013 07:20 screamingpalm wrote:
Finding actual nutrition in the US is tough. Even cutting out fast food, the quality of food at grocery stores is pretty atrocious. I'll spare my personal anecdotes living between the States and Italy, but from what I understand, basically the way food is processed and produced leaves very little nutritional value. Monoculture is one big example, and agriculture policies just compound the issue, making it easier to enable those kinds of practices (GMO etc).
In the bulk, even though the quality of food in the US compared to other countries may be lower, the nutrition found in vegetables and low-fat proteins is still sufficient for a healthy lifestyle and a strong person. Compare the quality of food found at your average grocery store and that of fast food chains and you'll STILL find a stark difference in favor of the grocery stores. I don't accept for an instant that processing or production of vegetables, meats, milk, and eggs in American grocery stores means the nutritional value is insufficient for a healthy lifestyle. Globally it may lack by comparison, but those carrots, lettuce, cabbage, and sundry vegetables will still keep you fit should they be the norm and not fast food.
|
On June 20 2013 07:36 Souma wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 07:22 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 06:52 HunterX11 wrote:On June 20 2013 06:32 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 06:10 Klondikebar wrote:On June 20 2013 05:54 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 05:51 aksfjh wrote:On June 20 2013 05:47 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 05:41 aksfjh wrote:On June 20 2013 04:49 Danglars wrote:[quote] Going from calling food a necessity to talking about obesity rates is hinting at the economic reality. The rarity in America is the urgent need for food, the desire for food more often becomes counterproductive and dangerous when we're talking about the poor. Try telling an economist that there is an objective and quantifiable need for this or that. Armed with choice, they choose fatty fast foods at high enough rates to be a statistically significant part of the obese in America. This is a choice despite all the government's education pushes for healthy eating in many programs. We've seen more and more assistance be tilted to healthy foods, but the second you have a dollar and a choice, the healthy foods by and large are not the choice. May I suggest that if fatty foods from KFC, McDonalds, and others didn't taste so darn good, this would not be a problem? If those carrots and zucchini were akin to adding opium hash to a meal, you'd be seeing a lot more healthy poor walking around (Poor being a relative term in this sense, and not an absolute term, since your average poor person in America has 2 color TV's and satellite/cable) First, I can't believe people stick "color tv" as some sort of luxury good poor people shouldn't have access to. I really think many of you literally think poor people should be working 100 hours a week, and when they aren't working, either cooking or studying to "get ahead." You treat leisure for somebody making less than $20k a year as some sort of sin, unless maybe it's sitting around a radio in a dark room. I'll tell you right now, the taste of the food isn't as big of a deal. It's obviously a factor, but not the entire story. For an adult, fast food is a choice that is cheap, work-free, and convenient. You do nothing more than pay the cashier and you receive a meal that fixes your hunger. There's no worry about proportions, which are decided for you, nor can you accidentally ruin the meal. There's also the case for timing, since bringing a meal home at 8 or 9 at night means kids won't be up until 11 eating, instead of having to start dinner that late. Poor people aren't choosing to eat fast food and be unhealthy because they like to engorge themselves more than the rest of us, but because it makes the most economic sense for now and the foreseeable future. Some of you dolts need to realize that these people aren't much different than us when it comes to aggregate desires and decisions. They are forced, in their situation, to make bad long-term decisions to get by in the short term. About the only choice they are given is to take a gamble and sacrifice what they can spare for a chance to move up 1 rung on the socioeconomic ladder in a lifetime, which doesn't look much different than the rung they are on. You lost me in the last paragraph. Are you saying their decisions are poor ones or good ones? They make poor choices naturally because of their situation, but if they sit down and draw the good choices to their natural conclusions, they see that their situation doesn't change much (nominally better, but not really better). That ignores the economic history. Their situation exists because the communities decided to favor the unhealthy over the healthy. Umm...and you're just completely rewriting economic history. Poor communities never decided to be unhealthy. They've always had to squeeze as many calories per dollar into their food as they can. As it became easier and easier to squeeze calories out of a dollar (i.e. fast food) yes they started eating too many calories BUT that doesn't change the fact that grocery stores aren't the answer. Time is still very valuable and groceries aren't practical. I'm not sure whether you're deliberately skipping my posts or just missing them but I list many reasons why grocery stores don't work other than the price tab. The obesity / unhealthy food issue is a recent thing. Every issue you listed existed prior to concerns over obesity. Walking to a grocery store was always a pain. Cooking food always took time. The introduction of fast food meant that people could make the bad choice to trade health and money for convenience. And they did so in droves. Ghettoization was not some community choice where people were previously doing well but decided to live in a food desert: it is the result of intentional and unintentional polices that disfavor people who make bad choices like being poor or black. I'm not seeing the distinction. It's not a choice but a product of many choices? On June 20 2013 07:11 Souma wrote:
The problem with obesity and fast food is becoming much more of an obvious concern among poor youth. They have no income (only meager allowances, if even that), do not cook, and often do not have the means to get groceries, whether financially or physically. These kids are generally juggling around a few/several dollars a week, and tend to gravitate towards a cheeseburger a day as opposed to an apple because it's much more filling and satisfying.
In many areas, we have created an environment for our kids to rely on fast food. When they see that it is much more convenient and cheap (opportunity costs must be weighed in) to eat fast food (and generally more filling), of course they'll tend to lean towards fast food as opposed to groceries. You can say that parents should do a better job of forcing their kids to eat healthy, but low-income parents generally aren't afforded as much time and resources to keep tabs on their children. You can cook healthier dinners for them at home, but what they eat while they're out of the house and you're at work is mostly out of your hands.
One of the major problems with obesity is that it is similar to smoking cigarettes, in that the effects culminate slowly so that there is less awareness of the consequences. This is why trying to raise awareness amongst the youth about health and obesity is difficult, because they don't experience the consequences instantly and shrug them off. Though, eventually, the effects will be plainly visible, and by that time you're just the fat kid and your parents are labelled as horrible educators.
In the end, price and convenience plays a huge part in why obesity rates are so high and getting worse among the youth. In Japan, when you're eating out, portion sizes are incredibly smaller and more expensive to boot, so it is actually worth taking the time to go to the grocery store and cook, and kids don't have the luxury of eating crap as often. It is obviously possible to curb this problem if most people just decided to not consume so many calories a day, and in accordance with that, settle for a fruit or two instead of a burger, but who are we kidding? Humans are rational beings, and will always weigh the costs/opportunity costs, but in the case of obesity, with the physical costs initially hidden, junk food becomes that much more enticing of a choice. This is why I think it would be great if we could establish a junk food tax and use the revenue to subsidize fruits/vegetables and to make them more accessible, but that's not gonna happen any time soon so long as obesity is seen as only a product of choice and not a product of both choice and environment. The environment in this case is a product of choices. Fast food is convenient and abundant because people in the past chose to eat there a lot and business owners responded by offering more. Fast food is convenient because it's fast food. It's abundant because yes, people chose to eat there a lot, but why they chose to eat there a lot is because of their environment. In other words, their choice is a product of their environment (what choice isn't...?)
Yes the environment plays a role, but that environment is largely a product of choices as well.
|
2nd Worst City in CA8938 Posts
On June 20 2013 07:50 JonnyBNoHo wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 07:36 Souma wrote:On June 20 2013 07:22 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 06:52 HunterX11 wrote:On June 20 2013 06:32 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 06:10 Klondikebar wrote:On June 20 2013 05:54 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 05:51 aksfjh wrote:On June 20 2013 05:47 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 05:41 aksfjh wrote:
[quote]
First, I can't believe people stick "color tv" as some sort of luxury good poor people shouldn't have access to. I really think many of you literally think poor people should be working 100 hours a week, and when they aren't working, either cooking or studying to "get ahead." You treat leisure for somebody making less than $20k a year as some sort of sin, unless maybe it's sitting around a radio in a dark room.
I'll tell you right now, the taste of the food isn't as big of a deal. It's obviously a factor, but not the entire story. For an adult, fast food is a choice that is cheap, work-free, and convenient. You do nothing more than pay the cashier and you receive a meal that fixes your hunger. There's no worry about proportions, which are decided for you, nor can you accidentally ruin the meal. There's also the case for timing, since bringing a meal home at 8 or 9 at night means kids won't be up until 11 eating, instead of having to start dinner that late.
