United States Heading towards a Depression?

Could be the difference between taking responsability and blaming others. Also making good choices is harder, it is based in our consciousness, but if you let the subconsciousness talk, then you would eat fast and junk food too. It's easier, cheaper and tastier to eat badly and become obese.

 

Poor food choices, lack of personal retraint, and depression are all possible explanations, but I wouldn't attribute it to lack of choice or access, except in rare cases. I suspect those in structural poverty, which is what we have (bred) in this country, lead mostly sedentary lifestyles watching TV, with poor nutritional education, or any other type of education for that matter.

I got 100% by chosing exactly the opposite answer of what one might expect. The "facts" represented by many of those answers I found to be misleading. I wonder how Michelle Obama, and her anti-obesity campaign feels about throwing more food at the obese to cure them of their hunger.

 

I found this on the Huffington Post:

LOL

 

This made me laugh. I've never seen this excuse before, it sure is a cracker. People love TV and gaming while being too lazy to exercise because it takes long term dedication and most of all it's hard and exhausting, it really is that simple.

 

Good stuff.

"the barriers faced by people living in poverty in accessing healthy foods"​

What barriers are they referring to exactly, I wonder.

"a dearth of safe environments for physical activity and recreation"​

Yeah, I wouldn't want to go jogging around South Central Los Angeles. They say if your car breaks down on the 110, you should push it to Long Beach.

"and food marketing targeted to this population ... lower SES is associated with the consumption of more refined grains and added fats [6]."​

Refined grains. Why do the words "Malt liquor" come to mind....

"Simply stated, families with limited economic resources may turn to food with poor nutritional quality because it is cheaper and more accessible [7]"​

Pure comedy. They may also turn bad food because potato chips taste better than spinich, and take a hell of a lot less time to prepare. Love the leading guesswork presented. Clearly the only answer is to provide more government funding. Go HuffPo!

"many low-income communities lack access to fresh and nutritious food. Instead of a supermarket, these neighborhoods may have an abundance of fast-food retailers and corner stores that are stocked with products high in fat and low in nutrients [9]."​

Highly debatable as to whether this is the cause or the effect, or even factual at all. There are more liquor stores in poor neighborhoods than anywhere else, so I suppose the laws of supply and demand would follow that, if nobody is asking for fresh fruits and vegatables, nobody is going to bother stocking those types of perishables.

"Additionally, low-income families are often targeted by food marketers with advertisements encouraging the consumption of nutrient-poor foods. In this environment, children in low-income families are especially hard hit, as evidence demonstrates that consistent exposure to such advertising increases the likelihood of adopting unhealthy dietary practices [10]"​

Believable, though again it sounds like a call for more regulation without addressing issues of personal responsibility. There is always someone else to blame.

Its funny how times change. I grew up on public food assistance for my school lunches until high school. As a result, I was damn skinny.

We kept chickens in the back yard for fresh eggs, and rabbits for meat. I was killing and skinning rabbits from age 5 on. When there was no rabbit meat, liver was the meat of choice for dinner, as it was cheaper. Nowadays, you would get fined or jailed for doing something like that.

To me, all these data points point to a problem, and it isn't the food or the advertising.

 

What can be done to help pull these people up?

I think greater opportunity and jobs are key.

 

It sounds counter intuitive but people need to be allowed to fail. Safety nets need to have limits or they will be used and abused as a crutch, hurting the very people they intend to help. Give a man a fish/teach a man to fish and all that type of thing.

Do you think the government should provide 5000 calories a day for the grossly obese? They need at least that kind of caloric intake to maintain their weight, some much more. Would providing that quantity of food be helping them, or hurting(enabling) them?

 

Cutting a desperate, low-income, hungry persons food aid benefits isn't teaching a man how to fish.

 

The point is that we produce more and have more financial capabilities but the hunger, homelessness and lack of medicine accessibility is also increasing. This is not acceptable. It is not only about morally being wrong, it is economically wrong and harmful to the society. USA has only about 5% of population of the world but it has 25% of prisoners in the world. Do you think keeping prisoners is cheap? Prisons have become a private industry that is very profitable for some companies so there is no initiative to solve the problems that causes this situation. There are many functions of the government that average people have no use of, so why shouldn´t the companies that benefit from it pay more taxes to support those functions. For example, USA can scrap most of it´s Navy and Air force and be perfectly safe as a country which is the real function of an arm forces but it needs these vast army to protect the interests of American companies around the world.
The concentration of wealth in the hand of few, is not good for economy because the few cannot provide all the necessary customers for restaurants, clothing stores, movie theaters,.... which results in the death of small businesses. This is what already can be seen in Europe where many main streets are becoming ghost towns with sign for sale or rent on every shop. Finally the economic situation will not be good even for those few because sooner or later desperate people will do desperate actions. Do you remember the story about Marie Antoinette, the queen of France who said "If people don´t have bread, they can eat cakes". It wasn´t long after, that she found her neck on a chopping block.

 

I agree with you about the US prison system, it's the "prison industrial complex". I was shocked when I learned the other day that inmate labour accounts for something like 90% of all car registration plates and 40% of furniture and so on. Talk about taking jobs away from workers! It's as if the government wants life to be as difficult as possible for law abiding workers.

I understand everything you're saying mate and I agree. But the usual solution thought up by dimtis is to tax the middle classes in order to subsidise the working classes when they're both as valuable as each other. In reality both classes are being squeezed while those who don't work receive everything for nothing. It's worse here and examples are rife. Bill gates, wall street and other elitists should have their money heavily taxed - leave the productive alone!

