This one is going to be a bit all over the place. Trying to collect all the thoughts in my head. I was thinking about obesity in our country the other day. And then today I was watching the news feed coming across the bottom of the screen for Fox news and there were some "alarming" facts about obesity running across the screen; basically stating that by 2030 we were going to be a seriously fat nation.
This is one of those situations where the problem also begets many other problems, mainly of course health which in turn raises the cost of health care which in turn causes more economic headaches etc etc etc
The other day I was thinking about causes of obesity in our country and really you can name many of them. And I do mean many when you think about it. And which are the main drivers of the problem are hard to say. I think each contributes heavily. Some examples are education about good eating, poverty, eating out too much or lack of planned family meals, meal schedules, processed foods over fresh foods, eating healthy is actually expensive, and lack of active lifestyles to name a few. This has been something that has developed over decades.
Some things that I would like to focus on are also in my wheel house about the economy. And the title of this post describes one of them. To start though lets talk about an indirect cause and that is meal planning. This goes for upper middle class to families in poverty being affected. With two parents working or single family parents much of the time there is little to none meal planning. Everyone is busy, time is short breakfast never gets eaten and dinner is sometimes after 8 at night. Ask any nutritionist and this is a recipe by itself for disaster. There are many reasons why this problem exists, but mainly a combination of trying to cram in more activities further from home and the middle class losing spending power so the need for both parents to work causes later dinners and non healthy dinners either by processed foods or restaurant eating. Think back a couple of generations, going out to eat was not just a treat, but something that was only for weekends and even then the choices were limited. Now between fast food and chain restaurants our highways are littered with eatery choices. And yes our society has recognized that eating out is a problem think about menu choices now, almost all have some type of heart healthy choices or some other label for so called healthier choices. Now is this the main problem, no the lack of meal planning is just a cause among many, but not the most immediate topic I want to discuss, but I wanted to include it because the solution will need to address this as well.
The topic I want to focus on and address for this post is the concept of processed foods or that we get most of our at home meals through prefixed meals. Highly processed foods that have very low nutritional value, except fortified with vitamins, (we need vitamins from the actual food). This is where bigger is not better. Think about this for a second, we now have large corporations making money off what we eat and by becoming large they have put what is the most important element of eating to the side and that is it is for our bodies, our health, and our nourishment. Now it is just filler so we can think we have eaten something, yes we have something in our stomachs, but what good is it doing for us as humans. So maybe the solution falls into my economic thinking and that is maybe we should break back down the food distribution system. bring back smaller industries built on local markets so we get fresh food on our tables again. We to eat we well we will need to add education and time back into the process, but relying on fast food or frozen foods for most of our daily meals is putting ourselves on the back burner of our own lives. And yes we hear this every day from government health bureaucrats, nutritionists, and even the media, however, there is no plan to put good food back into our systems. I think as part of a new economy bringing the food process back locally has a few benefits. One we eat better, two local economies are enhanced ( and yes goes with diversified wealth),three because of planning families might get more time together eating a real meal, four new industries developed, but instead of new fake food, we get new ways to get food to the market, yes it is harder for some areas to have fresh food than others, but we work on solving that issue not trying to feed everyone from one source (large corporations) and again I am not trying to play Robin Hood and steal from one group to give to another, but who does the best job for us right now should be rewarded so if the large corporations can diversify and bring this home so to speak more power to them, but we got to bring back eating real food to us.
Again I am all over the board with this and there is so much more, but I wanted to get some ideas started on paper. And even though it sounds like much, most of the distribution system is there, it is just the philosophy and freshness that becomes important, and there are other ways to help like expanding hydroponics, rebuilding farms in certain areas and having cities that are sprawled out, replan to allow growth around the farms and allowing tax breaks etc to make farming affordable next to and inside cities. Just some quick ideas.
Obesity is another issue like poverty that will take work, but the benefits from doing the right thing are worth much more than the investments needed to start fixing the problems. Not only are the monetary benefits, but the whole big picture is improved giving us the country we truly want.
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