Poor people aren't choosing to eat fast food and be unhealthy because they like to engorge themselves more than the rest of us, but because it makes the most economic sense for now and the foreseeable future. Some of you dolts need to realize that these people aren't much different than us when it comes to aggregate desires and decisions. They are forced, in their situation, to make bad long-term decisions to get by in the short term. About the only choice they are given is to take a gamble and sacrifice what they can spare for a chance to move up 1 rung on the socioeconomic ladder in a lifetime, which doesn't look much different than the rung they are on. You lost me in the last paragraph. Are you saying their decisions are poor ones or good ones? They make poor choices naturally because of their situation, but if they sit down and draw the good choices to their natural conclusions, they see that their situation doesn't change much (nominally better, but not really better). That ignores the economic history. Their situation exists because the communities decided to favor the unhealthy over the healthy. Umm...and you're just completely rewriting economic history. Poor communities never decided to be unhealthy. They've always had to squeeze as many calories per dollar into their food as they can. As it became easier and easier to squeeze calories out of a dollar (i.e. fast food) yes they started eating too many calories BUT that doesn't change the fact that grocery stores aren't the answer. Time is still very valuable and groceries aren't practical. I'm not sure whether you're deliberately skipping my posts or just missing them but I list many reasons why grocery stores don't work other than the price tab. The obesity / unhealthy food issue is a recent thing. Every issue you listed existed prior to concerns over obesity. Walking to a grocery store was always a pain. Cooking food always took time. The introduction of fast food meant that people could make the bad choice to trade health and money for convenience. And they did so in droves. Ghettoization was not some community choice where people were previously doing well but decided to live in a food desert: it is the result of intentional and unintentional polices that disfavor people who make bad choices like being poor or black. I'm not seeing the distinction. It's not a choice but a product of many choices? On June 20 2013 07:11 Souma wrote:
The problem with obesity and fast food is becoming much more of an obvious concern among poor youth. They have no income (only meager allowances, if even that), do not cook, and often do not have the means to get groceries, whether financially or physically. These kids are generally juggling around a few/several dollars a week, and tend to gravitate towards a cheeseburger a day as opposed to an apple because it's much more filling and satisfying.
In many areas, we have created an environment for our kids to rely on fast food. When they see that it is much more convenient and cheap (opportunity costs must be weighed in) to eat fast food (and generally more filling), of course they'll tend to lean towards fast food as opposed to groceries. You can say that parents should do a better job of forcing their kids to eat healthy, but low-income parents generally aren't afforded as much time and resources to keep tabs on their children. You can cook healthier dinners for them at home, but what they eat while they're out of the house and you're at work is mostly out of your hands.
One of the major problems with obesity is that it is similar to smoking cigarettes, in that the effects culminate slowly so that there is less awareness of the consequences. This is why trying to raise awareness amongst the youth about health and obesity is difficult, because they don't experience the consequences instantly and shrug them off. Though, eventually, the effects will be plainly visible, and by that time you're just the fat kid and your parents are labelled as horrible educators.
In the end, price and convenience plays a huge part in why obesity rates are so high and getting worse among the youth. In Japan, when you're eating out, portion sizes are incredibly smaller and more expensive to boot, so it is actually worth taking the time to go to the grocery store and cook, and kids don't have the luxury of eating crap as often. It is obviously possible to curb this problem if most people just decided to not consume so many calories a day, and in accordance with that, settle for a fruit or two instead of a burger, but who are we kidding? Humans are rational beings, and will always weigh the costs/opportunity costs, but in the case of obesity, with the physical costs initially hidden, junk food becomes that much more enticing of a choice. This is why I think it would be great if we could establish a junk food tax and use the revenue to subsidize fruits/vegetables and to make them more accessible, but that's not gonna happen any time soon so long as obesity is seen as only a product of choice and not a product of both choice and environment. The environment in this case is a product of choices. Fast food is convenient and abundant because people in the past chose to eat there a lot and business owners responded by offering more. Fast food is convenient because it's fast food. It's abundant because yes, people chose to eat there a lot, but why they chose to eat there a lot is because of their environment. In other words, their choice is a product of their environment (what choice isn't...?) Yes the environment plays a role, but that environment is largely a product of choices as well.
I wager that the environment came before the choice, unless you want to prove to me that there were choices before existence.
|
On June 20 2013 07:11 Souma wrote:
In the end, price and convenience plays a huge part in why obesity rates are so high and getting worse among the youth. In Japan, when you're eating out, portion sizes are incredibly smaller and more expensive to boot, so it is actually worth taking the time to go to the grocery store and cook, and kids don't have the luxury of eating crap as often. It is obviously possible to curb this problem if most people just decided to not consume so many calories a day, and in accordance with that, settle for a fruit or two instead of a burger, but who are we kidding? Humans are rational beings, and will always weigh the costs/opportunity costs, but in the case of obesity, with the physical costs initially hidden, junk food becomes that much more enticing of a choice. This is why I think it would be great if we could establish a junk food tax and use the revenue to subsidize fruits/vegetables and to make them more accessible, but that's not gonna happen any time soon so long as obesity is seen as only a product of choice and not a product of both choice and environment.
You have obviously not lived in Japan. I do, and it is not hard to find cheap food (i.e. curry, ramen, McDonald's). All produce is more expensive in Japan than it is in the US, and cooking is still a chore.
But portion sizes are smaller and people in general eat much less than Americans do. I think this has far more to do with portion control and discipline. What you eat is important but overstated. I've known people on "diets" who eat four low-calorie granola bars for breakfast. If you're going to eat that much, you might as well just eat normally.
On June 20 2013 07:20 screamingpalm wrote:
Finding actual nutrition in the US is tough. Even cutting out fast food, the quality of food at grocery stores is pretty atrocious. I'll spare my personal anecdotes living between the States and Italy, but from what I understand, basically the way food is processed and produced leaves very little nutritional value. Monoculture is one big example, and agriculture policies just compound the issue, making it easier to enable those kinds of practices (GMO etc).
This point is completely incorrect. Finding nutrition in the US is easier and cheaper than anywhere else in the world, and the quality of grocery store food has increased dramatically with increased demand for quality. TV shows before the 90s had a thematic element where kids complained about the taste of vegetables or meat loaf and refused to eat. And in general, that's because they tasted bad (sorry moms). We don't see that any more.
There's no evidence that quality food is expensive or hard to find or otherwise only a privilege for rich people because it's not true.
|
On June 20 2013 07:22 JonnyBNoHo wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 06:52 HunterX11 wrote:On June 20 2013 06:32 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 06:10 Klondikebar wrote:On June 20 2013 05:54 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 05:51 aksfjh wrote:On June 20 2013 05:47 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 05:41 aksfjh wrote:On June 20 2013 04:49 Danglars wrote:On June 20 2013 04:30 Stratos_speAr wrote:
[quote]
"Collective personal preference."
When it comes to something like food (a necessity), you take what you can get. The consumer doesn't strictly dictate what is available.
