McDonald's UK CEO Blames Video Games for Childhood Obesity 321
BoingBoing is reporting that Steve Eaterbrook, McDonald's UK CEO, says that video games are leading the charge in obesity. He does have the decency to at least admit fatty foods are a part of the problem, but points the finger at interactive games for keeping kids indoors and not out burning off energy. "According to The Times, McDonalds UK is 'on the brink of its best year for two decades'. The firm has enjoyed six per cent like-for-like sales growth in the last year. More than 88 million visits were made to McDonald's restaurants last month, up 10 million on the previous year." Don't forget, we have known for ages that video games make us fat and mean.
First soda, now burgers (Score:4, Informative)
http://kotaku.com/335546/soda-companies-blame-videogames-for-fat-kids [kotaku.com]
Re:The Layer Cake of Disappointment (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The Layer Cake of Disappointment (Score:2, Informative)
Destroy ADM and Cargill, today!
Re:Korea and Japan (Score:5, Informative)
Re:The Layer Cake of Disappointment (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Being a larger guy... (Score:4, Informative)
Lack of balanced protein and/or lack of fat makes you FEEL HUNGRY, and sugars early in the day make the liver "lazy" ("gimme easy food, not food I have to work to process!") and gives you the munchies. -- My diet is based around red meat (chicken, fish, and vegetable proteins do NOT have the right balance of amino acids to control your appetite), with normal amounts of fat (no particular effort made to trim it down). I don't eat carbs before noon, unless liberally lathered with grease. (Incidentally my cholesterol is way *down* there.) This serves to keep my appetite under control over the long haul, and prevents having the munchies during the day. -- I don't limit sweets otherwise, since I hit a natural limit of how much "tastes good" fairly quick. I suspect as a side effect, I do not get "sugar highs" even if I eat a lot of sugar at once.
Just because your stomach is empty does NOT necessarily mean you need to ingest more calories. Learn to feel when you need energy, don't just assume your stomach knows anything about it. -- My stomach does NOT control when I eat. It can growl all it likes, but if the rest of my body doesn't say it needs food TOO, the stomach will be ignored (or at best placated with a couple crackers or a piece of jerky); it has learned to produce a couple token growls, then shuts up and stops bothering me. If you don't give in every time you feel the slightest hunger, your stomach too can learn this self-control.
Don't stuff yourself. I feel no need to "clean my plate". That's what the fridge is for -- storing leftovers. One extra bite at every meal adds up. And if you eat out a lot, remember that both fast-food joints and 5-star restaurants have doggie-bags. Take it home, get another meal out of it, instead of shoveling down food you don't really want.
Listen to your body when it is "bored" and wants to move around, or needs to sleep. The "twitchies" you get after a marathon coding session are a major symptom of this physical boredom and sleep deprivation (the two tend to go hand in hand). -- Find something physical to DO for an hour or so every day, even if it's just walking around the block. And try to sleep at *night* (preferably by 10pm) -- that helps keep the rest of the system in sync, so your appetite is easier to control.
Take note of the metabolic slowdown that happens around age 30. If you keep eating as much as you did when you were 20, you WILL get fat.
If your lifestyle *becomes more sedentary* thanks to computer games or ANY "sit in one place" behaviour, you WILL get fat. I know a lot of formerly-active, formerly-thin people (mostly middle-aged guys) who got addicted to some computer game, or to the internet, or who got a desk job after being a field rep, and promptly put on weight, simply because now they sit there and snack instead of moving around, and they eat just because their body is bored. -- I can tell when a certain friend's computer is broken, because he loses weight. -- TV never had quite as much of an effect, probably because what interests most people is limited to certain hours and certain days, so sitting in front of the TV tends to be self-limiting. Conversely, you can play WoW 24 hours a day if you wish. -- I still play a lot of DOOM, and muck about online a lot, but I DON'T snack while I'm on the computer. And I do stuff besides just sit here all day.
So... that's it. Nothing special about my lifestyle, no particular diets, no deprivation, no exercise regimen (tho I do a couple hours of physical work every day, it's nothing strenuous, mainly just a lot of walking). Do likewise, and chances are you'll return to your teenage weight, too. It worked for generations of your forefathers, who never heard of all this low-fat, low-protein "healthy eating" that's been packing weight on Americans for the past two decades.
The Science of Obesity (Score:2, Informative)
In short, Taubes argues very thoroughly and persuasively that there is much known about the cause of fat accumulation, and it goes very much against what the medical establishment claims. Anyone who has not closely looked at this matter is very likely in the dark about what is going on in our bodies, regardless of what they've heard or believe. Carbohydrates, specifically refined carbohydrates like white flour and sugar are the main culprits. Obesity is a disease that occurs because of poor nutrition, not because of poor willpower, gluttony, and sloth.
Here are the relevant links:
New York Times Magazine article from 2002: http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F04E2D61F3EF934A35754C0A9649C8B63 [nytimes.com]
MIT interview about the above article: http://web.mit.edu/knight-science/fellows/interviews/taubes.html [mit.edu]
Taubes' recent article about the role of exercise: http://nymag.com/news/sports/38001/ [nymag.com]
Happy reading! And good luck staying healthy!
Gym class. . ? (Score:3, Informative)
Life hasn't changed that much for kids except that the TV and video game quotient has crept up, (but not by so much), and McFries along with much of our food supply now uses GM vegetable oil. (McFries used to be cooked with animal fat back in the good old days when the oils wouldn't break down under heating into toxins; but that's another story. . ).
