The store-bought junk food is pretty bad in America, to be fair. But foreigners also tend to overestimate their popularity, because American media is largely funded by product placement; The average American probably hasn’t eaten a Twinkie in months or even years.
Restaurants are where you’ll truly experience American food. You’ll be amazed at how much flavor is packed into each dish, and at how large the portions are. But the latter is largely a cultural thing; Americans typically have leftovers that they take home. Europeans will see the feast-sized portions on the table and immediately go “no wonder Americans are so fat…” In reality, Americans would expect to take half of it home.
Americans typically have leftovers that they take home
Are you just not aware of how overweight Americans are on average? As i understand it we have been conditioned to believe these insane portions are “a meal”. I was simply unable to start losing weight until i traveled to Mexico to discover and internalize what a normal meal portion is. If you go to a restaurant in the US, you should expect to see most of the people around you finishing their plates
As someone from one of the most obese states in the union, the core of the issue is most definitely not portion sizes. Food quality is shit and most people will eat ultraprocessed foods on the daily because money is tight for most people and fresh/healthy food is hella expensive assuming there’s even access to it. If you have the same amount of calories in ultrprocessed food vs real food, your body will still gain more weight from the ultra processed one because it is less satiating because your body burns through it much faster.
Small scale organic farming used to be the norm in my grandma’s time, but nowadays younger people don’t know what an okra plant looks like or cracked open a pecan. Additionally if you’re even able to access and afford fresh produce it’s mainly water and is not nutritionally dense. This is an issue with the entire food system that’s been built on shipping stuff from far away and profit incentives. Not to mention the targeted advertising of ultra processed foods to kids…
Also, there’s virtually no public transit and the small amount of pedestrian and bike infrastructure is laughable and outright dangerous. You have to have a car to get to most places and most places require a lot of driving to get to depending. That means sitting down for most of the day. It’s hard for most people to get exercise in daily life without being super intentional about it, and a lot of people are overworked and underpaid on top of that, so they understandably just wanna relax. As with most things in life, the answer is always complicated.
The US’s obesity problem is more complicated than that. It’s not just that our portions are big. Americans have to work pretty long hours too. That means much of our lives we probably aren’t getting much exercise, and when we get home a lot of us don’t have a lot of energy to cook so we probably eat a lot more pre-packaged food. Stress also contributes a lot to weight gain.
And once you have gained a lot of weight, all of those problems, plus the fact that healthcare is so expensive, make it even more difficult to lose.
youtu.be/TH6Wq4KWu7M TL;DW smaller portion size, better school nutrition, healthier foods from convenience stores rather than omega-processed fast food garbage
You are extrapolating a lot from your own experience. I can confirm from my own upbringing that my family always had junk food or soda in the house - eating it was a daily occurance, and it was re-added to the grocery list each time we ran out with little thought given to the potential health impacts. And we only took home leftovers if it was, like, a really big meal.
Sure, not all Americans are like this. I’m not like this, and none of my friends are. But I am aware that I very much live in a bubble.
bear@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 months ago
I’ve had one Twinkie in the last 20 years, and it was breaded in panko and deep fried.