And yes, even if there is a grocery store around, it is true that healthier foods tend to be noticeably more expensive than cheaper foods, which is a huge factor when talking about obesity rates among the poor. Going from calling food a necessity to talking about obesity rates is hinting at the economic reality. The rarity in America is the urgent need for food, the desire for food more often becomes counterproductive and dangerous when we're talking about the poor. Try telling an economist that there is an objective and quantifiable need for this or that. Armed with choice, they choose fatty fast foods at high enough rates to be a statistically significant part of the obese in America. This is a choice despite all the government's education pushes for healthy eating in many programs. We've seen more and more assistance be tilted to healthy foods, but the second you have a dollar and a choice, the healthy foods by and large are not the choice. May I suggest that if fatty foods from KFC, McDonalds, and others didn't taste so darn good, this would not be a problem? If those carrots and zucchini were akin to adding opium hash to a meal, you'd be seeing a lot more healthy poor walking around (Poor being a relative term in this sense, and not an absolute term, since your average poor person in America has 2 color TV's and satellite/cable) First, I can't believe people stick "color tv" as some sort of luxury good poor people shouldn't have access to. I really think many of you literally think poor people should be working 100 hours a week, and when they aren't working, either cooking or studying to "get ahead." You treat leisure for somebody making less than $20k a year as some sort of sin, unless maybe it's sitting around a radio in a dark room. I'll tell you right now, the taste of the food isn't as big of a deal. It's obviously a factor, but not the entire story. For an adult, fast food is a choice that is cheap, work-free, and convenient. You do nothing more than pay the cashier and you receive a meal that fixes your hunger. There's no worry about proportions, which are decided for you, nor can you accidentally ruin the meal. There's also the case for timing, since bringing a meal home at 8 or 9 at night means kids won't be up until 11 eating, instead of having to start dinner that late. Poor people aren't choosing to eat fast food and be unhealthy because they like to engorge themselves more than the rest of us, but because it makes the most economic sense for now and the foreseeable future. Some of you dolts need to realize that these people aren't much different than us when it comes to aggregate desires and decisions. They are forced, in their situation, to make bad long-term decisions to get by in the short term. About the only choice they are given is to take a gamble and sacrifice what they can spare for a chance to move up 1 rung on the socioeconomic ladder in a lifetime, which doesn't look much different than the rung they are on. You lost me in the last paragraph. Are you saying their decisions are poor ones or good ones? They make poor choices naturally because of their situation, but if they sit down and draw the good choices to their natural conclusions, they see that their situation doesn't change much (nominally better, but not really better). That ignores the economic history. Their situation exists because the communities decided to favor the unhealthy over the healthy. Umm...and you're just completely rewriting economic history. Poor communities never decided to be unhealthy. They've always had to squeeze as many calories per dollar into their food as they can. As it became easier and easier to squeeze calories out of a dollar (i.e. fast food) yes they started eating too many calories BUT that doesn't change the fact that grocery stores aren't the answer. Time is still very valuable and groceries aren't practical. I'm not sure whether you're deliberately skipping my posts or just missing them but I list many reasons why grocery stores don't work other than the price tab. The obesity / unhealthy food issue is a recent thing. Every issue you listed existed prior to concerns over obesity. Walking to a grocery store was always a pain. Cooking food always took time. The introduction of fast food meant that people could make the bad choice to trade health and money for convenience. And they did so in droves. Ghettoization was not some community choice where people were previously doing well but decided to live in a food desert: it is the result of intentional and unintentional polices that disfavor people who make bad choices like being poor or black. I'm not seeing the distinction. It's not a choice but a product of many choices? Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 07:11 Souma wrote:
The problem with obesity and fast food is becoming much more of an obvious concern among poor youth. They have no income (only meager allowances, if even that), do not cook, and often do not have the means to get groceries, whether financially or physically. These kids are generally juggling around a few/several dollars a week, and tend to gravitate towards a cheeseburger a day as opposed to an apple because it's much more filling and satisfying.
In many areas, we have created an environment for our kids to rely on fast food. When they see that it is much more convenient and cheap (opportunity costs must be weighed in) to eat fast food (and generally more filling), of course they'll tend to lean towards fast food as opposed to groceries. You can say that parents should do a better job of forcing their kids to eat healthy, but low-income parents generally aren't afforded as much time and resources to keep tabs on their children. You can cook healthier dinners for them at home, but what they eat while they're out of the house and you're at work is mostly out of your hands.
One of the major problems with obesity is that it is similar to smoking cigarettes, in that the effects culminate slowly so that there is less awareness of the consequences. This is why trying to raise awareness amongst the youth about health and obesity is difficult, because they don't experience the consequences instantly and shrug them off. Though, eventually, the effects will be plainly visible, and by that time you're just the fat kid and your parents are labelled as horrible educators.
In the end, price and convenience plays a huge part in why obesity rates are so high and getting worse among the youth. In Japan, when you're eating out, portion sizes are incredibly smaller and more expensive to boot, so it is actually worth taking the time to go to the grocery store and cook, and kids don't have the luxury of eating crap as often. It is obviously possible to curb this problem if most people just decided to not consume so many calories a day, and in accordance with that, settle for a fruit or two instead of a burger, but who are we kidding? Humans are rational beings, and will always weigh the costs/opportunity costs, but in the case of obesity, with the physical costs initially hidden, junk food becomes that much more enticing of a choice. This is why I think it would be great if we could establish a junk food tax and use the revenue to subsidize fruits/vegetables and to make them more accessible, but that's not gonna happen any time soon so long as obesity is seen as only a product of choice and not a product of both choice and environment. The environment in this case is a product of choices. Fast food is convenient and abundant because people in the past chose to eat there a lot and business owners responded by offering more.
So? I don't see why we should ignore all problems where choice is a factor. Making sure that people do something as simple as taking their medicine according to directions can be a problem even though that's a choice too, but that doesn't mean we should eliminate things like supervised medication where they have been found to work because you deserve to die of AIDS if you make poor choices.
|
On June 20 2013 07:36 Danglars wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 07:20 screamingpalm wrote:
Finding actual nutrition in the US is tough. Even cutting out fast food, the quality of food at grocery stores is pretty atrocious. I'll spare my personal anecdotes living between the States and Italy, but from what I understand, basically the way food is processed and produced leaves very little nutritional value. Monoculture is one big example, and agriculture policies just compound the issue, making it easier to enable those kinds of practices (GMO etc). In the bulk, even though the quality of food in the US compared to other countries may be lower, the nutrition found in vegetables and low-fat proteins is still sufficient for a healthy lifestyle and a strong person. Compare the quality of food found at your average grocery store and that of fast food chains and you'll STILL find a stark difference in favor of the grocery stores. I don't accept for an instant that processing or production of vegetables, meats, milk, and eggs in American grocery stores means the nutritional value is insufficient for a healthy lifestyle. Globally it may lack by comparison, but those carrots, lettuce, cabbage, and sundry vegetables will still keep you fit should they be the norm and not fast food.
I can only assume that there are some standards and regulations in place, but I still have my doubts. I don't really have any empirical evidence to back it up, but I have been trying to educate myself on this ever since my sobering and eye-opening experiences with how vastly and noticeably different my (and my ex-wife) health changed when travelling between the two countries. I don't mean to say that American produce is comparable nutritionally to fast food, but placing the blame of nutrition on consumer choice feels like a half-truth imo. I will just simply say that cutting out fast food and consuming produce available in grocery stores in the US were (/are) not sufficient nutition for me (us- at the time I noticed). YMMV I guess.
This point is completely incorrect. Finding nutrition in the US is easier and cheaper than anywhere else in the world, and the quality of grocery store food has increased dramatically with increased demand for quality. TV shows before the 90s had a thematic element where kids complained about the taste of vegetables or meat loaf and refused to eat. And in general, that's because they tasted bad (sorry moms). We don't see that any more.
There's no evidence that quality food is expensive or hard to find or otherwise only a privilege for rich people because it's not true.
It's really frustrating that I don't understand the science enough to explain it, even though I have tried to read up on the issue. I can only express anecdotes about how incredibly different a tomato tastes, or how different an egg looks, or how we lost weight (despite eating at least 3X as much) or how our skin color changed. Michael Pollan's books are the closest thing I could find that relate to my experiences that I have read.
Aside from that, I try to get to the farmer's markets as often as I can and grow a small garden of my own. I won't say privilege for rich people, just lucky to have that option. :D
|
2nd Worst City in CA8938 Posts
On June 20 2013 08:10 coverpunch wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 07:11 Souma wrote:
In the end, price and convenience plays a huge part in why obesity rates are so high and getting worse among the youth. In Japan, when you're eating out, portion sizes are incredibly smaller and more expensive to boot, so it is actually worth taking the time to go to the grocery store and cook, and kids don't have the luxury of eating crap as often. It is obviously possible to curb this problem if most people just decided to not consume so many calories a day, and in accordance with that, settle for a fruit or two instead of a burger, but who are we kidding? Humans are rational beings, and will always weigh the costs/opportunity costs, but in the case of obesity, with the physical costs initially hidden, junk food becomes that much more enticing of a choice. This is why I think it would be great if we could establish a junk food tax and use the revenue to subsidize fruits/vegetables and to make them more accessible, but that's not gonna happen any time soon so long as obesity is seen as only a product of choice and not a product of both choice and environment. You have obviously not lived in Japan. I do, and it is not hard to find cheap food (i.e. curry, ramen, McDonald's). All produce is more expensive in Japan than it is in the US, and cooking is still a chore. But portion sizes are smaller and people in general eat much less than Americans do. I think this has far more to do with portion control and discipline. What you eat is important but overstated. I've known people on "diets" who eat four low-calorie granola bars for breakfast. If you're going to eat that much, you might as well just eat normally.
