“Learning about Cuba, and having some food.” – Fast Times at Ridgemont High
“Sir, I found the IED – Ice Cream, Eggos® and Diet Coke™.”
I had (before Vlad decided to put on the Imperial March and send the tanks down south) promised a three-post series based around a single theme. As the name of the blog implies, this first one covers the “health” theme of the blog . . . . Unless events in Ukraine dictate, expect parts two and three on Monday and Wednesday.
What happens when society conspires to make people . . . unhealthy? We’ve experienced an upheaval in the traditions and previously self-imposed and society-imposed limits to behavior (behaviour is the metric spelling for you in Chairman Trudeau’s People’s Republic of Canada).
By (nearly) any measure the United States is far less healthy as a nation than it was five or six decades ago. About only good thing we’ve seen is a lowering in heart disease and other diseases related to smoking. That’s a bright spot. Many of the metrics are fairly grim, though on other health statistics. Even life expectancy, which had been increasing, is now trending downward faster than Kamala Harris at the county fair zipper pull.
So, Joe Biden sent her over to manage the Ukraine situation. I’ll bet she’ll suck at that, too.
I’ll throw out this idea: many of the health issues that we are facing are the product of modernity – changes in society that break with time tested traditions:
- I can pull up numerous articles that point to how America is the fattest that it has ever been. Homer Simpson was portrayed as comically obese in the 1990s when he reached the weight of 239. Now that qualifies him to wear medium clothes. From the child’s section.
- We’re also at a high point of kids being raised in broken homes, which causes health issues as well. I mean, if being in jail is a health issue.
- Finally, we’re in many ways unhappier than ever before – opioid deaths aren’t happening because life is peachy. Kids in high school today don’t think they’ll do as well financially as their parents. And people are looking for increasing escapes from reality.
Let’s start with weight – I’ll spend more time here since I think it’s a topic where we tend to blame people because they’re fat. However, I am not particularly a proponent of the idea that self-control just disappeared and that’s why America decided to pack on the pounds. Nope. Things changed which made it much easier to pack on the Dorito® muscle.
This is exactly what AOC weighs when she has both her saddle and feedbag on.
Join me for a minute in a time machine back to the 1960s. What did people eat?
Food. Duh.
But what kind of food? Food with much lower levels of processing. For example, frozen pizzas and microwave Pizza Rolls® and Bagel Bites™ didn’t exist. If you wanted a TV dinner, they were required to be placed in an oven for approximately sixty years and then pulled out. I never had a 1960’s version of a TV dinner, but the photos I’ve seen made them look as attractive as Nancy Pelosi.
They were a novelty.
When I was growing up, Ma Wilder made dinner. Sure, she bought noodles sometimes, but she also made her own, from scratch. I can’t remember my mother ever making something from a kit. She bought me some pizza kits about twice a year where you made your own dough because I think it amused her to watch me try to cook.
No, when Ma Wilder made mashed potatoes, she started with . . . potatoes. Then she added milk and butter and salt. Four ingredients. She even made gravy from scratch. Much of the food Ma bought didn’t have labels. Why would you need to label a steak? I mean, the only ingredient is: steak. Same with lettuce. Same with tomatoes. It’s . . . food.
I think I channeled Aesop for a minute there.
How many moms in 2020 have the time to cook like Ma Wilder did? How many are, instead, thrown to work and then due to time pressures toss the kids Pop Tarts® and Tropicana™ and Kid Cuisine©? When I was a single dad (and much stupider than today) I’ll raise my hand – I did.
So did/do a lot of people. The food that is convenient is categorically different. And, at least until inflation makes it nigh unaffordable, it’s now ubiquitous. Soda pop costs less now (adjusted for inflation) than ever. Buy it in the 2 liter (2 milligrams in metric litres) bottles and it’s amazingly cheap. Buy the off-brand stuff and you can get it inexpensively enough that you could bathe in it.
Food is also available all the time, everywhere. When I was a kid, there was breakfast (I always skipped it due to the high quality of my genetics) lunch at school (I nearly always skipped that because I could buy a comic instead of lunch if I saved my lunch money) and then dinner at home. Mom may or may not have made dessert – it was generally a once a week thing. And convenience stores are selling Snacky Cakes© at 3am. When I was a kid, everyone was asleep at 3am.
They say breakfast is the most important meal of the day. But what if there’s no fast to break?
