this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2024
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And pretty surely along with a lot of sugar and other bad shit. Anyone outside the US very easily sees how much crap is in your food, and how fat and unhealthy a disturbing amount of people are. Eating cheap in most of the world is usually pretty healthy, but in the US the accepted quality of fast food is very low so eating cheap usually becomes just eating that. And then there's high-fructose corn syrup in almost everything, which isn't the case anywhere else. And really weird shit like sugar in peanut butter, what the fuck?
We're talking about the more than half of America that is fat and sometimes diabetic.
Those people are less healthy than people who eat no processed food
Ed. Updated to make it more clear I'm not claiming most Americans are diabetic
I really meant the obesity rate. I know that doesn't equal diabetic, but it's on the pathway
I should change it to "and/or"
Easy enough to check. Looks like 11.6%. Higher than the 6.2% of EU diabetics, but hardly "half of America".
EDIT: Looking more closely at the European numbers rather than simply the average is super interesting. Turkey has basically US numbers for diabetes. Ireland at 3.2% has comparatively no diabetes. For all this talk about the "Mediterranean diet" and olives being a superfood, Spain and Portugal have very high diabetes numbers. I guess we should be talking about the "Greek diet" instead.
They mostly talk about Italy and France as living longer than current nutrition models expect
The Greek diet that science cares about is the post war Greek poverty diet. Not much food, mostly whatever they could grow in their community, and pull from the sea
So fish, octopus, olives, leafy greens, tomatoes
It's not an easy diet to follow.
Dessert is definitely not a big part of Spanish culture, there are a select few small deserts that are offered everywhere, but not that far off a yoghurt, spanish usually just have a coffee after food (a small espresso shot maybe some milk, but that's all)
It's about 12% only a few percent more than the rest of the world. Obesity is another story tho.
Turns out there's more than just those 6 people in America.
The American diet is uniquely awful. Your social group is likely to include people in a similar socioeconomic position to you. If that means those people are eating lots of vegetables and clean fats then congratulations, you're doing pretty well.
That does not describe the diet of most Americans. It's rich in refined carbohydrates, "dirty" fats, processed meat, and very few vegetables, and the primary vegetable is the potato,, which is also essentially just another carbohydrate. It's better than deep fried flour, but not by much.
Pizza, all things considered, is fine, practically healthy, compared to the cheeseburger and fries that makes up the typical lunch for many Americans.
Most of the food we have easy, cheap access to is arguably addictive, high carbohydrate, low in nutrient, and generally just bad for you.
Which is why we have an obesity crisis and some of the worst rates of diabetes in the world.
And then if you look for less or no salt, you might be looking at even more of a premium, or at least have it be harder to find