all about food

Today I learned that the reason Americans are so fat is because back in 1977, the meat and dairy industries wouldn't let Senator McGovern's health committee tell people to eat less meat and dairy, so we got fixated on food components, which by now would have given rise to sugar-free omega-3 whole-grain soda pop, if only people could figure out how to put oil and whole grains in soda.

Anyway, here's the quote of the day:

Once, food was all you could eat, but today there are lots of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages festooned with health claims, which brings me to a related rule of thumb: if you’re concerned about your health, you should probably avoid food products that make health claims. Why? Because a health claim on a food product is a good indication that it’s not really food, and food is what you want to eat.

I also got a great statistic on the sixth page of that article: women in this one big study weighed on average 170 lbs and reported that they ate only 1800 calories a day, which no one believes, most particularly the people doing studies because they know full well that everybody lies and can usually quantify by how much. Also, we as a nation produce 3900 calories per person per day, and it has to be going somewhere.

The other thing I learned is that meat loses roughly a third of its weight when you cook it, so based on what I cook in a four day period, I probably eat around a third of a pound each of beef and salmon but maybe a quarter pound each of turkey and pork, so I'm not too far off from the quarter-pound meat servings that big study considered 'medium.' I suppose that since I'm not overweight I don't need to ask things like that, but as you likely know by now, I'm just like that.