Tag Archives: obesity

Little boxes… made of ticky-tacky…

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 Not in my front yard! (photo courtesy of myfoxdetroit.com)

I’m one of many, many Americans who have the dubious distinction of having grown up in the suburbs. Though I can understand the thought process of some who live there – More land for your money! Lower taxes! Better schools! Everybody’s just like us! – I hated it. HATED IT. Especially where I lived, there was nowhere I could go on foot other than to the local high school. Which is cool for about all of five minutes. The closest grocery store and shopping area was a mile away on a road with no sidewalks where people (myself included, in my teenage years) regularly drove 20 miles above the speed limit. Not exactly a good destination for a middle-schooler on foot.

I drove through that part of town this past weekend to show my son where I used to live. It was the first time I hadn’t been over there to deal with something from my parents’ old house (cleaning 33 years of stuff out of the place has been over for a couple of years, thank goodness) and the first time in ages I wasn’t on autopilot driving through. All I could think of was “how on earth do people LIVE here?”

Maybe I’m a snob, maybe I’ve just lived in a city too long, but I like walking to the coffee shop and the bus stop and having a major supermarket (and in two weeks, a brand-spanking-new urban Tarzhay) within a mile of my house. I like walking there on sidewalks that actually exist, I like riding a bike there easily, I like driving there, I like being home quickly from work in 20 minutes on a bus that someone else drives so I don’t have to. Yes, I do like driving sometimes, but I like even more the fact that I don’t HAVE to. I can still function in society if I were to suddenly become carless tomorrow. Which is probably why I’ve lived within the city limits for 16 years now and have a graduate degree in planning. So I admit that I’m a little more extreme than most. But still….

Who doesn’t want their kid to walk to school? Who wants to make their kids fatter? Who wants to prohibit the planting of vegetables so that the neighborhood kids don’t know where tomatoes come from before they end up in ketchup? No one I know. But, alas, we live in a society where all of those things happen – and, as it happens, all things have been talked about (especially the last thing, those poor defenseless tomatoes) this week:

  •  The Safe Routes to School Program unveiled a new “walkability” checklist to determine the community value of a school – in part because “one phenomenon we battle everyday is kids’ inability to walk to school – or anywhere – because it’s too far” (sound familiar, childhood?). According to them, school siting away from existing populations, or residential siting away from existing schools, “has helped contribute to the epidemic of obesity and diabetes that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control has proclaimed.”
  • Yeah, that pesky obesity epidemic. Sick of hearing about that one yet? Me neither, because it’s getting worse. The catchy title of this year’s report F as in Fat: How Obesity Threatens America’s Future 2011 highlights both adult and childhood obesity. More than two-thirds of the 50 states have adult obesity rates over 25%. Twenty years ago, no state had a rate over 20%. Childhood rates aren’t quite as alarming, but this interactive map from last year shows that all states except one have childhood obesity rates less than 10% (yet another reason I feel compelled to move to Oregon). So at minimum, one out of ten kids are overweight. In my state, 15% of all kids are overweight. But not being able to walk to school has nothing to do with it, right? Neither does having the ability to grow your own food and learn that food doesn’t just come from a grocery store. Nothing at all.
  • Which leads me to the worst story of the week, as far as I’m concerned. Have you heard the one about the woman who is being sued by her city for growing vegetables in her front yard? Sadly, it’s not a joke. Gotta love complaining neighbors in small towns who don’t think raised garden beds are suitable for front yards, even though the municipal code specifically exempts vegetables from the prohibition of random things in yards. Yes, I’ve checked. And what struck me in this story (after thinking that Oak Park has nothing better to do than to declare war on vegetables) is what this supportive neighbor said: “I have a bunch of little children and we take walks to come by and see everything growing. I think it’s a very wonderful thing for our neighborhood.”

So let’s take away maybe the only place kids can see things growing that they might one day eat in a neighborhood because it’s not suitable. Thinking back on my childhood, I don’t remember any of our neighbors growing gardens, just my parents. Is it typical of suburbia to want things so ‘just-so’ that they don’t want people eating from their yards? That’s certainly the stereotype, and there are many documented cases of kids not having a clue where food comes from. 

