Weight and American Food

[catscradle]

So now I'm thinking about weight and food and things like that.

Is American food designed to make us fat and keep us that way? I'm looking at all the foods in the grocery store and seeing that most of the kits and easy food prep stuff is some of the most fattening things you could possibly eat. So people with little time on their hands due to kids and job and what have you, have little choice but to grab these things and make food that's essenially really bad for them.

I stopped buying the kit stuff a while ago. I now just buy the ingredients to make my own meals from scratch - at least I can control how much of what goes into things. But I have to admit, on days I come home from work over heated and dog tired, I really don't feel like making a dinner.

Do other Americans feel this way?

Do those of you that live in other countries feel that you have healthy eating standards, or do you wonder about your foods too?

Comments

[catscradle.livejournal.com]

*g* Actually, we have a pretty wide variety in bread - you can get any style imaginable at most moderate to large sized grocery stores that also have a bakery (which is most of them). We even have a few large chains dedicated to nothing but breads in addition to the smaller Mom&Pop places. I don't think I've bought white bread in about 3 years. I hate the stuff.

Fruit and veggies really do depend on where you go - I know I'll not go to certain stores to get them - I'll go to the smaller groceries that buy from either organic farmers or at least small farms rather than industrial ones. But they're not hard to find if you know the area well.

I'll agree with you that Hersey's and Mars are pretty bad - but our independant chocolate shops are completely different. Chocolate seems to be one of those things that's done REAL well on a small market basis here - and REAL bad on a large market basis. Go figure.

I don't know where you were when you went grocery shopping - but the places sound rather generic and more of a convenience store variety than a grocery market. Or maybe you stayed in a more WASPy neighborhood (aka The Whitebread Prostestant regions). One cool thing about the US is that there are a billion ethnicities here and you can find every food available provided you haven't landed smack dab in the middle of the upper middle class Protestant areas.