Compare that to today? All school food is free for all students this year. Pugsley could have free breakfast, a free snack, a free lunch, and then a free afternoon snack if he wanted. Every day. And then dinner, and then a fridge filled with snacks.
The cooks at school aren’t (mostly) getting actual food ingredients to cook, either. They’re getting highly processed foods that contain (in some cases) ingredients other than salt that were mined instead of grown. They contain oils and chemicals that were made in facilities that would make an oil refinery blush. Oh, wait, the “vegetable” oil is made in a refinery that uses solvent extraction and then bombards the oil with hydrogen to create a chemical reaction to make it shelf stable.
Do we wonder why we’re fat? We’re not eating food. And what we are eating is so available that we’re stuffing ourselves with it constantly.
Why?
Moms have to work because society says that making PowerPoints® is more important than raising kids. Besides, it takes a village, right? Oh, and since all the moms are working, a family can’t afford a house on just one income. That’s, of course, if the family is intact. Single moms and dads have even less time.
Yup. This modern world is a winner, am I right?
I tried pole dancing once, but Kowalski didn’t like it.
That brings us to issue two: single parents and blended families. Do I understand that it’s sometimes required? Yes. I was married to someone before The Mrs., and it didn’t work because it was a mixed marriage – I was human and she . . . wasn’t. I kid. She might be human, but the test kept turning to smoke when her DNA was exposed to light.
Society has made divorce a go-to option. Again, I’ve been there as a parent.
But not as a kid.
I had two parents for most of my childhood, which was awesome. (I was adopted after the mother wolf left me on the Wilder doorstep, which was seen as a fulfillment of the Great Prophecy that I would be the one to unite the mayonnaise and mustard – the condisatz haderwich – I even survived the Everlasting Gomstopper© jabbar.) Sure, they argued. Sure, there were problems from time to time.
I never had to worry, though, who Ma or Pa was going to bring home.
I never had to help them emotionally through a divorce. I got to be a kid. And when Ma said, “Wait until your father gets home,” I was damn scared. They were united in punishment, and they would absolutely not undercut each other.
But Pa saved his blue shield for special occasions.
If I was in trouble, I couldn’t escape the consequences.
Now? The pathology of single parenthood is clear:
- 43% of prison inmates grew up in a single-parent household
- 90% of repeat juvenile arsonists live only with their mother
- 75% of patients in drug abuse facilities came from a single-parent household
- 63% of youth suicides are from homes without a father
I could go on and on. Society has made divorce by women for “fun and prizes” cheap and easy. It’s even celebrated by the “I don’t need no man” crowd. Who suffers? Society. And the kids.
So, the tradition of divorce being very, very hard to get and socially undesirable seems so outdated now. Right?
Let’s add on our final contestant for this post: the financial pressures and collapsing economy brought out by a relentless globalization and continual change. Careers are gone. Gigs are in when an economy has all turned to “services” driven by cheaper labor.
In many cases, businesses are built with just the idea to use cheap labor to financialize the industry. What’s the forty-year-old guy who used to carve gravestones going to do when the boss buys a laser engraver that does twice his work in half the time? There’s not exactly a market for monument carvers.
At Mozart’s grave, you can watch him decompose.
Let’s also add this into the mix: The constant streams of gratification available from infinite Internet porn to infinite Internet social apps (I hear the kids have found something called MySpace®) haven’t created the sort of real-life experiences that were common in the past. Now, the negatives are accentuated, amplified, and immediate. Is it a surprise that kids today are nihilistic and escapist and jaded on male-female relations?
Still, in all of this, there is room for personal responsibility. We are each responsible for our individual outcomes. I can’t pass the buck for my failures back to society, but I can look at the trend. Have the people who got fat changed? Not really. It’s just far easier to get fat today, but still the responsibility of the individual.
Have plenty of kids from broken homes turned into champs? Sure! But the statistics show that parents, shockingly, matter to the outcomes.
If I pick a career that gets replaced, is that on me? Yes, yes it is. But how many people have picked careers where they have been replaced? Twitter® even banned people for telling journalists (who had told coal miners, “learn to code”) to “learn to code.” We live in a society where careers are ephemeral, coming and going faster than Nancy Pelosi’s bouts of sobriety. And what do we do about a generation raised by computers that are programmed to be as addictive as possible without creating actual achievement?
I heard an actual journalist was recently at CNN®. They had Security escort him out.