I know this post may be wandering, but it also proves a point – everything is connected. If my kids don’t know where food comes from and the difference between processed and non-processed foods, and they can’t walk to the bus stop or to school because of safety or land use issues, it seems pretty inevitable that they will end up overweight. I’m doing my best to keep that from happening – and it’s so foreign to me that people, especially planners, who are supposed to think of the interconnectedness of systems, don’t get it. Then again, there’s a reason I don’t live in places like that.

#myplate – beef (protein?) #2

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As I mentioned earlier, two things bothered me about the USDA’s food pyramid transformation into a plate. Other people have had valid complaints about dairy by itself, protein not actually being a food, and other issues. The biggest one that struck me, however, is the disconnect between what the federal government is telling people to eat, and what the federal government is subsidizing farmers (I use this term loosely, Monsanto) to grow.
There are two striking visuals to this effect. First, one developed by the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine comparing #myplate to agricultural subsidiesfor crops grown that people in the United States eat (it excludes the support of exported and non-food crops). If you don’t feel like clicking, here you go:

Fruits and veggies take up half #myplate, but they only get less than 1% of agricultural subsidies. Protein is a quarter of the plate, with dairy a modest-looking glass on the side. Even if you assume that the protein quarter is only meat (which isn’t actually the case, because beans, tofu, and other vegetarian options also provide protein), there’s no reason that it needs 63% of the agricultural subsidy. At least, not if supporting your own recommendations is important.

Second, Utne Reader highlights Kitchen Gardeners’ dueling maps of Michelle Obama’s organic vegetable garden on the White House lawn – what is actually planted there, and what would be planted there if her garden reflected federal subsidies. Obviously, meat and dairy aren’t represented here, but you get the general idea:

So unless you eat corn, corn, and more corn, with some soybeans and tobacco thrown in for variety, you aren’t eating what the government supports with taxpayer dollars. At least, not directly (keep in mind that corn and soybeans are also used for animal feed, so unless you eat grass-fed everything in your meat diet, you probably are eating corn, corn, and more corn in some fashion). Here, fruit, vegetables, nuts, and ‘other specialty crops’ are less than 1% of the total subsidy, again. Does #myplate really make fruits and vegetables look like specialty crops? I certainly wouldn’t consider half of every meal a specialty.

What does this mean for the consumer? Even without considering increasing gas prices (and therefore, increased transportation costs for the food you’re eating), if you eat what USDA suggests you eat, your food bill is likely to go up, because half of your food is hardly subsidized by the government at all. How is that serving the American public?

And that’s just within USDA itself. How about the conflict between subsidizing foods that cause health problems (like obesity, diabetes, and other non-hereditary diseases)? Or having the Farm Bill be at odds with the First Lady’s attempts to combat these issues in kids? That’s HHS, the CDC, and the White House up against USDA. That certainly doesn’t seem like an efficient way to run government.

In fact, the President and Congress agree with me. The Government Performance and Results Modernization Act of 2010 aims to avoid overlapping government programs to increase efficiency and effectiveness for the American people. In addition, agencies in the Obama administration are collaborating in a way that is unprecedented at the federal level. HUD, DOT, and EPA are jointly funding grants designed to further sustainablilty in housing, transportation, and the environment. Six agencies are collaborating across agency boundaries to combat domestic and sexual abuse. And nine agencies are collaborating (for better or for worse, depending on your opinion of this topic) about building transmission lines on federal lands. Trust me when I say that federal agencies talking to each other regularly, let alone really collaborating, is nothing short of miraculous.

So…. <insert crickets chirping here> why exactly aren’t we subsidizing the foods the government is telling us we should eat to be healthy? Is USDA exempt from that whole collaboration idea?

#myplate – could even be a platter.