I obviously did live in Japan. While fruit and some vegetables are more expensive, so is fast food, and even more so if you also wager in portion sizes. A large pizza in Japan is equivalent to the size of a medium one in America and costs multiple times more. KFC is like three times the price. McDonalds is like 1.5x the price or more depending on the product (five bucks gets you five nuggets and some change in Japan yet it gets you 20 in America). A McFlurry is half the size and twice as expensive.
On the other hand, I can go grocery shopping and buy rice, vegetables, etc. for much much cheaper. You can go out to eat gyudon or something at Yoshinoya or Matsuya, which is decently priced with a decent portion size, but compared to what you can get for that money in America, and considering even that is healthier than the junk food in America, it's obvious why it's much easier to get fatter in America than in Japan. To add to this evidence, though anecdotal, every Japanese person who comes to study abroad in America that I've known (and that is a lot) gains weight, yet Americans who live in Japan for an extended period of time more often lose weight. It's really not hard to see why.
|
On June 20 2013 08:22 Souma wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 08:10 coverpunch wrote:On June 20 2013 07:11 Souma wrote:
In the end, price and convenience plays a huge part in why obesity rates are so high and getting worse among the youth. In Japan, when you're eating out, portion sizes are incredibly smaller and more expensive to boot, so it is actually worth taking the time to go to the grocery store and cook, and kids don't have the luxury of eating crap as often. It is obviously possible to curb this problem if most people just decided to not consume so many calories a day, and in accordance with that, settle for a fruit or two instead of a burger, but who are we kidding? Humans are rational beings, and will always weigh the costs/opportunity costs, but in the case of obesity, with the physical costs initially hidden, junk food becomes that much more enticing of a choice. This is why I think it would be great if we could establish a junk food tax and use the revenue to subsidize fruits/vegetables and to make them more accessible, but that's not gonna happen any time soon so long as obesity is seen as only a product of choice and not a product of both choice and environment. You have obviously not lived in Japan. I do, and it is not hard to find cheap food (i.e. curry, ramen, McDonald's). All produce is more expensive in Japan than it is in the US, and cooking is still a chore. But portion sizes are smaller and people in general eat much less than Americans do. I think this has far more to do with portion control and discipline. What you eat is important but overstated. I've known people on "diets" who eat four low-calorie granola bars for breakfast. If you're going to eat that much, you might as well just eat normally. I obviously did live in Japan. While fruit and some vegetables are more expensive, so is fast food, and even more so if you also wager in portion sizes. A large pizza in Japan is equivalent to the size of a medium one in America and costs multiple times more. KFC is like three times the price. McDonalds is like 1.5x the price or more depending on the product (five bucks gets you five nuggets in Japan yet it gets you 20 in America). A McFlurry is half the size and twice as expensive. On the other hand, I can go grocery shopping and buy rice, vegetables, etc. for much much cheaper. You can go out to eat gyudon or something at Yoshinoya or Matsuya, which is decently priced with a decent portion size, but compared to what you can get for that money in America, and considering even that is healthier than the junk food in America, it's obvious why it's much easier to get fatter in America than in Japan.
I don't know if you lived in Japan while the currency was very strong or what, but McDonald's has a 100-yen menu that is exactly the same as the dollar menu in the US. Tack on tax and tip to the total cost in the US (Japan has 5% tax and no tip), and even restaurants are fairly equivalent.
My point is that cost is not the sole or even primary reason why Japanese people eat less than Americans. Japan has been a rich country for a long time now and Japan has its share of cheap junk food, but for a variety of reasons, most people just don't eat that much.
This is an issue of personal responsibility, not an economic problem of access.
EDIT: I will say anecdotally that I've lost a lot of weight in Japan. But my spending on food has also gone way down compared to what it was in the US because I'm simply eating less. It's about the quantity of food, not the price. For now, I would conjecture that the high summer humidity is reducing my appetite.
|
On June 20 2013 08:31 coverpunch wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 08:22 Souma wrote:On June 20 2013 08:10 coverpunch wrote:On June 20 2013 07:11 Souma wrote:
In the end, price and convenience plays a huge part in why obesity rates are so high and getting worse among the youth. In Japan, when you're eating out, portion sizes are incredibly smaller and more expensive to boot, so it is actually worth taking the time to go to the grocery store and cook, and kids don't have the luxury of eating crap as often. It is obviously possible to curb this problem if most people just decided to not consume so many calories a day, and in accordance with that, settle for a fruit or two instead of a burger, but who are we kidding? Humans are rational beings, and will always weigh the costs/opportunity costs, but in the case of obesity, with the physical costs initially hidden, junk food becomes that much more enticing of a choice. This is why I think it would be great if we could establish a junk food tax and use the revenue to subsidize fruits/vegetables and to make them more accessible, but that's not gonna happen any time soon so long as obesity is seen as only a product of choice and not a product of both choice and environment. You have obviously not lived in Japan. I do, and it is not hard to find cheap food (i.e. curry, ramen, McDonald's). All produce is more expensive in Japan than it is in the US, and cooking is still a chore. But portion sizes are smaller and people in general eat much less than Americans do. I think this has far more to do with portion control and discipline. What you eat is important but overstated. I've known people on "diets" who eat four low-calorie granola bars for breakfast. If you're going to eat that much, you might as well just eat normally. I obviously did live in Japan. While fruit and some vegetables are more expensive, so is fast food, and even more so if you also wager in portion sizes. A large pizza in Japan is equivalent to the size of a medium one in America and costs multiple times more. KFC is like three times the price. McDonalds is like 1.5x the price or more depending on the product (five bucks gets you five nuggets in Japan yet it gets you 20 in America). A McFlurry is half the size and twice as expensive. On the other hand, I can go grocery shopping and buy rice, vegetables, etc. for much much cheaper. You can go out to eat gyudon or something at Yoshinoya or Matsuya, which is decently priced with a decent portion size, but compared to what you can get for that money in America, and considering even that is healthier than the junk food in America, it's obvious why it's much easier to get fatter in America than in Japan. I don't know if you lived in Japan while the currency was very strong or what, but McDonald's has a 100-yen menu that is exactly the same as the dollar menu in the US. Tack on tax and tip to the total cost in the US (Japan has 5% tax and no tip), and even restaurants are fairly equivalent. My point is that cost is not the sole or even primary reason why Japanese people eat less than Americans. Japan has been a rich country for a long time now and Japan has its share of cheap junk food, but for a variety of reasons, most people just don't eat that much. This is an issue of personal responsibility, not an economic problem of access.
If it were just a matter of personal responsibility, what then caused everyone to spontaneously start being less responsible in recent decades? I mean if you're framing it as personal responsibility, then I guess that means there can't be a cause, and it's just a massive coincidence, like if the Sun just suddenly disappeared because every particle in it teleported to another part of space through quantum tunneling.
|
On June 20 2013 07:55 Souma wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 07:50 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 07:36 Souma wrote:On June 20 2013 07:22 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 06:52 HunterX11 wrote:On June 20 2013 06:32 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 06:10 Klondikebar wrote:On June 20 2013 05:54 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 05:51 aksfjh wrote:On June 20 2013 05:47 JonnyBNoHo wrote:
[quote]
You lost me in the last paragraph. Are you saying their decisions are poor ones or good ones? They make poor choices naturally because of their situation, but if they sit down and draw the good choices to their natural conclusions, they see that their situation doesn't change much (nominally better, but not really better). That ignores the economic history. Their situation exists because the communities decided to favor the unhealthy over the healthy. Umm...and you're just completely rewriting economic history. Poor communities never decided to be unhealthy. They've always had to squeeze as many calories per dollar into their food as they can. As it became easier and easier to squeeze calories out of a dollar (i.e. fast food) yes they started eating too many calories BUT that doesn't change the fact that grocery stores aren't the answer. Time is still very valuable and groceries aren't practical. I'm not sure whether you're deliberately skipping my posts or just missing them but I list many reasons why grocery stores don't work other than the price tab. The obesity / unhealthy food issue is a recent thing. Every issue you listed existed prior to concerns over obesity. Walking to a grocery store was always a pain. Cooking food always took time. The introduction of fast food meant that people could make the bad choice to trade health and money for convenience. And they did so in droves. Ghettoization was not some community choice where people were previously doing well but decided to live in a food desert: it is the result of intentional and unintentional polices that disfavor people who make bad choices like being poor or black. I'm not seeing the distinction. It's not a choice but a product of many choices? On June 20 2013 07:11 Souma wrote:
The problem with obesity and fast food is becoming much more of an obvious concern among poor youth. They have no income (only meager allowances, if even that), do not cook, and often do not have the means to get groceries, whether financially or physically. These kids are generally juggling around a few/several dollars a week, and tend to gravitate towards a cheeseburger a day as opposed to an apple because it's much more filling and satisfying.
