You might be right Cubbi. I'll try and dig up some of the articles I read way back when and see if they're as damning as I remember them being.

ignorant nonsense and conspiracy theories

Bull and bull.

Ignorance is an ad-homenim attack. Nonsense is a code word.

Conspiracy theories has nothing to do with it. All the crap that happens is public record -- which, BTW, people don't seem to read much anymore. (I personally suppose that without the simplistic "sound bites" talking heads feed us on national news programs people would actually have to learn something for themselves.)


Business sense does not equal care for the consumer. Monsanto, ConAgra, Nestle, etc, are all in the business of making money first, and health second.

For example, ever wonder what all the hubbub is about high-fructose corn syrup is? It is as simple as this: it is cheaper to produce and use it in the USA than it is to import actual sugar. There is a whole lot of money and effort put into convincing people that it is the same thing, but it is not. We don't know enough about it to say exactly how it affects us, but studies like this one at Princeton make for some nerviousness:
http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S26/91/22K07/

There you go for one of the simplest issues.


I live in NJ. My brother in law grows heirloom NJ tomatoes.
I won't buy the crap that is chemically ripened at the store anymore.
Do you know what the difference is? I do.

There's another simple one for you.


So don't call me closed-minded before you learn something yourself about our food supply.

Ignorance is an ad-homenim attack. Nonsense is a code word.

I have no milder words with which to describe your phrase about genetically-modified products. Sorry if you're taking it personal. This sort of neo-Luddite mindset is unfortunately common.

So don't call me closed-minded before you learn something yourself about our food supply.

Typical response of a conspiracy theorist. "Learn the truth, man, THEY are lying to you".
How about you learn something about actual, not "organic" 21st century agriculture, the level of research, control, and responsibility involved at every step from the fertilizer and pesticide manufacture to retail. Maybe some organic farmers can approach the quality of conventional produce, with extra effort and cost, but I simply cannot trust them.

(disclaimer: I am only familiar with american procedures, other countries may vary)

Bare in mind, I did say my point of view was skewed due to personal experience and what I've seen on different news outlets.

LOL.

I have no milder words with which to describe your phrase about genetically-modified products.

Here is the phrase: "We are being fed highly-processed, addictive, genetically-modified foods that affect us in ways we cannot handle."

Out of that you have attacked me on genetic modification, which you cannot claim does not happen. If I were you I would have been much more bothered by the "addictive" part of that. Not to mention that you skipped over the whole "in ways we cannot handle" thing, which is the real issue people in the industry have with this kind of statement.

neo-Luddite mindset crap

Straw man. Maybe you could, at some point here, attack my claims instead of me?

Typical response of a conspiracy theorist. "Learn the truth, man, THEY are lying to you".

Your entire attack against me has been a combination of ad homenim and related fallacies, including appeal to ridicule, among others. I have not claimed any of the crap you say I do.

"organic"

What?

research, control, and responsibility

/me runs off to laugh

Generic phrases about the consummate trustworthiness of those on one side of an issue is bogus spin.

quality

More bull. The 'quality' of my brother's tomatoes is superior to the stuff imported out of California. But I have had some pretty low-quality 'organic' stuff too. "Quality" is not a trait endemic to one side of the argument. It is, in fact, a pretty non-specific word, much like "better" and "they".


Paraphrasing someone who posted here, "Sad to see nonsense trumps a reasoned discussion on an otherwise reasonable forum."

I'm not wasting more time with this.

Speaking of evolution, how long do you think it'll be before north koreans branch off into their own species?

Sorry for the late reply, but I wonder do you mean the North Koreans themselves, or their government?

There are ordinary people all around the world, I am guessing they basically want the same things out of life (decent water, food, clothes, housing etc), but their government makes a huge mess of everything.

The level of expectation might be different, what some one from a third world country thinks is suitable house, will probably be very different to what someone from a first world country might expect.

He meant because of the difficulty of getting either in or out of the country.

My £0.0128:
- The vast majority of food companies do not care about how healthy their food is, unless it benefits them (because they can sell it at a higher price and because "healthy!" is an attractive advertisement).
- Food that is advertised as healthy and high-quality is often neither of those things.
- There is no intent to damage people's health; food companies don't care either way. If there's an option that's healthy and an option that gets them more profit, they'll almost invariably pick the latter.
- Companies do tend to make their food addictive, but they don't need genetic modification to do that because they have something called sugar.
- There are some food companies that try to make their food healthy, even at risk to their own profit margin. These are unfortunately in the minority.
- If your government doesn't regulate this kind of thing, you need to move out of the third world country you live in.

@Duoas,
I just wanted to specifically aim this point at you. No-one is forcing you to eat this food. If you want good food, get it from a farmer's market or something. The silver lining of the evils of capitalism cloud is that you don't have to buy it.

