The media have got their new hobby horse. Obesity. Cigarettes were fun, now it's fat. In 1995 a Libertarian guy in NZ, Lindsay Perigo, told me that the Nanny-state people would make fat illegal, tax it and so on. I really thought he was kidding, but he assured me that that was where they were heading.
Sure enough, around the world, it's now fat fat fat. Obesity, health, diabetes. Oh the children. Bring on the laws and taxes. Save the world from itself. With We the Anointed in charge, bossing people around and taking their money.
Which is not, I hasten to add, that I am in favour of destroying children by selling them various combinations of trans fatty acids and sucrose, or fructose held together with some starch and made delicious with various flavourings. Chemists hit as many evolutionarily created taste hot buttons as they can simultaneously, which is what sells such products. Keeping pushers of drugs and other harmful chemicals out of schools and away from children is a good idea. But more important is that children learn to manage themselves, and learn that young.
The taste senses were great in the wild for identifying food, which always contained other essential nutrients too. Now, with factories creating the "food", and people hunter-gathering in supermarkets, it's only the intelligent, or well-guided, who are able to figure out the challenge they face in surviving.
Which is why the lower socio-economic people suffer disproportionately from obesity. The common assertion is that they can't afford decent food, which is stupid. Onions, cabbages, carrots, lettuce, tomatoes, potatoes, peas, pumpkins, rice etc are so cheap people can eat all they like. Eggs are cheap too. So are various cuts of meat. Some fish products are cheap too. Milk is cheap too [for the amount of nutrients].
The real reason the poor are fat is not because they are poor, but because they are not very intelligent and they are greedy, which well-off people are too. It's not that they need more exercize, though that wouldn't hurt. Sure, plenty of people have emotional problems too, so they don't even care if they could figure out what to eat. Greed is the root of all evil. Stupidity is greed's handmaiden.
Anyway, there is a LOT to write on the subject and we can expect to see a LOT everywhere, with megabucks made on the poor saps who will support the media and political spivs, dietary advisors, and hordes who get on the bandwagon.
Mqurice |