In many areas, we have created an environment for our kids to rely on fast food. When they see that it is much more convenient and cheap (opportunity costs must be weighed in) to eat fast food (and generally more filling), of course they'll tend to lean towards fast food as opposed to groceries. You can say that parents should do a better job of forcing their kids to eat healthy, but low-income parents generally aren't afforded as much time and resources to keep tabs on their children. You can cook healthier dinners for them at home, but what they eat while they're out of the house and you're at work is mostly out of your hands.
One of the major problems with obesity is that it is similar to smoking cigarettes, in that the effects culminate slowly so that there is less awareness of the consequences. This is why trying to raise awareness amongst the youth about health and obesity is difficult, because they don't experience the consequences instantly and shrug them off. Though, eventually, the effects will be plainly visible, and by that time you're just the fat kid and your parents are labelled as horrible educators.
In the end, price and convenience plays a huge part in why obesity rates are so high and getting worse among the youth. In Japan, when you're eating out, portion sizes are incredibly smaller and more expensive to boot, so it is actually worth taking the time to go to the grocery store and cook, and kids don't have the luxury of eating crap as often. It is obviously possible to curb this problem if most people just decided to not consume so many calories a day, and in accordance with that, settle for a fruit or two instead of a burger, but who are we kidding? Humans are rational beings, and will always weigh the costs/opportunity costs, but in the case of obesity, with the physical costs initially hidden, junk food becomes that much more enticing of a choice. This is why I think it would be great if we could establish a junk food tax and use the revenue to subsidize fruits/vegetables and to make them more accessible, but that's not gonna happen any time soon so long as obesity is seen as only a product of choice and not a product of both choice and environment. The environment in this case is a product of choices. Fast food is convenient and abundant because people in the past chose to eat there a lot and business owners responded by offering more. Fast food is convenient because it's fast food. It's abundant because yes, people chose to eat there a lot, but why they chose to eat there a lot is because of their environment. In other words, their choice is a product of their environment (what choice isn't...?) Yes the environment plays a role, but that environment is largely a product of choices as well. I wager that the environment came before the choice, unless you want to prove to me that there were choices before existence.
By environment I think we're discussing man-made environment. I certainly am.
But I'm probably arguing this point too hard. I agree that environment plays a factor in the choices people make. My point is that, ultimately, we can't remove the choice aspect.
On June 20 2013 08:15 HunterX11 wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 07:22 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 06:52 HunterX11 wrote:On June 20 2013 06:32 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 06:10 Klondikebar wrote:On June 20 2013 05:54 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 05:51 aksfjh wrote:On June 20 2013 05:47 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 05:41 aksfjh wrote:On June 20 2013 04:49 Danglars wrote:[quote] Going from calling food a necessity to talking about obesity rates is hinting at the economic reality. The rarity in America is the urgent need for food, the desire for food more often becomes counterproductive and dangerous when we're talking about the poor. Try telling an economist that there is an objective and quantifiable need for this or that. Armed with choice, they choose fatty fast foods at high enough rates to be a statistically significant part of the obese in America. This is a choice despite all the government's education pushes for healthy eating in many programs. We've seen more and more assistance be tilted to healthy foods, but the second you have a dollar and a choice, the healthy foods by and large are not the choice. May I suggest that if fatty foods from KFC, McDonalds, and others didn't taste so darn good, this would not be a problem? If those carrots and zucchini were akin to adding opium hash to a meal, you'd be seeing a lot more healthy poor walking around (Poor being a relative term in this sense, and not an absolute term, since your average poor person in America has 2 color TV's and satellite/cable) First, I can't believe people stick "color tv" as some sort of luxury good poor people shouldn't have access to. I really think many of you literally think poor people should be working 100 hours a week, and when they aren't working, either cooking or studying to "get ahead." You treat leisure for somebody making less than $20k a year as some sort of sin, unless maybe it's sitting around a radio in a dark room. I'll tell you right now, the taste of the food isn't as big of a deal. It's obviously a factor, but not the entire story. For an adult, fast food is a choice that is cheap, work-free, and convenient. You do nothing more than pay the cashier and you receive a meal that fixes your hunger. There's no worry about proportions, which are decided for you, nor can you accidentally ruin the meal. There's also the case for timing, since bringing a meal home at 8 or 9 at night means kids won't be up until 11 eating, instead of having to start dinner that late. Poor people aren't choosing to eat fast food and be unhealthy because they like to engorge themselves more than the rest of us, but because it makes the most economic sense for now and the foreseeable future. Some of you dolts need to realize that these people aren't much different than us when it comes to aggregate desires and decisions. They are forced, in their situation, to make bad long-term decisions to get by in the short term. About the only choice they are given is to take a gamble and sacrifice what they can spare for a chance to move up 1 rung on the socioeconomic ladder in a lifetime, which doesn't look much different than the rung they are on. You lost me in the last paragraph. Are you saying their decisions are poor ones or good ones? They make poor choices naturally because of their situation, but if they sit down and draw the good choices to their natural conclusions, they see that their situation doesn't change much (nominally better, but not really better). That ignores the economic history. Their situation exists because the communities decided to favor the unhealthy over the healthy. Umm...and you're just completely rewriting economic history. Poor communities never decided to be unhealthy. They've always had to squeeze as many calories per dollar into their food as they can. As it became easier and easier to squeeze calories out of a dollar (i.e. fast food) yes they started eating too many calories BUT that doesn't change the fact that grocery stores aren't the answer. Time is still very valuable and groceries aren't practical. I'm not sure whether you're deliberately skipping my posts or just missing them but I list many reasons why grocery stores don't work other than the price tab. The obesity / unhealthy food issue is a recent thing. Every issue you listed existed prior to concerns over obesity. Walking to a grocery store was always a pain. Cooking food always took time. The introduction of fast food meant that people could make the bad choice to trade health and money for convenience. And they did so in droves. Ghettoization was not some community choice where people were previously doing well but decided to live in a food desert: it is the result of intentional and unintentional polices that disfavor people who make bad choices like being poor or black. I'm not seeing the distinction. It's not a choice but a product of many choices? On June 20 2013 07:11 Souma wrote:
The problem with obesity and fast food is becoming much more of an obvious concern among poor youth. They have no income (only meager allowances, if even that), do not cook, and often do not have the means to get groceries, whether financially or physically. These kids are generally juggling around a few/several dollars a week, and tend to gravitate towards a cheeseburger a day as opposed to an apple because it's much more filling and satisfying.
In many areas, we have created an environment for our kids to rely on fast food. When they see that it is much more convenient and cheap (opportunity costs must be weighed in) to eat fast food (and generally more filling), of course they'll tend to lean towards fast food as opposed to groceries. You can say that parents should do a better job of forcing their kids to eat healthy, but low-income parents generally aren't afforded as much time and resources to keep tabs on their children. You can cook healthier dinners for them at home, but what they eat while they're out of the house and you're at work is mostly out of your hands.