If I leave a kid in a candy shop politician unsupervised, it’s my fault, as well as the kid’s politician’s fault. You just don’t leave irresponsible people where they can cause damage, even though the moral choices were made by the kid politician.
Perhaps, moving away from traditions means moving away from problems that have been solved before?
I grew up in the 50’s, all of them. My mom cooked our meals and restaurant food was rare. Fast food was a nearby hamburger joint that sold 7 hamburgers for a dollar and though cheap they were hardly a staple food source. Soft drinks were not the standard beverage, and convenience food, which my Mom appreciated since she really didn’t enjoy cooking, such as Kraft Dinner and Chef Boy Ardee, were served maybe once a week. Probably 90% of the food I ate while growing up was made from scratch. My grandmother made homemade breads and desserts and most everything else from real ingredients. I carried the practice of preparing and cooking real food into adulthood and as a result have maintained excellent health with no chronic conditions, or prescription meds. I haven’t had a cold or the flu, never mind Covid, in over 5 years. I don’t do flu shots and I stay away from the doctor. While other factors also come into play, I do believe that eating wholesome, homegrown if possible, homemade food is the reason for my good health. And it’s also much less expensive!
Makes one wonder why we went away from those traditions?
sadly, John; the advertising folks and mass media (sorry, that’s redundant) spent years hyping convenience and time saving (surely not health) and it dovetails well with the rest of the ‘destroy the family unit’ – which is their prime target. Going back to the white working class fool – pioneered by Archie Bunker, or even Jackie Gleason – the mission of Satan, and make no mistake who our real enemy is; has been to break up the traditional family unit and hold the fathers up to ridicule. Think about why, focusing on how important the family unit is to the Lord; and how He uses the example of the family in Scripture… this is a spiritual battle; do not be deceived. And keep in mind, despite being prayed up and doing the Lord’s work – it came down to Daniel picking up a few rocks…
Indeed – look back at television, and it was nearly all propaganda. Sad.
I mean, not Gilligan’s Island.
You mean David, right?
I’ve heard that processed foods are eaten faster because they “melt in your mouth” and overall require less chewing than “normal food”. That, plus the general rush most mealtimes seem to be today, means you slam down more calories for a given number of both minutes and chews. So..eat more slowly. Take time to enjoy your meal. If you’re eating out, irritate people more by sitting longer at the table for which they are waiting.
Irritating people at a restaurant enough can possibly have the added benefit of providing additional exercise during the meal itself. Like this incident at Golden Corral:
https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1487240362741616641/pu/vid/270×480/BU8JZkZk3N5ZuNam.mp4?tag=12
Ricky, that video was horrible to see, but you may have noticed that the melee was mostly comprised of a certain segment of our population that experiences all of the negatives John wrote about in this article.
They impact your system much faster – and cause a greater insulin “kick” – along with other things . . .
But, yeah, free excercise!
Excellent piece, John. Surprised you mentioned hydrogenated fats, but left out HFCS (metric for high fructose corn syrup) which is in foods that used to not be sweetened at all! And let’s not forget the buried studies from the 60s that linked sugar to heart disease, instead pinning it on fats and red meat.
IMHO high fructose corn syrup is the single biggest reason for obesity in the USA*. My understanding is that it is FIRST metabolised to fat to be stored for later use, compared with cane sugar (glucose) which becomes available for use before excess is stored as fat.
Bearing in mind I’m just some random weirdo on the internet, do your own research.
*Not a resident or citizen, just making an observation
First it has to be processed by the liver, which is a good waste of liver space.
HFCS will get a post of its own . . .
A fascinating book on the current state of food and how we got here is Joel Salatin’s “Folks, This Ain’t Normal.” Since we moved out to our small homestead a couple years ago, we’re trying hard to eat a lot less processed food. The difference is pretty amazing. And as soon as the ground dries out and I can get back to clearing the tree line, it’s great exercise.
Your points on the ease of divorce are spot on. It’s devastating to kids, but for some reason, parents thinks, “They’re young. They’ll adapt.” Well, they adapt all right. Looking forward to parts 2 & 3. Assuming we don’t see any super-bright clouds over the weekend…
No superbright clouds! Yay!
John, it has disturbed me for some years now that we have created a situation where we seem to expand our ability to gain weight (pun actually intended there) while at the same time bemoaning the fact that it has happened and we should do more. If this was truly a “pandemic” – words we have heard somewhere recently – would we not do everything in our power to to work against it?
