Told to Eat Its Vegetables, America Orders Fries

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/25/health/policy/25vegetables.html?hpw

by grellas • 16 years ago

26 52 16 years ago

csallen• 16 years ago

If you get a login wall from the above link, try going through Google and clicking the first result: http://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1CHMG_enUS291US301&so...

jarin• 16 years ago

Does anyone have a non-paywall link?

lachyg• 16 years ago

Got one. http://www.ndtv.com/article/world/told-to-eat-its-vegetables...

ronnier• 16 years ago

You can always try my reader http://viewtext.org/article?url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.nytimes.com...

marcinw• 16 years ago

Anytime you come across a paywall link on NYT's site, just remove the "/glogin?URI=" and query string from the URL, and you can usually brute through it.

barrkel• 16 years ago

Changing the 'Referer' HTTP header to http://news.google.com/ or similar punches through many of these registration walls, like NYT, WaPo, FT, etc.

On Firefox, the RefControl extension works well.

twillerelator• 16 years ago

>People know that vegetables can improve health

More like: we were cajoled and coerced into eating vegetables by our parents, who were in turn cajoled by their parents, etc.

We then spend the rest of our lives rationalising this uncritical acceptance, which isn't the same thing as knowing something.

zeteo• 16 years ago

It's even arguable that vegetables were critical 100 years ago, but no longer in days when you can get your fiber from breakfast cereal and vitamins in the form of a pill.

zach3• 16 years ago

Not just our parents:

http://www.fruitsandveggiesmatter.gov/

This site is a production of the Produce for Better Health Foundation, founded and funded by the Produce Marketers Association.

anigbrowl3• 16 years ago

Like the meat producers don't do the same thing?

itistoday4• 16 years ago

  I'm not afraid of zucchinis, but I just don't know how to cook them.

This is just sad. So many people are failing at something as basic and fundamental as eating.

cageface• 16 years ago

Most vegetables are good if you just slice them up, steam them briefly, then sprinkle a little salt on them. If you don't feel like doing anything more ambitious this only takes a few minutes.

nkassis• 16 years ago

I just put them straight on the grill next to whatever I'm making. My wife does the more complex stuff when needed but that sometimes make me feel dumb. I can figure out most things on my own but cooking is something I just have no interest in learning.

points4• 16 years ago

s/eating/cooking

itistoday4• 16 years ago

No, I mean eating. Part of eating is knowing how and what to eat. As discussed in the article, they're not eating vegetables and are choosing to eat things like fries or potato chips instead. You don't even need to cook most vegetables to eat them. In fact, for many vegetables it's better (nutritionally) if you don't cook them.

lelele3• 16 years ago

You can eat a lot of veggies - zucchinis included - raw.

wanderingmango• 16 years ago

The Stonesoup cookbook was featured here in June: http://thestonesoup.com/blog/2010/06/a-free-e-cookbook/ I've switched almost entirely to that book — 5-ingredient, 10-minute recipes. It is quicker than eating out, and my veggie intake has tripled.

ezyang• 16 years ago

I suspect that if people knew how to cook vegetables properly, consumption would increase dramatically. Ask your vegan friends for some recipes.

rubashov• 16 years ago

The presumption that people need to eat a lot of vegetables is perhaps flawed:

http://www.second-opinions.co.uk/why-eat-5-portions-1.html

Population studies haven't really shown a clear benefit from eating a lot of vegetables.

atomical4• 16 years ago

The benefit is that you don't become overweight and obese. I lived in Korea for a year and those people know how to eat vegetables. They are filling and low calorie which makes it less likely for the sedentary person to put on weight.

points4• 16 years ago

It's not a direct link though. I can stuff my face with nothing but donuts for weeks on end and never put on an ounce of weight. Which is probably as irritating as someone who can't lose weight.

narrator• 16 years ago

Being overweight and obese is caused by eating too many calories. No really. If you don't believe me you can get the very long exhaustive scientific treatment of the subject over here: http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/www/hackdiet.html

zephyrfalcon• 16 years ago

I also recall this blog post from 2009: http://t-a-w.blogspot.com/2009/11/myth-of-5-day-people-never...

arethuza• 16 years ago

Sorry I got to "British socialized medicine destroying UK" and gave up on that one.

sesqu• 16 years ago

"We have to make the healthy choice the easy choice," Dr. Foltz said.

That's the ticket. Implementation over theoretical qualities.

I eat a salad pretty much every time I'm in a restaurant with a salad bar, but rarely otherwise.

neilk• 16 years ago

How about looking at the cost? In America, grains, sugars, and meats are subsidized in myriad ways, directly and indirectly.

It seems to me, when I was a child, salads were less expensive than meat. But it's almost starting to become the opposite.

Mz3• 16 years ago

"Eating vegetables is a lot less fun than eating flavor-blasted Doritos," said Marcia Mogelonsly, a senior analyst for Mintel, a global marketing firm. "You will always have to fight that."

Just offer flavor-blasted veggies: Outback Bloomin' Onion. Hashbrowns with onion and red pepper. Etc. I eat more veggies these days than I used to and that is part of my approach. Veggies don't have to be bland.

autarch• 16 years ago

I'm pretty sure potatoes and other starches are not included in the definition. I don't think hash browns are the solution, though they make for a delicious problem.

Mz3• 16 years ago

My understanding is potatoes are a vegetable and very nutritious in their own right, which is why they were a staple of the Irish diet until the potato famine (by staple, I mean you could practically raise a family primarily on potatoes and some poor families basically did just that). I do understand why french fries and potato chips are considered "junk food" but I don't think that changes the fact that potatoes are a vegetable.

midnightmonster• 16 years ago

Obviously I'm not a controlled study, but I've found weight loss is easier since I made a habit of eating a large serving of vegetables at least once a day. And I don't worry about what I have to do to make them desirable--soy sauce, salad dressing, salt and butter--just so long as I'm mostly eating veggies at the time.

tomjen3• 16 years ago

>Dr. Jennifer Foltz, a pediatrician who helped compile the report. She, like other public health officials dedicated to improving the American diet, concedes that perhaps simply telling people to eat more vegetables isn’t working.

Jesus, you didn't know this? Really?

I have been bombarded with "this is healthy", "this is not healthy", "you should eat so much of this, so much of that, only a little bit of this" ever since I was four, possibly earlier. Same goes for all the calls to exercise, the cute campaigns to "exercise 30 minutes a day", "take the stairs", etc, etc, et fucking cetera.

So why, after all this time have they still not realized that the reason I (and mostly everybody else) don't exercise isn't that we don't know we should, it is that exercising sucks, getting sweaty takes time and then you have to clean up again, getting back and forth to the gym, etc.

The same thing goes for eating healthy, although it is _slightly_ ofset by carrots, which are very tasty.

Told to Eat Its Vegetables, America Orders Fries

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