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The USDA unveiled their new and improved way of encouraging Americans to eat healthily last week – you know, because we have no way of knowing what’s actually healthy to eat while being bombarded by millions of dollars in marketing campaigns designed to take our $1.99 to the closest value menu of choice. Some big name food policy ‘celebrities’ (such as they are) have weighed in – Marion Nestle is optimistic, while Michael Pollan points out a huge disconnect. Look how pretty it is – amazing what $2 mil will get you these days:
MyPlateWhile admirable to keep trying to get people to eat healthier, two things* popped out at me the first time I looked at the www.choosemyplate.gov site. First off, there is NO mention (that I have found as of yet) of what size the plate should be, hence dictating portion size. At ALL. I don’t know about you, but I have several sizes of plates living in my cupboards, and even the smaller salad plates would be pretty darn full of food if I loaded it up the way the USDA shows me. While confusing (like a third of a bagel equalling one serving of grains), those of us who can do basic math in our heads can still figure out the old pyramid. Furthering the confusion, where does one see a ‘normal’ portion size anymore? Certainly not at restaurants. Let’s look into that issue a little further.

This past year, as a working mom of two with a husband in graduate school, I grabbed takeout more often than I should have. Thankfully, I live fairly close to a Chipotle restaurant, probably the only fast food place I will walk into anymore (though I will cop to a hankering for a Whopper Jr. every once in a while, I drive through and eat guiltily in the parking lot while wondering if I’m eating a downer cow. But damn, that char-broiled fake food taste still gets me every time.). It’s fresh, I can see it made, I can load up on veggies and know that the organization supports my commie pinko leftist food choices with their naturally raised locally sourced foods. Sounds fantastic, right? Load that burrito on up!

Hang on a sec. How many calories am I supposed to be eating a day? According to the USDA (and buried on page 12 of a dietary guideline document, and yet further buried in greater detail in appendix 6 of that doc), I should officially be taking in somewhere between 1,800 and 2,000 calories a day. Just checking.

Back to that gorgeous burrito. That guacamole is calling my name. Who cares how many calories? Well, my 20 pound weight gain last year cares. My kids who have a mom who can’t run very well right now care. And I care, because I’d like to not have to buy a new wardrobe, keep the light on in bed with my husband without obsessing about my stretch marks, or worry about dropping dead of a heart attack at age 68 less than three hours after calling my daughter to tell her I wasn’t feeling well (as my mother did). How many calories is that burrito, exactly?

According to Chipotle’s own nutritional information, a whackload. My personal combination of tortilla, rice, black beans, fajita veggies, chicken, mild and medium salsas, cheese, sour cream, and guacamole adds up to 1155 calories. For ONE meal. That’s not counting the chips and extra guac I sometimes bought. That left me with 645-845 calories for the rest of the day. I can tell you that my caffeine habit was supported by chai lattes at that time, which land at 300 calories. I’m not sure what else I ate on those days but I can tell you it was probably more than 545 calories. And you wonder why people in this country are obese? Enormous portions in restaurants are the norm. If you put it in front of someone, they’ll eat it. Don’t even get me started on places like the Cheesecake Factory, where some single-serve entrees are reported to be over 2000 calories.
So common sense needs to come into play. But people are busy, and frazzled, or poor, and unable to access the food they need to be healthy. What happens if no one taught you was a normal portion size was, or told you to aim for 2000 calories a day, or that restaurants are required to provide nutrition information, but mostly hide it or throw it up on the internet where no one looks before they buy a burrito, or a hamburger, or a sandwich where the bread is actually fried chicken? Come on, USDA. Think a little more about substantive recommendations like the SIZE of the plate instead of “avoid oversized portions” when normal isn’t normal anymore.

As for me, when my fat jeans didn’t even fit, I reassessed. I eat out of the fridge more and grab stuff out of the takeout line less. And when I do visit Chipotle these days (because their food is fantastic, regardless of size), I go for this combo: a salad with romaine lettuce, black beans, fajita veggies, chicken, mild and medium salsas, sour cream, and guacamole. That huge pile of food is only 645 calories. And I’m mindful of the vinaigrette, which can add another 260 calories, but I never use the whole thing.

As for you, #myplate, I have more to say about you. But that’s for another day.*

*I’m too wordy to address both things that bug me about this in one post.