One of the major problems with obesity is that it is similar to smoking cigarettes, in that the effects culminate slowly so that there is less awareness of the consequences. This is why trying to raise awareness amongst the youth about health and obesity is difficult, because they don't experience the consequences instantly and shrug them off. Though, eventually, the effects will be plainly visible, and by that time you're just the fat kid and your parents are labelled as horrible educators.
In the end, price and convenience plays a huge part in why obesity rates are so high and getting worse among the youth. In Japan, when you're eating out, portion sizes are incredibly smaller and more expensive to boot, so it is actually worth taking the time to go to the grocery store and cook, and kids don't have the luxury of eating crap as often. It is obviously possible to curb this problem if most people just decided to not consume so many calories a day, and in accordance with that, settle for a fruit or two instead of a burger, but who are we kidding? Humans are rational beings, and will always weigh the costs/opportunity costs, but in the case of obesity, with the physical costs initially hidden, junk food becomes that much more enticing of a choice. This is why I think it would be great if we could establish a junk food tax and use the revenue to subsidize fruits/vegetables and to make them more accessible, but that's not gonna happen any time soon so long as obesity is seen as only a product of choice and not a product of both choice and environment. The environment in this case is a product of choices. Fast food is convenient and abundant because people in the past chose to eat there a lot and business owners responded by offering more. So? I don't see why we should ignore all problems where choice is a factor. Making sure that people do something as simple as taking their medicine according to directions can be a problem even though that's a choice too, but that doesn't mean we should eliminate things like supervised medication where they have been found to work because you deserve to die of AIDS if you make poor choices.
I'm not suggesting that we ignore any problem were choice is a factor.
|
2nd Worst City in CA8938 Posts
On June 20 2013 08:31 coverpunch wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 08:22 Souma wrote:On June 20 2013 08:10 coverpunch wrote:On June 20 2013 07:11 Souma wrote:
In the end, price and convenience plays a huge part in why obesity rates are so high and getting worse among the youth. In Japan, when you're eating out, portion sizes are incredibly smaller and more expensive to boot, so it is actually worth taking the time to go to the grocery store and cook, and kids don't have the luxury of eating crap as often. It is obviously possible to curb this problem if most people just decided to not consume so many calories a day, and in accordance with that, settle for a fruit or two instead of a burger, but who are we kidding? Humans are rational beings, and will always weigh the costs/opportunity costs, but in the case of obesity, with the physical costs initially hidden, junk food becomes that much more enticing of a choice. This is why I think it would be great if we could establish a junk food tax and use the revenue to subsidize fruits/vegetables and to make them more accessible, but that's not gonna happen any time soon so long as obesity is seen as only a product of choice and not a product of both choice and environment. You have obviously not lived in Japan. I do, and it is not hard to find cheap food (i.e. curry, ramen, McDonald's). All produce is more expensive in Japan than it is in the US, and cooking is still a chore. But portion sizes are smaller and people in general eat much less than Americans do. I think this has far more to do with portion control and discipline. What you eat is important but overstated. I've known people on "diets" who eat four low-calorie granola bars for breakfast. If you're going to eat that much, you might as well just eat normally. I obviously did live in Japan. While fruit and some vegetables are more expensive, so is fast food, and even more so if you also wager in portion sizes. A large pizza in Japan is equivalent to the size of a medium one in America and costs multiple times more. KFC is like three times the price. McDonalds is like 1.5x the price or more depending on the product (five bucks gets you five nuggets in Japan yet it gets you 20 in America). A McFlurry is half the size and twice as expensive. On the other hand, I can go grocery shopping and buy rice, vegetables, etc. for much much cheaper. You can go out to eat gyudon or something at Yoshinoya or Matsuya, which is decently priced with a decent portion size, but compared to what you can get for that money in America, and considering even that is healthier than the junk food in America, it's obvious why it's much easier to get fatter in America than in Japan. I don't know if you lived in Japan while the currency was very strong or what, but McDonald's has a 100-yen menu that is exactly the same as the dollar menu in the US. Tack on tax and tip to the total cost in the US (Japan has 5% tax and no tip), and even restaurants are fairly equivalent. My point is that cost is not the sole or even primary reason why Japanese people eat less than Americans. Japan has been a rich country for a long time now and Japan has its share of cheap junk food, but for a variety of reasons, most people just don't eat that much. This is an issue of personal responsibility, not an economic problem of access.
Yeah McDonalds has a 100-yen menu, but we also gotta take into consideration the other products too. I'll concede that if you're eating out at a restaurant then prices can be fairly equivalent if we include tax and tip (though if we're taking into consideration portion sizes and how much your money is actually buying you, eh), but we're mainly focusing on fast food here, and the triple-whopper of franchises like McDonalds, Domino's/Pizza Hut, and KFC are much more expensive than in America.
But yes, I'm not saying that cost is the primary reason why Japanese people eat less than Americans. Japanese people are one of the most health conscious, if not the most, people in the world and that is the main reason why they eat less and eat healthier. My point was that because of high prices in conjunction with the higher prevalence of smaller portions in Japan, it is merely easier (?) for them to eat healthier than Americans. If we increased junk food prices and made portion sizes smaller in America, I assure you there'd be less obesity here. My bigger point all along was that this is both an issue of personal responsibility and an economic problem. It's just, it's a lot simpler to solve the economic problem than the problem of personal responsibility for this specific issue.
|
On June 20 2013 08:41 JonnyBNoHo wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 07:55 Souma wrote:On June 20 2013 07:50 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 07:36 Souma wrote:On June 20 2013 07:22 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 06:52 HunterX11 wrote:On June 20 2013 06:32 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 06:10 Klondikebar wrote:On June 20 2013 05:54 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 05:51 aksfjh wrote:
[quote]
They make poor choices naturally because of their situation, but if they sit down and draw the good choices to their natural conclusions, they see that their situation doesn't change much (nominally better, but not really better). That ignores the economic history. Their situation exists because the communities decided to favor the unhealthy over the healthy. Umm...and you're just completely rewriting economic history. Poor communities never decided to be unhealthy. They've always had to squeeze as many calories per dollar into their food as they can. As it became easier and easier to squeeze calories out of a dollar (i.e. fast food) yes they started eating too many calories BUT that doesn't change the fact that grocery stores aren't the answer. Time is still very valuable and groceries aren't practical. I'm not sure whether you're deliberately skipping my posts or just missing them but I list many reasons why grocery stores don't work other than the price tab. The obesity / unhealthy food issue is a recent thing. Every issue you listed existed prior to concerns over obesity. Walking to a grocery store was always a pain. Cooking food always took time. The introduction of fast food meant that people could make the bad choice to trade health and money for convenience. And they did so in droves. Ghettoization was not some community choice where people were previously doing well but decided to live in a food desert: it is the result of intentional and unintentional polices that disfavor people who make bad choices like being poor or black. I'm not seeing the distinction. It's not a choice but a product of many choices? On June 20 2013 07:11 Souma wrote:
The problem with obesity and fast food is becoming much more of an obvious concern among poor youth. They have no income (only meager allowances, if even that), do not cook, and often do not have the means to get groceries, whether financially or physically. These kids are generally juggling around a few/several dollars a week, and tend to gravitate towards a cheeseburger a day as opposed to an apple because it's much more filling and satisfying.
In many areas, we have created an environment for our kids to rely on fast food. When they see that it is much more convenient and cheap (opportunity costs must be weighed in) to eat fast food (and generally more filling), of course they'll tend to lean towards fast food as opposed to groceries. You can say that parents should do a better job of forcing their kids to eat healthy, but low-income parents generally aren't afforded as much time and resources to keep tabs on their children. You can cook healthier dinners for them at home, but what they eat while they're out of the house and you're at work is mostly out of your hands.
One of the major problems with obesity is that it is similar to smoking cigarettes, in that the effects culminate slowly so that there is less awareness of the consequences. This is why trying to raise awareness amongst the youth about health and obesity is difficult, because they don't experience the consequences instantly and shrug them off. Though, eventually, the effects will be plainly visible, and by that time you're just the fat kid and your parents are labelled as horrible educators.