I do wonder though, that part of the reason some are resistant is the combination of we cannot say anything uncomplimentary about anyone ever – even if it is endangering their life – and that we cannot discuss changing our eating habits without someone bringing in a required mindset in personal beliefs and living. If we want people to get healthy, let us start there and leave the pontificating to a later date.
As to divorce – I had the same experience as you (although at home, there was no shield; TB the Elder just had a bearskin from his Berserker days): parents married their whole lives (still married after 63 years!) and if there were any marital issues, it never bled over into our lives as children. I cannot imagine that burden. Again, if “the science” tells us things are effects, why are we not doing whatever we can to address the causes (because, as of recently, we have to “follow the science”)?
If we did something about it, then people wouldn’t need so many expensive drugs.
“…because it was a mixed marriage…”
Same here. I was raised Presbyterian. She was a Baptist. And, as far as fat goes, I dropped from 199 to 165 over a year. Quit bread, period. We raise ‘maters, celery, green beans, onion, collards, broccoli, etc., ad infinitum. Lettuce too. No corn, as the f’ing deer would eat it.
Nicely done! Bread is an interesting product nowadays . . . very different than even a few decades ago.
“She might be human, but the test kept turning to smoke when her DNA was exposed to light.”
And there’s yet another reason to read WW&W three times a week. Might be “borrowing” that one. In return, here’s a couple of useful nouns for this sorry day and age: “shrillista” and “offendotron.”
Borrow as you wish! Shrillista! Ha!
Although everything you say about the SAD (Standard American Diet) is undeniably true, I think there is another underappreciated element to the modern obesity epidemic – the chemical environment. Everything from traces of Xanax in the water supply to microplastics filtering into the foods we eat, processed or not. We are immersed in a toxic stew of man-made, unnatural irritants that have us all in a state of constant inflammation.
I have been fastidious about fat management in adult life (obsessive bordering on maniacal, insists beloved wife). She herself was thin right into middle age, only to make an abrupt about-face when the satan of menopause rudely shoved aside her demonic little sister, PMS, and the pounds accreted. BW has always been an excellent home-scratch cook, but this did not spare our kids once they became independent. They, and their partners, battle daily with their weight today.
Bottom line, none of us in this family eat processed foods regularly, and we eat mostly home-cooked meals. Yet we all struggle to some degree to keep overweight at bay. Self-control is only part of the equation, and perhaps not even the major part. There are many days that I feel like a cork bobbing on the waves, drifting wherever Mother Nature and the environment take me.
Indeed. And there are solutions now, thankfully as the lies begin to, at last, vanish.
I experienced a similar upbringing in the 50’s/60’s. Besides diet, the other big difference for me was physical activity. My dad worked night shift, and slept during the day, so unless it was pouring down rain or below zero degrees, I was outside, in order not to wake him up. I spent hours riding a bike, climbing trees, and engaging in other physical activity that burned off lots of calories and built muscle. No sitting around watching T.V. and fiddling with a cell phone.
I grew up in the mountains. Good times.
1950s, I grew-up on a farm in the mountains east of Sacramento.
My four grandparents lived next door.
.
I was, and am, too curious to spectate at televisionprogramming… other than Saturday morning for Gene and Roy, Sky’s spring-loaded niece Penny and the reverse-psychology successes of private dick Boston Blackie.
.
My granpa Jack (surname ‘Russell’) rode with Roosevelt up San Juan Hill.
Him and me, eight years old and eighty-eight years old, side-by-side fussing in the orchard and chicken-coop.
.
I will be 70 in a few weeks, I get tuckered-out in a couple hours puttering around the farm.
Those were tough people.
They were. And they were family. And we learned from them. And they made us better. I remember one of the best days of my life was spent side by side with my great-grandpa working around his house for hours when I was five. I’ll remember that day until my last day.
Calories are just cheap and the cheapest calories are the worst ones. Try shopping for decent food, you will quickly discover that it is way more expensive even though it generally has been processed less. If I didn’t know better I might think this is being done intentionally or something…
Yup. But they are much, much more filling.
I think John Kennedy feared what we’ve become as a society. His fitness initiative led my school to push physical exercise, annual fitness tests, and a demand for healthy people. It worked, and somewhere in the decades since, it faded into video games, large amounts of processed food, and a society that buys exercise machines to store in the garage.
From my perspective, people really don’t care. Life is easy and self-discipline is as unimportant as understanding how to have a healthy diet.
