To think most people don’t care about healthy eating, exercise, etc

[Notcontent]

We keep hearing about rising obesity levels, diabetes, and how sugary/processed good is responsible for a lot of it, etc.

But it seems to me that most people are completely ignoring those messages - either because they think it’s all nonsense or because they think “oh well, I want to enjoy my food and drink and I don’t really care what happens when I get to 50”.

I completely agree that we need to have treats and enjoy food because that’s what life is all about. But a lot of it is just simple stuff, like having water instead or sugary drinks. Why is that? Yes, I know some people can’t afford healthy food, but most of us do have some choice about what we feed ourselves and our families.

Kids are brought up now to expect snacks. And kids activities and clubs reinforce this
They expect it their use to it.
I've met lots of EE families, Their DC have porridge for breakfast, eat carrot sticks, hummus, homemade healthy snacks at lunch and dinner, there are loads of ideas of youtube. Replace sugar with honey or vanilla flavours.
My friend had to do 3 laps of the pitch every morning in school in Poland, they cook from scratch.
It is a lifestyle they are use too, we should be encouraging the same, if your out working all day invest in a slow cooker, it will save money on ready meals in the future, buy pre cut veg to safe time.
We make to many excuses, I don't like to hurt anyone feeling about their weight, but it is so odd after growing up 90s as a teen, we were all slim teens.
The majority of my niece and her teenage pals are overweight, probably 2 out of 10 are slim.

Is this "huge pressure at work" mantra a wind up? Am I meant to believe that there are more overweight people working in the City for KPMG than their are unemployed in Bolton?

Is this "huge pressure at work" mantra a wind up? Am I meant to believe that there are more overweight people working in the City for KPMG than their are unemployed in Bolton?

This!
Some cultures in the Far East eat street food for diner every day. Healthy and home cooked and cheap! And they get to socialse too.
I don’t agree with lack of time either. There are loads of healthy(ish) meals that take little prep and cooking.
Smoked mackerel cous cous and cherry tomatoes
Veg omelette
Soup and sandwich (wholemeal bread of course)
Salmon only takes 15 mins under the gril - have some broccoli and a microwave sweet potato with it etc etc

I do care....however I'm morbidly obese (size 20-22).

I have bipolar disorder and am the family breadwinner working long hours in a stressful job.

Sometimes I feel like the serotonin/dopamine from shitty sugar and carb heavy foods is the only thing that keeps me going.

Planning out a healthy balanced diet, sourcing good quality ingredients, managing cupboard/freezer stock, having the skills to turn these wholesome ingredients into tasty nutritious meals is a real, complex skill. People who sniff at it, got no idea. Consider this, to qualify as a chef, I.e. to be able to do the above, one would require many years of training and a lifetime of learning/ professional improvement thereafter. It is absolutely a skill, and a difficult one at that.

As somebody who grew in a household where I wasn’t taught how to cook/ shop/ manage menus/stock, it took me at least 4-5 years to get to the stage of cooking edible meals and having a half-decent diet. As I was now on my own, nobody cooked or shopped for me any more. It was a damn steep learning curve and I had to eat a few takeaways/pub grub along the way which has put me off mass produced food for life. Sorry there is no comparison taste wise or nutrition wise between chip shop crap or convenience isle crap and a wholesome homemade meal, freshly prepared. I don’t eat out these days, as it is invariably a disappointment: fatty, dry, over cooked, undercooked, not particularly fresh, too salty, too sweet. I am incredibly fortunate that I have had the time to teach myself the nutrition/cooking skills. It takes a huge amount of time, headspace and planning to eat well.

I don’t judge two-working-parents households that they resort to convenience food, they simply have not got the mental/physical energy left over to invest in a family diet. I have done it and can testify that at 7pm in the evening when you all walk through the door starving and about to collapse, the last thought on your mind is spending 40-50 mins minimum labouring in the kitchen after a full day’s work. People don’t have the resources to look after their health and well-being properly, bled dry by their jobs and numerous responsibilities. So I don’t judge. It is tough. It is not simply down to laziness as some believe on this thread.