And yet there has been a distinct change, and I don't think it is linked to any one thing; not to video games or TV or our diets. I think it's a collective build-up of unhealthy and limiting forces, no one of which is going to tip the scales on its own. But it's there. People today are in general, less interesting. I'm sorry, you youngsters our there, but it's true. There's a curve of sorts going on. Want to test it? Do the following. .
Sit down with a sampling of regular burger-eating, TV-watching twenty-year-olds, (I should note that this does not apply to people who have disengaged from all the normal culprit lifestyles), and ask about their lives and their childhoods. Listen to their stories. Then do the same thing with a bunch of people in their late thirties and early forties. Move through the decades. --You'll begin to really notice the trend with people who were born in the fifties and sixties.
I did that for a while without particularly planning to measure anything; I was just in a phase where I was meeting lots of people, and was stunned by just how much more alive people seemed who had been born in the earlier decades. --I knew this one girl who must be in her late forties by now, who when she was a kid burned down a garage in the middle of one of her adventures. She and her gang also used to hike through the city ravine system which back then could take you from one end of the city to the other without needing to abandon the tree line, and they knew when all their various abusive parents would be away so that they could raid their separate kitchens en masse for lunch without being spotted. They'd take in fifty-cent films down at the Kingsway with the gang sitting along the entire front row passing roaches made from wild marijuana they'd picked in the forest and rolled into joints the size of 12 gage cigars. --One time they went to their favorite baseball field only to find that the Toronto chapter of the Hell's Angels had settled in for the day. --So they challenged them to a baseball game, and everybody ended up having one of the most exciting days of their lives.
Shit. I was born in the early Seventies, and my stories weren't nearly so bloody or amazing. --I did a few cool things; I burned down a fence one time trying to reverse-engineer fireworks, and I stole a shipment of wonderbread from a grocery store with my friends one night on a whim.
But I know a guy who was born in the fifties who has stories like Indiana Jones. And a thirteen year-old today whose big adventure was that she lost her cell phone and had to go looking for it in the woods.
--Now, I know this is not the norm. There are placid people in all times. --And adventurous ones, too. But it's the style and depth of adventure which I notice seems to have diminished over the decades. George Lucas used to be into street racing and hot rods; American Graffiti was drawn from his own teen years. Most of the young wannabe directors I meet today just watch movies. And
Re:The Layer Cake of Disappointment (Score:5, Informative)
I own chickens. It might seem unrelated but in owning chickens I wanted to learn how best to feed them. (I learned much about their nutrition and the epidemic of obesity in the industrialized world by this.) So I went to the local feed suppliers and tried to determine the best diet for feeding the birds. The answer to the question of how best to feed the birds was always another question that made no sense. "How much Antibiotics do you want?" was the answer! After getting this illogical response about 6 times, and eliminating disease as a reason for this, I finally got it out of the feed suppliers what is going on. Chickens gain 1.3 times as much weight per pound of food consumed when fed antibiotics as when they are not fed them. Typically Chickens convert about 3kg of feed into 1kg of chicken meat but when fed antibiotics it only takes 2.3kg of feed to produce 1kg of chicken meat.
Shortly there after I learned that this was a fairly typical gain associated with feeding animals. I learned that chickens being such high efficiency converters of food into meat and eggs also didn't alter the feed that much in its content. The Future Farmers of America (FFA) typically has an experiment that shows this very well. It involves feeding a laying hen purple dyed food. The egg yolks from that hen become purple!
I learned a lot more about the breeding of birds in the years that passed and about their raising. A typical farm raised bird is sold with about a 4% margin to the farm. This leaves the farm about 25% "under water" financially if the do not feed antibiotics. This is also typical in most meat production. Unless the meat is specifically raised without antibiotics it has them in it. These antibiotics pass through to the one eating the meat and they affect that person exactly as the feed animal. How this works is pretty simple and leads right into our epidemic of fat people. Antibiotics screw of the Glucose metabolism causing Hyperglycemia. Bluntly they cause a temporary diabetic episode. This triggers insulin release and begins damage towards type II diabetes. This causes almost instant weight gain in the individual. But this is hardly all of it regards our feed animals.
McDonald's Corporation, KFC and several other major US food delivery companies have done tremendous research now covering something close to 70 years to optimize user demand and to breed foods that stimulate demand. Chickens for example are highly genetically altered through breeding and other processes so that they produce meat of this profile. Similarly most meat animals have been modified this way. In addition our vegetable crops have been altered this way as well. This modification has come to dominate the production of most food crops in the USA. Potatoes and many other crops have become altered to achieve the goals of McDonald's et al. The essential demand increase is to produce a food that demands more food by screwing up blood sugar. As a result a person gets a very high blood sugar followed by a very low one. This is very nearly a profile for diabetes and weight gain. If you are a farmer, it is very nearly impossible to get farm loans and such to raise crops outside this genetic and marketing chain. As a result it is beyond doubt that McDonald's and other similar institutions have caused our epidemic of obesity. Their success in genetic and farming control is about 20 years old now and it corresponds directly to the time when this obesity started developing dramatically. It is so deep and so profound in the food chain in North America, that it is quite possible to point out that even a vegan who never ate at McDonald's could be proved to have problems directly traced to McDonalds et al.
The point here isn't to divorce any personal responsibility from the system. Rather to point out that it is a far lessor factor than we might like to think. Frankly it has fallen to a trivial level of consideration. The real issue here is when will be realize that our foods have been screwed up to the point wher