[Azure]

Originally Posted by Devils'Advocate

What?!?!? The government recommends 8 to 12 servings of fruits and vegetables every day. How many people get that? The reason people are obese is NOT because people trusted the Canadian Food Guide and followed it to the letter.

If blaming the government makes you feel better, go for it. But you are deluding yourself. As a formerly obese person, I can tell you right now the reason I was fat was because I absolutely IGNORED the Canadian Food Guide and ate pizza nuggets on Monday, Pizza Pops on Tuesday, Pizza burgers on Wednesday, Pizza subs on Thursday and Pizza Hut Pizza on Friday. And not because the government told me to do so. I lost the weight on a low-carb, NO-MEAT diet and feel better than ever.

So, try to help me understand here. You say if you HAD followed the Food Guide, you would have remained a healthy NON obese person, and yet when it came to loosing weight you ignored just about everything the food guide said, and to THIS day remain a vegan(IIRC), which goes directly against the government sanctioned food guide.

Strange.

8-12 servings of fruit per day don't make you a healthy person. You need protein and fat as well, and unless you're crazy, no sane person is going to build a diet around 8-12 servings per day.

Fact is the government recommended more carbs for over 30 years. Bad carbs? No difference. White bread over whole wheat bread? No difference. And on top of that they subsidized the corn industry and helped push transfats into the market. Corn industry resulted in going away from natural sugar sources, like cane sugar, and towards unnatural sources like HFCS. What else did it do? Micheal Pollan answers that question.

Cheap corn, the dubious legacy of Earl Butz, is truly the building block of the ''fast-food nation.'' Cheap corn, transformed into high-fructose corn syrup, is what allowed Coca-Cola to move from the svelte 8-ounce bottle of soda ubiquitous in the 70's to the chubby 20-ounce bottle of today. Cheap corn, transformed into cheap beef, is what allowed McDonald's to supersize its burgers and still sell many of them for no more than a dollar. Cheap corn gave us a whole raft of new highly processed foods, including the world-beating chicken nugget, which, if you study its ingredients, you discover is really a most ingenious transubstantiation of corn, from the cornfed chicken it contains to the bulking and binding agents that hold it together.

There is an understandable reluctance to let Big Food off the hook. Yet by devising ever more ingenious ways to induce us to consume the surplus calories our farmers are producing, the food industry is only playing by a set of rules written by our government. (And maintained, it is true, with the industry's political muscle.) The political challenge now is to rewrite those rules, to develop a new set of agricultural policies that don't subsidize overproduction -- and overeating. For unless we somehow deal with the mountain of cheap grain that makes the Happy Meal and the Double Stuf Oreo such ''bargains,'' the calories are guaranteed to keep coming.

From a great article.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/12/ma...l?pagewanted=1

And don't tell me that big business is being held accountable for their actions more than the government. That's crap. How many articles in these journals cover the corporate responsibility to provide healthy food choices. Low-salt organic prepared soups like Health Valley cost $4.99 for a single serving, while Campbells slaps a "low sodium" sticker on a can that provides 40% of your daily sodium on a "Health Smart" soup and where is that being discussed in the media?

Public demand is forcing big food companies to rethink their marketing strategy, and to think more about offering organic foods, some of which are a ploy.

I never said they're being held as accountable as they should be. I'm saying I agree with what Pollan is saying. Food companies, and farmers, all play by the rules that were written by the government.

And until that gets changed you're still going to have a problem with obesity.