In the end, price and convenience plays a huge part in why obesity rates are so high and getting worse among the youth. In Japan, when you're eating out, portion sizes are incredibly smaller and more expensive to boot, so it is actually worth taking the time to go to the grocery store and cook, and kids don't have the luxury of eating crap as often. It is obviously possible to curb this problem if most people just decided to not consume so many calories a day, and in accordance with that, settle for a fruit or two instead of a burger, but who are we kidding? Humans are rational beings, and will always weigh the costs/opportunity costs, but in the case of obesity, with the physical costs initially hidden, junk food becomes that much more enticing of a choice. This is why I think it would be great if we could establish a junk food tax and use the revenue to subsidize fruits/vegetables and to make them more accessible, but that's not gonna happen any time soon so long as obesity is seen as only a product of choice and not a product of both choice and environment. The environment in this case is a product of choices. Fast food is convenient and abundant because people in the past chose to eat there a lot and business owners responded by offering more. Fast food is convenient because it's fast food. It's abundant because yes, people chose to eat there a lot, but why they chose to eat there a lot is because of their environment. In other words, their choice is a product of their environment (what choice isn't...?) Yes the environment plays a role, but that environment is largely a product of choices as well. I wager that the environment came before the choice, unless you want to prove to me that there were choices before existence. By environment I think we're discussing man-made environment. I certainly am. But I'm probably arguing this point too hard. I agree that environment plays a factor in the choices people make. My point is that, ultimately, we can't remove the choice aspect. Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 08:15 HunterX11 wrote:On June 20 2013 07:22 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 06:52 HunterX11 wrote:On June 20 2013 06:32 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 06:10 Klondikebar wrote:On June 20 2013 05:54 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 05:51 aksfjh wrote:On June 20 2013 05:47 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 05:41 aksfjh wrote:
[quote]
First, I can't believe people stick "color tv" as some sort of luxury good poor people shouldn't have access to. I really think many of you literally think poor people should be working 100 hours a week, and when they aren't working, either cooking or studying to "get ahead." You treat leisure for somebody making less than $20k a year as some sort of sin, unless maybe it's sitting around a radio in a dark room.
I'll tell you right now, the taste of the food isn't as big of a deal. It's obviously a factor, but not the entire story. For an adult, fast food is a choice that is cheap, work-free, and convenient. You do nothing more than pay the cashier and you receive a meal that fixes your hunger. There's no worry about proportions, which are decided for you, nor can you accidentally ruin the meal. There's also the case for timing, since bringing a meal home at 8 or 9 at night means kids won't be up until 11 eating, instead of having to start dinner that late.
Poor people aren't choosing to eat fast food and be unhealthy because they like to engorge themselves more than the rest of us, but because it makes the most economic sense for now and the foreseeable future. Some of you dolts need to realize that these people aren't much different than us when it comes to aggregate desires and decisions. They are forced, in their situation, to make bad long-term decisions to get by in the short term. About the only choice they are given is to take a gamble and sacrifice what they can spare for a chance to move up 1 rung on the socioeconomic ladder in a lifetime, which doesn't look much different than the rung they are on. You lost me in the last paragraph. Are you saying their decisions are poor ones or good ones? They make poor choices naturally because of their situation, but if they sit down and draw the good choices to their natural conclusions, they see that their situation doesn't change much (nominally better, but not really better). That ignores the economic history. Their situation exists because the communities decided to favor the unhealthy over the healthy. Umm...and you're just completely rewriting economic history. Poor communities never decided to be unhealthy. They've always had to squeeze as many calories per dollar into their food as they can. As it became easier and easier to squeeze calories out of a dollar (i.e. fast food) yes they started eating too many calories BUT that doesn't change the fact that grocery stores aren't the answer. Time is still very valuable and groceries aren't practical. I'm not sure whether you're deliberately skipping my posts or just missing them but I list many reasons why grocery stores don't work other than the price tab. The obesity / unhealthy food issue is a recent thing. Every issue you listed existed prior to concerns over obesity. Walking to a grocery store was always a pain. Cooking food always took time. The introduction of fast food meant that people could make the bad choice to trade health and money for convenience. And they did so in droves. Ghettoization was not some community choice where people were previously doing well but decided to live in a food desert: it is the result of intentional and unintentional polices that disfavor people who make bad choices like being poor or black. I'm not seeing the distinction. It's not a choice but a product of many choices? On June 20 2013 07:11 Souma wrote:
The problem with obesity and fast food is becoming much more of an obvious concern among poor youth. They have no income (only meager allowances, if even that), do not cook, and often do not have the means to get groceries, whether financially or physically. These kids are generally juggling around a few/several dollars a week, and tend to gravitate towards a cheeseburger a day as opposed to an apple because it's much more filling and satisfying.
In many areas, we have created an environment for our kids to rely on fast food. When they see that it is much more convenient and cheap (opportunity costs must be weighed in) to eat fast food (and generally more filling), of course they'll tend to lean towards fast food as opposed to groceries. You can say that parents should do a better job of forcing their kids to eat healthy, but low-income parents generally aren't afforded as much time and resources to keep tabs on their children. You can cook healthier dinners for them at home, but what they eat while they're out of the house and you're at work is mostly out of your hands.
One of the major problems with obesity is that it is similar to smoking cigarettes, in that the effects culminate slowly so that there is less awareness of the consequences. This is why trying to raise awareness amongst the youth about health and obesity is difficult, because they don't experience the consequences instantly and shrug them off. Though, eventually, the effects will be plainly visible, and by that time you're just the fat kid and your parents are labelled as horrible educators.
In the end, price and convenience plays a huge part in why obesity rates are so high and getting worse among the youth. In Japan, when you're eating out, portion sizes are incredibly smaller and more expensive to boot, so it is actually worth taking the time to go to the grocery store and cook, and kids don't have the luxury of eating crap as often. It is obviously possible to curb this problem if most people just decided to not consume so many calories a day, and in accordance with that, settle for a fruit or two instead of a burger, but who are we kidding? Humans are rational beings, and will always weigh the costs/opportunity costs, but in the case of obesity, with the physical costs initially hidden, junk food becomes that much more enticing of a choice. This is why I think it would be great if we could establish a junk food tax and use the revenue to subsidize fruits/vegetables and to make them more accessible, but that's not gonna happen any time soon so long as obesity is seen as only a product of choice and not a product of both choice and environment. The environment in this case is a product of choices. Fast food is convenient and abundant because people in the past chose to eat there a lot and business owners responded by offering more. So? I don't see why we should ignore all problems where choice is a factor. Making sure that people do something as simple as taking their medicine according to directions can be a problem even though that's a choice too, but that doesn't mean we should eliminate things like supervised medication where they have been found to work because you deserve to die of AIDS if you make poor choices. I'm not suggesting that we ignore any problem were choice is a factor.
We can remove the aspects that encourage people to make bad choices. That's the idea.
|
2nd Worst City in CA8938 Posts
On June 20 2013 08:41 JonnyBNoHo wrote:Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 07:55 Souma wrote:On June 20 2013 07:50 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 07:36 Souma wrote:On June 20 2013 07:22 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 06:52 HunterX11 wrote:On June 20 2013 06:32 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 06:10 Klondikebar wrote:On June 20 2013 05:54 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 05:51 aksfjh wrote:
[quote]
They make poor choices naturally because of their situation, but if they sit down and draw the good choices to their natural conclusions, they see that their situation doesn't change much (nominally better, but not really better). That ignores the economic history. Their situation exists because the communities decided to favor the unhealthy over the healthy. Umm...and you're just completely rewriting economic history. Poor communities never decided to be unhealthy. They've always had to squeeze as many calories per dollar into their food as they can. As it became easier and easier to squeeze calories out of a dollar (i.e. fast food) yes they started eating too many calories BUT that doesn't change the fact that grocery stores aren't the answer. Time is still very valuable and groceries aren't practical. I'm not sure whether you're deliberately skipping my posts or just missing them but I list many reasons why grocery stores don't work other than the price tab. The obesity / unhealthy food issue is a recent thing. Every issue you listed existed prior to concerns over obesity. Walking to a grocery store was always a pain. Cooking food always took time. The introduction of fast food meant that people could make the bad choice to trade health and money for convenience. And they did so in droves. Ghettoization was not some community choice where people were previously doing well but decided to live in a food desert: it is the result of intentional and unintentional polices that disfavor people who make bad choices like being poor or black. I'm not seeing the distinction. It's not a choice but a product of many choices? On June 20 2013 07:11 Souma wrote:
The problem with obesity and fast food is becoming much more of an obvious concern among poor youth. They have no income (only meager allowances, if even that), do not cook, and often do not have the means to get groceries, whether financially or physically. These kids are generally juggling around a few/several dollars a week, and tend to gravitate towards a cheeseburger a day as opposed to an apple because it's much more filling and satisfying.
