When a KFC commercial flashes on the television and fried chicken is advertised as abeing the cornerstone of a healthy diet””and “”containing only six grams of carbs,””it’s obvious that America has some catching up to do on what’s healthy and what isn’t.
Six grams of fat would have been a decent selling point, but six grams of carbohydrates? Apparently, we’re so ignorant about what is healthy that a food that is low in carbohydrates is magically good for us ‹ never mind the amount of fat, sodium, cholesterol, chemical additives, or lack of real nutrition.
When we glean our information about what is healthy to eat from pseudo-scientific diet books and KFC commercials, reality practically turns on its head. Then the dreary statistics hit us again: Americans are fat and getting fatter.
Call it a hunch, but eating KFC isn’t going to help anything except maybe it’s bottom line. In fact, eating KFC and the like are exactly what caused the problem in the first place.
It seems that Americans are polarizing in terms of body weight and how we deal with it: There are the willowy health and fitness nuts, and then there are “”the statistics,””who are doomed to be overweight by genetics, the processed food industry, ignorance and so forth. The people in between seem to be rapidly disappearing, possibly because when Americans aren’t gorging ourselves with fattening, unhealthy junk food or starving ourselves with the newest fad diet, we have no idea what to eat.
This is America, and Americans will endlessly defend the right to force a crash or fad diet instead of simply being educated about nutrition and eating a balanced, varied diet. Americans will also defend the right to have detailed nutrition labeling on food, even when we have very little idea which ingredients are healthy and which aren’t (and further, have no reservations about shoving mass quantities of unpronounceable chemicals down our gullets).
Ironically, in Europe, where nutrition labeling isn’t compulsory, people are much more picky about what they put in their mouths. Incidentally, Europeans have a lot more opposition to genetically modified foods than Americans do.
It’s also ironic that in America (where beauty ideals are slowly evolving, but are still soundly grounded in being unnaturally thin,) that obesity is most rampant.
That’s not to say that America’s beauty ideal is healthy ‹ it’s not, and obesity is partly a paradoxical effect of the pressure to be skinny. But concern over increasing rates of obesity run much deeper than failure to conform to a beauty ideal: Being massively overweight is a health risk that can be easily controlled by real knowledge of what’s healthy along with a little bit of discipline and restraint.
The success of books like Eric Schlosser’s “”Fast Food Nation””is an encouraging sign that people are beginning to take some interest in what is finding its way into their stomachs. On the other hand, the Atkins diet ‹ legitimate or not ‹ is in vogue right now, and many people are trying its basic low-carb, high-protein formula without bothering to research its finer points. People want an easy fix and the ability to lose 20 pounds in two weeks, not a shift in lifestyle that might require them to cut down on KFC visits.
Consider the nutrition labels ‹ we all know they exist, but how many people read them? And how many of those people actually understand them or make dietary decisions based on the information they contain?
Americans demand that the information be available, but then ignore it or sheepishly realize that we have no idea how to use it.
So far, much of the blame for Americans’ obesity has been put on the fast food and processed food industries, which have, without a doubt, revolutionized American eating habits and continue to have enormous influence over what people choose to eat. Blaming individuals for the state of their bodies has become politically incorrect. But putting all the blame on institutions completely ignores the 40 percent of Americans who, despite those KFC commercials, the pull of junk food and the ease of a sedentary lifestyle, are not overweight.
There’s no reason why people in an industrialized, educated, wealthy country like America should be doomed to early deaths because of simple ignorance about what’s healthy and what’s simply slick marketing or a passing fad. Furthermore, there’s no reason why people should consider even for a moment the silly claims like the one made on KFC’s commercials.
It’s not hard to realize that something processed, breaded, preserved, fried and flavored with chemicals made in a laboratory is probably not good for you. It seems so obvious, but Americans just don’t get it ‹ we want to believe what we see on television and be reassured that if it’s cheap and delicious, it’s also somehow good for us.
Until we face the facts about all the garbage we put in our mouths, the obesity statistics are going to keep getting worse and our health care system will continue to be strained by easily preventable weight-related illnesses.