The economy is a mess and catches up with us all, so what does the state do? Quantitative easing (printing money) and bottoming interest rates punishing savers and encouraging borrowers, what a laugh. If they wanted to help me they could cut petrol tax so I could drive more and further, spreading my mney further a field. They could lower VAT so I'd buy more and prices would be lower, instead they increase it from 17.5% to 20%. Don't tell me tax breaks don't work because they affect everyone, even those on the dole - the only difference is that their money doesn't require effort.

It makes my head spin when I think of how the state spends more on social security than any other expenditure, making it very attractive and actually out competing wages, so much so that there are many, many people here who wouldn't be able to survive with a working wage. Then the state claims no-one is working (no shit) and thus opens the flood gates to Europe and cheap labour. You couldn't make this stuff up.

You'd think it economics 101 that in a contracting economy you don't squeeze the people harder..

 

The problem is that there is no difference between the government and the elites, they both compete to steal as much as they can. They are just increasing the VAT in Spain from %18 to 21%, increasing the tax on fuel with 0.03 euro and the VAT on real estate purchase from 8% to 10% and this is when people are hardly surviving and the real estate has the worst slump in decades. Why are they doing this? To save banks which have stolen all the money and I mean literally stolen the money through loans that everybody knew will not be paid back. The only thing that people in government think about is how much money they can bring in so they will have their money without thinking about people or if this situation is sustainable in the long run when every business is going bankrupt and soon there will be no money left to be taxed.
The problem is not to feed people, provide them with housing or give them medical care, the problem is the rampant corruption which has destroyed all trace of morality and decency and made people to animals who only think about themselves.

 

Teaching this person to survive on under 2500 calories a day is most definitely teaching a person to fish. This is what America's poor and hungry often look like.Going a step further, the government supplying this person with more than 2500 calories a day is enabling and morally wrong.

Failure isn't just good for society, its good for the gene pool.If you read a bit less Marx and a bit more Darwin, you would understand that. Breeding dependency on the government robs a person of their self esteem, their productivity, and most importantly, their basic survival skills. The rest of your claptrap about prison population is just a change of topic.

 

You're preaching to the choir mate, I'm no fan of the big banks and their fascism. Only smaller government can cure this disease.

 

What is the picture of your mom got to do with anything? Instead of dealing with facts which are presented in the governemnt statistics and other sources, you just post a picture of your family and you think you have presented an answer.

 

Lovely, "facts which are presented in the governemnt statistics"

See anything wrong with that statement kiddo? No, I'm not referring to the typo.

 

Thinking about this a bit, we need something beyond the food entitlement(civil right) we already have. I was reading my favorite globalist, Corporatist, and eliteist, Fareed Zakaria, explaining a similar problem that exists in the health care entitlement(civil right) that he is pushing for. He explains to us:

In other words, we consumers are simply too stupid and ill informed to make decisions about our health care that will produce good outcomes, so we need the government to make those decisions for us. Similarly, when it comes to our food rights, many of us are clearly too uninformed to make good decisions. We need the government to not only enable us to acquire the food, which they already do, but also tell us what food to eat, so we can be healthy. Only then will we solve both the hunger and obesity problems. It amazes me we ever managed, as a society and a culture, before we had the government to make these important decisions for us.


@Mia: Julian is just back to trolling as usual, but it does make you wonder if he really does equate government statistics to all inclusive facts.

 

But you're not teaching the person a way to survive. You're just pushing them further into poverty. A percentage of them may also resort to crime, in which case, they will end up being incarcerated and the tax payers will pay more. Many of them will be malnourished. It's been shown this permanently effects children, decreasing their ability to succeed in life. More homelessness because they can't make the bills, because the food aid made that difference. Lots of suffering. You seem to justify cutting aid, with an assumption they're all just fat and lazy. So unworthy. As if they're just reluctant to dip into the savings of their offshore account. Or, they just have so many opportunities, but prefer poverty. I think lots of these people are at their wits end. They don't know what to do.

 

Nope. I am simply not facilitating their obesity with taxpayer dollars.

Nonsense. They always have the option to eat less. You make it sound as though, if the governemtn don't accomodate their obesity, it is somehow responsible for turning them into criminals. If you think the government has responsibility for their crime, why would it not also be responsibile for their obesity?

One could easily argue that every one of them weighing over 225 lbs (most of them) is malnourished already.

Were you talking about obesity or starvation? The above statements are DEFINITELY true of obese people.

Cutting aid to 2500 calories a day? A healthy adult male of average height only consumes 2200 calories a day, so I'm trying to figure out how 2500 calories can be called a cut.

Hard to argue with statistics about the fat part of fat and lazy.

Obesity used to be a luxury afforded only to the rich. Not sure why you are arguing to subsidize that.

Of course they dont. They've been lead to believe the state can live their lives for them, and it has gone on long enough that they have no role models from their family or their community who will tell them anything different.



[Edit]When your community has no role models at all, it blames everyone else for it's problems, and every so often, somebody steps in with a wake up call.

[video=youtube;_Gh3_e3mDQ8]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Gh3_e3mDQ8[/video]

 

They don't provide food stamps based on a recipients weight or how many calories they need. It's based on economic need and it's considered how much food would be consumed by the average adult female, adult male...

 

Where do you live Rebecca? Verify info? Low income people live better than many in the middle class in the US. When you make below the poverty level you can get assistance and tax returns that often times total more than you made in a year. The majority take advantage of the system. The minority? They do not benefit from the system at all.

BTW, those jobs and opportunities you speak of? Barry Obama created those businesses you know.