In many areas, we have created an environment for our kids to rely on fast food. When they see that it is much more convenient and cheap (opportunity costs must be weighed in) to eat fast food (and generally more filling), of course they'll tend to lean towards fast food as opposed to groceries. You can say that parents should do a better job of forcing their kids to eat healthy, but low-income parents generally aren't afforded as much time and resources to keep tabs on their children. You can cook healthier dinners for them at home, but what they eat while they're out of the house and you're at work is mostly out of your hands.
One of the major problems with obesity is that it is similar to smoking cigarettes, in that the effects culminate slowly so that there is less awareness of the consequences. This is why trying to raise awareness amongst the youth about health and obesity is difficult, because they don't experience the consequences instantly and shrug them off. Though, eventually, the effects will be plainly visible, and by that time you're just the fat kid and your parents are labelled as horrible educators.
In the end, price and convenience plays a huge part in why obesity rates are so high and getting worse among the youth. In Japan, when you're eating out, portion sizes are incredibly smaller and more expensive to boot, so it is actually worth taking the time to go to the grocery store and cook, and kids don't have the luxury of eating crap as often. It is obviously possible to curb this problem if most people just decided to not consume so many calories a day, and in accordance with that, settle for a fruit or two instead of a burger, but who are we kidding? Humans are rational beings, and will always weigh the costs/opportunity costs, but in the case of obesity, with the physical costs initially hidden, junk food becomes that much more enticing of a choice. This is why I think it would be great if we could establish a junk food tax and use the revenue to subsidize fruits/vegetables and to make them more accessible, but that's not gonna happen any time soon so long as obesity is seen as only a product of choice and not a product of both choice and environment. The environment in this case is a product of choices. Fast food is convenient and abundant because people in the past chose to eat there a lot and business owners responded by offering more. Fast food is convenient because it's fast food. It's abundant because yes, people chose to eat there a lot, but why they chose to eat there a lot is because of their environment. In other words, their choice is a product of their environment (what choice isn't...?) Yes the environment plays a role, but that environment is largely a product of choices as well. I wager that the environment came before the choice, unless you want to prove to me that there were choices before existence. By environment I think we're discussing man-made environment. I certainly am. But I'm probably arguing this point too hard. I agree that environment plays a factor in the choices people make. My point is that, ultimately, we can't remove the choice aspect. Show nested quote +On June 20 2013 08:15 HunterX11 wrote:On June 20 2013 07:22 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 06:52 HunterX11 wrote:On June 20 2013 06:32 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 06:10 Klondikebar wrote:On June 20 2013 05:54 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 05:51 aksfjh wrote:On June 20 2013 05:47 JonnyBNoHo wrote:On June 20 2013 05:41 aksfjh wrote:
[quote]
First, I can't believe people stick "color tv" as some sort of luxury good poor people shouldn't have access to. I really think many of you literally think poor people should be working 100 hours a week, and when they aren't working, either cooking or studying to "get ahead." You treat leisure for somebody making less than $20k a year as some sort of sin, unless maybe it's sitting around a radio in a dark room.
I'll tell you right now, the taste of the food isn't as big of a deal. It's obviously a factor, but not the entire story. For an adult, fast food is a choice that is cheap, work-free, and convenient. You do nothing more than pay the cashier and you receive a meal that fixes your hunger. There's no worry about proportions, which are decided for you, nor can you accidentally ruin the meal. There's also the case for timing, since bringing a meal home at 8 or 9 at night means kids won't be up until 11 eating, instead of having to start dinner that late.
Poor people aren't choosing to eat fast food and be unhealthy because they like to engorge themselves more than the rest of us, but because it makes the most economic sense for now and the foreseeable future. Some of you dolts need to realize that these people aren't much different than us when it comes to aggregate desires and decisions. They are forced, in their situation, to make bad long-term decisions to get by in the short term. About the only choice they are given is to take a gamble and sacrifice what they can spare for a chance to move up 1 rung on the socioeconomic ladder in a lifetime, which doesn't look much different than the rung they are on. You lost me in the last paragraph. Are you saying their decisions are poor ones or good ones? They make poor choices naturally because of their situation, but if they sit down and draw the good choices to their natural conclusions, they see that their situation doesn't change much (nominally better, but not really better). That ignores the economic history. Their situation exists because the communities decided to favor the unhealthy over the healthy. Umm...and you're just completely rewriting economic history. Poor communities never decided to be unhealthy. They've always had to squeeze as many calories per dollar into their food as they can. As it became easier and easier to squeeze calories out of a dollar (i.e. fast food) yes they started eating too many calories BUT that doesn't change the fact that grocery stores aren't the answer. Time is still very valuable and groceries aren't practical. I'm not sure whether you're deliberately skipping my posts or just missing them but I list many reasons why grocery stores don't work other than the price tab. The obesity / unhealthy food issue is a recent thing. Every issue you listed existed prior to concerns over obesity. Walking to a grocery store was always a pain. Cooking food always took time. The introduction of fast food meant that people could make the bad choice to trade health and money for convenience. And they did so in droves. Ghettoization was not some community choice where people were previously doing well but decided to live in a food desert: it is the result of intentional and unintentional polices that disfavor people who make bad choices like being poor or black. I'm not seeing the distinction. It's not a choice but a product of many choices? On June 20 2013 07:11 Souma wrote:
The problem with obesity and fast food is becoming much more of an obvious concern among poor youth. They have no income (only meager allowances, if even that), do not cook, and often do not have the means to get groceries, whether financially or physically. These kids are generally juggling around a few/several dollars a week, and tend to gravitate towards a cheeseburger a day as opposed to an apple because it's much more filling and satisfying.
In many areas, we have created an environment for our kids to rely on fast food. When they see that it is much more convenient and cheap (opportunity costs must be weighed in) to eat fast food (and generally more filling), of course they'll tend to lean towards fast food as opposed to groceries. You can say that parents should do a better job of forcing their kids to eat healthy, but low-income parents generally aren't afforded as much time and resources to keep tabs on their children. You can cook healthier dinners for them at home, but what they eat while they're out of the house and you're at work is mostly out of your hands.
One of the major problems with obesity is that it is similar to smoking cigarettes, in that the effects culminate slowly so that there is less awareness of the consequences. This is why trying to raise awareness amongst the youth about health and obesity is difficult, because they don't experience the consequences instantly and shrug them off. Though, eventually, the effects will be plainly visible, and by that time you're just the fat kid and your parents are labelled as horrible educators.
In the end, price and convenience plays a huge part in why obesity rates are so high and getting worse among the youth. In Japan, when you're eating out, portion sizes are incredibly smaller and more expensive to boot, so it is actually worth taking the time to go to the grocery store and cook, and kids don't have the luxury of eating crap as often. It is obviously possible to curb this problem if most people just decided to not consume so many calories a day, and in accordance with that, settle for a fruit or two instead of a burger, but who are we kidding? Humans are rational beings, and will always weigh the costs/opportunity costs, but in the case of obesity, with the physical costs initially hidden, junk food becomes that much more enticing of a choice. This is why I think it would be great if we could establish a junk food tax and use the revenue to subsidize fruits/vegetables and to make them more accessible, but that's not gonna happen any time soon so long as obesity is seen as only a product of choice and not a product of both choice and environment. The environment in this case is a product of choices. Fast food is convenient and abundant because people in the past chose to eat there a lot and business owners responded by offering more. So? I don't see why we should ignore all problems where choice is a factor. Making sure that people do something as simple as taking their medicine according to directions can be a problem even though that's a choice too, but that doesn't mean we should eliminate things like supervised medication where they have been found to work because you deserve to die of AIDS if you make poor choices. I'm not suggesting that we ignore any problem were choice is a factor.
Man-made environment is just a product of choices made necessary/more convenient by the natural environment. :>
|
|
|
|
|
|
EPT