It’s hard work keeping the weight off, after the age of about 35 though. My BMI has crept up to 25, from 22, so that’s about 18 pounds over the last 15 years. Just over 1 pound per year, which is nothing, until you add it up. I don’t want to wake up at 50 and find I’m not far off obese with all the health complications.

I have to actively choose healthy options and do some exercise. I have a desk based job so get hardly any exercise on a day to day basis. Now I live in the suburbs I also drive to work. I used to walk an hour a day, across the city when I lived centrally, just to get to work and back.

Our lifestyles just aren’t healthy. So unless you make the effort then you will end up overweight.

“Some cultures in the Far East eat street food for diner every day. Healthy and home cooked and cheap! And they get to socialse too.”

Which is interesting as that’s eating a take away every day. People would be falling over themselves to condemn a British person who ate take away for dinner every night as unhealthy, uneducated and lazy

British takeaways are sad though, sad, fat, greasy, salty

I have only been in Singapore and Thailand, but the street food there was fresh, lots of veg, an nothing as greasy as a UK takeaway!

I can get anything I want as a take away Britain. You’re just restricting understanding of them to pizza and chicken/ fish and chip shops aren’t you?

Which is interesting as that’s eating a take away every day. People would be falling over themselves to condemn a British person who ate take away for dinner every night as unhealthy, uneducated and lazy

Definitely not the same sort of food!

Come on, I live in a village just outside a grim northern town and we can still get healthy take away. Chicken skewers or chunks of lamb with tons of salad in a pitta from the kebab house. Veggie curry and daal from the Indian.

Most people really aren't that bothered though. My kids went to the naicest of village schools with overwhelmingly slim middle class parents. I went in for a family lunch and quite a few of the other parents were making shocked remarks because DS(7) was eating a wrap heavily stuffed with salad and eating fruit. I was thinking, "Come on, this is not weird, this is what we all should and could be doing."

Thinking about processed foods, what about the 1970s? I grew up on things like Smash, Maggi fast soup, Findus crispy pancakes, oh and lots of Angel Delight! It is not a recent thing...

Anything you can buy in a restaurant you can get as a take away. And obviously it’s home cooked.

And agree user, it was the baby boomers who enthusiastically embraced the processed foods, and it was important really, as it helped free a generation of women from the kitchen

Well I went to secondary school in the 80s at the height of the cadh cafeteria. It was all burgers , hot dogs chips and cakes.
I was on fsm so had no choice. I hated it with a passion but just picked the best of a bad lot.
The choice at dds secondary is much better.
At home we ate healthily enough and I was a normal weight.
Nowadays I am just about obese but eating healthily and exercising. The weight is slowly coming off.
Dh is a normal weight but eats crap and doesn't exercise.
Nics to know that I am the one seen to be a scourge on the NHS purely due to my current size.

I don’t always think weight is a good indication of health. My DH can eat anything and not gain Weight and he has an awful diet with unhealthy food constantly. I am overweight and really struggle to lose weight but eat healthily in general. Also I don’t smoke or drink much so I am possibly healthier again than the skinny smokers at work.

Think it’s hard to fit it all in. The easy option is to drive everywhere and eat processed food.

100 odd years ago, these weren’t options and manual work was a reality for everyone.

On the subject of preparing vegetables (which I was told off for boiling and told I should be 'sautéing' there is some more info here...

well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/18/ask-well-does-boiling-or-baking-vegetables-destroy-their-vitamins/

"It’s true that cooking methods alter the nutritional composition of fruits and vegetables, but that’s not always a bad thing. Several studies have shown that while cooking can degrade some nutrients, it can enhance the availability of others. As a result, no single cooking or preparation method is best, and that includes eating vegetables raw.