Few points:

a) "Not lazy, just... lazy". Too lazy to go grocery shopping, too lazy to cook, too lazy to play outside. Shopping and cooking takes quite some time and effort. Additionally, it's quite difficult to start with these days. Every shop overwhelms you with different variants of the same crap and the more time you spend comparing numbers (nutritional values, price, etc.), the bigger the odds that you pick randomly and feel bad about your choice, regardless of which one you took. Then, you're looking for a good recipe, but you don't know who to trust. Every master chef out there has different opinions of what a healthy meal means. I've seen famous chefs promote recipes that start with half a kilo butter for a 4-person meal. Better yet, you don't even know which ingredients to trust. Eggs are deemed healthy one day and the root of all obesity the next.

Summary: Shopping and cooking is hard; we're overloaded with information, but we're not given the tools to process this information. Very frustrating and tiresome.

b) Fast/Junkfood IS more popular in low income areas. There's quite a few infomercials out there plotting fast-food chain outlets over a map with average income/capita and the result is astounding. But, there's a few historical reasons for this as well:
-Theft: regular grocery shops are easy to steal from. You walk in, take something and walk out. Fastfood joints make you pay up front; you'd have to violently rob the place to get anything at all. When it does come to robbing, big chains are better protected and insured. Local grocery shops just don't survive in such an environment.
-Hang-outs: Fastfood joints generally have much more tables and seats than your average restaurant, because their kitchen throughput is that much higher. Makes for perfect hang-out spots for people who live small (read: low-income households).
-Time: The lower paying jobs often have worse hours, such as night shifts or even being "on call". Restaurants aren't open during the day, and too slow if you can get called up at any moment. It's much harder to do shopping and cooking if you have irregular working hours.

c) Obesity is (in Europe anyway, where fastfood is slightly less prominent) primarily caused by lack of exercise. Personally, I blame our society more than I blame individuals. Do you know how hard it is to do sports in the city? We have several large sports clubs that offer a wide variety of sports. Sadly, all of them are booked full for two weeks to come, which is the maximum pre-booking length allowed, aside for people who book fixed slots for an entire year. It's summer now and about half the population in my city are students, and still all sportscenters are fully booked. Swimming during off-hours is an option, but it's still quite crowded. Waking up at 5:30 just so you can go swimming in a mediumly crowded pool is not very motivating.

Running is quite popular in my city, but even then you're not doing yourself a favour. We have three large parks, and several smaller ones, but all of them are in between large streets. I'm asthmatic (but very well controlled with medication) and I can feel the bad air. There's one nice route I've found to run, but the road itself is very bad (sprained my ankle twice in a year) and overly used by people who walk their dogs and don't clean up after. It's hell to run there during the summer, as mosquitos and flies gather in large numbers.

Honestly, sporting in the city is shit. Technically you can get enough exercise by just sitting less and walking more, but taking a two-hour walk each day just because would leave me bored out of my mind after a week.

Get a skipping rope.

Bad air problem remains, but I guess that's an option. I'd be too ashamed to do it, I fear.

I bought a new bike instead. Walking gets boring quickly because you're quite limited in distance. Biking around lets you explore the outskirts of the city and look up nice spots that aren't that near your house. Not technically sport, but movement is movement and any moment away from my computer is positive.

Bikes get stolen by the hundreds a day here, though. Student cities are absolute shit for new bikes. I'm paying €15/month extra for a somewhat safe spot in the garage.

You don't have to do it in front of people, and if you did, you could pretend you were Rocky or something. Or just, you know, put up with it. Cycling is great too. Surely there's an indoor pool somewhere near you? The bad air wouldn't be a problem there.

Already mentioned pools: they're terribly crowded.

I'm not saying it's impossible to do sports. I'm just saying city life seems to be designed to demotivate people.

A lot of people go to the gym. Then again my gym's incredibly crowded and incredibly expensive.

Beast Disch!

I would have weighed in on this sooner, but been through a lot of things since Thursday. My son, while getting ready for school suddenly quit breathing. We have been at the hospital since then and are waiting to have a surgery tomorrow (I hope) to put in place a trachea tube and g-button feeding tube. Due to this, I have decided to remove myself from this topic even though it started because of my remarks.

Yikes... Hope he recovers soon!

Swimming I Hears Actually Doesn't Burn Body Fat.Well,Anyways,My Favorite Exercise Is Biking.And I probably do 5 hours of exercise every week.He Quit Breathing?Let Me Guess:CPR!

My 0.02$

I think the effects of (the lack of) physical activity on obesity are highly exaggerated. Yes I know many studies show correlation here, but don’t forget that people who exercise also care more about health in general. Weight depends mostly on diet.

We are obese because we are surrounded by shitty, unhealthy, processed foods which make us ill. These foods are cheap and easy accessible, while high quality foods are harder to find, require lots of work to make, and are often more expensive. Additionally, since 50s we are given bad advice about nutrition. People avoid perfectly healthy foods and eat worse ones thinking they are doing the right thing. I think this have a lot to do with the current pathetic state of the nutrition/health knowledge. So called observational "studies" have usually very little to do with real science. Their authors draw conclusions based on weak correlations that prove nothing. And so we are still told egg yolks are at least as bad as smoking (recent study here), and whole grain bread is the healthiest food in the universe.

OK, enough complaining. Vegans can send their hatemail to [email protected] ;)

current pathetic state of the nutrition/health knowledge

So where does your knowledge come from? Is there a secret scientific community with its own studies and journals?