Ruminations

Blog dedicated primarily to randomly selected news items; comments reflecting personal perceptions

Monday, September 27, 2010

The Family That Eats ... And Eats

Canada, like most other western and wealthy countries of the world, has a decided problem with gustatory greed. Food of every description is so lavishly and inexpensively available, and so ubiquitously so with an amazing proliferation of fast food outlets that everyone has become comfortable with the prevailing social more of eating as much as you want, not as much as you need.

Moreover, quality of fundamental food products is no longer an issue; feeders do not discriminate, but prefer to eat, hugely, anything that tantalizes the taste buds.

What tastes better to the palate than high-fat, high-sugar, well salted food? Not much, to people who have lost the ability to appreciate the simple good taste of nutritional food that has not been adulterated, not gone through any kind of processing to alter it from its natural state to one that bears little resemblance, taste-wise and nutritional-content to the original.

People are busy, their minds engaged elsewhere; certainly not engaged with what most people consider the mundane and complicated tasks of family meals preparation.

People appear, in this fast-paced world where cheap and plentiful quasi-food is so readily available, to have forgotten how to prepare basic foods in pleasing and tasty combinations. Nor do they see the necessity to 'waste' time in food preparation when it is so simple to open the freezer and withdraw meals already prepared.

And of course this mind-set is passed along to their children most of whom have no idea how real food should taste, and that the foods normally consumed have been drained of their goodness and replaced with health-impairing alternates.

Leading Canada's pediatricians to bemoan the fact that too many young Canadians, from infants to teens, are overweight and unhealthy. As unwilling to exercise as are their parents. Making them, like their parents, with too much fat around their viscera, susceptible to illness and disease.

Sedentary, overweight, incapable of providing sound nutritional advice to their children, parents raise children whose faulty lifestyle closely resembles their own, children who will, at an early age, face the problems associated with diabetes onset, heart complications, neural and eyesight damage.

Statistics Canada's figures are that 17% of children in this country are overweight, with 9% in the obese category. Teenage boys classified as overweight or obese have gone from 14% in 1981 to the current figure of 31%, while the figures for teenage girls is an increase from 14% to 25%.

Parents used to want their children to be happy and healthy. Well, one-half of the equation may remain in effect, but who can be certain about that, either?

It's not baby fat necessarily, folks.

It may not want to melt off as once people anticipated young children's excess weight might at one time have done; not when they continue to consume high-fat, -salt, -sugared processed foods with no thought to satiation and exercising to burn off those nutritionally-empty calories.

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