Many people believe that raw vegetables are packed with more nutrition than cooked vegetables, but, again, it depends on the type of nutrient. One study of 200 people in Germany who ate a raw food diet found that they had higher levels of beta carotene, but their plasma lycopene levels were well below average. That’s likely because fresh, uncooked tomatoes actually have lower lycopene content than cooked or processed tomatoes. Cooking breaks down the thick cell walls of many plants, releasing the nutrients stored in them.

Water-soluble nutrients like vitamin C and vitamin B and a group of nutrients called polyphenolics seem to be the most vulnerable to degradation in processing and cooking. Canned peas and carrots lose 85 to 95 percent of their natural Vitamin C. After six months, another study showed that frozen cherries lost as much as 50 percent of anthocyanins, the nutrients found in the dark pigments of fruits and vegetables. Cooking removes about two-thirds of the vitamin C in fresh spinach.

Depending on the method used, loss of vitamin C during home cooking typically can range from 15 percent to 55 percent, according to a review by researchers at the University of California, Davis. Interestingly, vitamin C levels often are higher in frozen produce compared with fresh produce, likely because vitamin C levels can degrade during the storage and transport of fresh produce.

Fat-soluble compounds like vitamins A, D, E and K and the antioxidant compounds called carotenoids fare better during cooking and processing. A report in The Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry concluded that over all, boiling was better for carrots, zucchini and broccoli than steaming, frying or serving them raw. Frying vegetables was by far the worst method for preserving nutrients.

But when it comes to cooking vegetables, there are always tradeoffs. A method may enhance the availability of one nutrient while degrading another. Boiling carrots, for instance, significantly increases measurable carotenoid levels compared with raw carrots. However, raw carrots have far more polyphenols, which disappear once you start cooking them."

We keep hearing about rising obesity levels, diabetes, and how sugary/processed good is responsible for a lot of it, etc.....But it seems to me that most people are completely ignoring those messages - either because they think it’s all nonsense or because they think “oh well, I want to enjoy my food and drink and I don’t really care what happens when I get to 50”

The same applies to smokers, drinkers and drug takers. Why would the OP choose to single out one form of "abuse" rather than all the others too? I think we all have a "weakness" - just that fat people are more obvious and so become a target.

I do care but being a single parent who has to work full time, think about what to have to eat, shop for it and then cook it day after day become tedious so I do resort to less healthy alternatives more often than I should. Add into that I don’t always know how many I’m cooking for (teens going out) it becomes hard going to care.

People don't need to smoke, drink and take drugs. We do all have to eat.

I think most people care a bit but not enough! And then there are the people who actively sabotage others health attempts. Much easier if the other person is a bit unsure of exactly what healthy is due to the plethora of contradictory information or not really that committed.

I’m torn on this. I work with elderly people and I don’t like what the future looks like. There are so many health issues around the elderly and it’s nothing to do with what they ate etc as most of them are slim. Loneliness is also prevalent. It’s grim and it depresses me when I see it. I don’t want to be around after 80.

Hmm, thing is you can live to eighty and be perfectly healthy and then go downhill. Or you can spend the years from 70 to 80 in ill health and then go downhill. The latter is more likely if you don't look after yourself.

My DFiL had a stroke at 83, had six horrid months then died, but before that he was fit and healthy. He kept active and tried to eat well. My DGrandad was similar. My Dad was overweight and a smoker, had a heart attack at 60 and really was in poor health until he died at 75. You can argue DFiL didn't get many more years than my Dad. But they were much better quality years.

My DH is superfit, at 55 runs mountain marathons and did an Ironman. I'm slightly worried about him keeling over on top of a mountain somewhere, but he says that's the way he wants to go, not festering away in a bed at 95.

You don't have to smoke drink or take drugs but you also dont need to eat crap food. And the 'easy option' is not driving everywhere and eating processed foods. For me the easy option is walking and cycling everywhere and eating delicious healthy food. It's a mindset. Just move more and eat less.

Snacking, snacking, snacking.