Yep, can’t remember how many exercise cycles and treadmills I’ve either given away or donated to charity over the years. When I was working outdoors in construction, there was a lot of exercise what with toting lumber, climbing and walking around construction sites.
Now that I’m retired, could use one of those machines now
I think they do, but I think that they haven’t been told the truth . . .
I participate in cooking classes at the Advent church.
After the lessons, everybody gets a plate of pipin’ hot goodies.
.
Leaning against the heater on a chilly afternoon, I noticed one obese youngster of probably 25 or so.
A forkful, one chew, swallow.
.
Im contrast, I chew the dickens out of every bite.
She finished her plate while I was on my second forkful.
If I did that rush business, I would feel deprived of flavor, texture, mouth-feel… and probably a significant amount of digestion.
Factor in the lack of Fat Shaming. The wife comes from a family of Extra Larges by genetics, but was shamed as a teen and lost and then kept off all the extra. She stay’s pleasantly plump in the correct places and actually doesn’t eat enough. And here’s a great story about today’s dysfunction. Stepdaughter leaves the marriage after 22 years. No reason given other than “feelings” ( I suspect as her daughter is almost 18, her hen pecked and abused husband would have left her. I sure would have. Professional money spender, bad wife, bad mom, all around bat crap crazy ). She moves in, through Tik Tok, with a divorced guy with little monsters for kids ( she didn’t even like her own, but at least they are only weekend visitation ). The one just got suspended from school for, once again, watching porn at school. 12 years old. The dad is a pothead. And all this seems disturbingly “normal”. At this point, you can only laugh.
Say what you will, bullying is a potent force to turn folks around.
All part of the Long March. The hey let’s throw everything that worked for millennia out because it was made by ol’ Whitey and sounded good in the faculty lounge after a few bong loads should end well. (Honk Honk!)
Dank Cackling Kamal meme-Shows her making bitter beer face and it says…that face when you are first woman president but the CPUSA doesn’t recognize genders.
Health? A construct of the white male capitalist patriarchy, comrade.
Forward! Yes we can!
A Great Reset Forward! Thank you WEF!
Foxtrot
Juliet
Bravo
Amen.
Any fedboi disinfo agents in the house?
I doubt it. We’re not quoted on MSM.
He’s your best e-buddy,
Your pal and your guy
His IP’s in Langley and he won’t meet up live
Fedboi is glowing around!
You ego he’ll stroke,
Your dog he will wag,
And then you’ll get left holding the bag,
Fedboi is glowing around!
He’s got all the stuff,
And everything planned,
Despite all this he never gets banned,
Fedboi is glowing around!
His haircut is sharp,
His polo is tight,
He glows much brighter than a tritium sight,
Fedboi is glowing around!
St. Leibowitz 12-09-21
NICE! I was looking for a comeback and had “polo” lined up and then . . . it was already there.
Now do ‘khakis’
His khakis are pleated,
He’s never defeated,
It’s you who’s been cheated and defeated.
And yeeted?
Fast Times At Ridgemont High is a classic, almost cult film.
Hi John: Funny thing, since I read this post I was doing a little shopping at a Midwest grocery chain. I usually just shop the specials there as the regular prices are too high, for example they have a store brand coffee that goes on sale every 6 weeks for 2.99, regular price 5.99. Oddly they discount it to 3.99 for 1 week, 2 weeks before it hits the low price.
But I digress..
Store brand cottage cheese was on sale and I usually get some as I perceive it to be a healthy choice. I read the ingredients and was shocked -which takes a lot these days- at the list of additives, but the clincher was natural and artificial flavors. I couldn’t (didn’t want to) try to imagine what the artificial flavor for cottage cheese would be like in it’s undiluted form.
Put it back and bought the expensive one. Ingredients: milk, cream, salt.
Sigh 😞
It was the right choice. Your body will appreciate it. How many ingredients should bread have? Water, flour, salt, yeast . . . maybe butter?
My machine recipe is exactly that, plus it calls for about a tbsp of powdered milk.
I know last nights corned beef likely had shady ingredients in the cure. Maybe next year, if there is one, I’ll make one from brisket. Did a pastrami in 2020, what else are you going to do when gov shuts down your small business and employer cuts hours back to “make it fair to the employees on the coasts who can’t work at all”. 🙄
Wow . . . hadn’t heard of that. Here? After the nonsense of the panic phase, we were back to normal fairly soon.