Wanna balance the budget? Eat real food.

‘Food desert’ is not a common idea on people’s minds, but we also tend to say “Let them eat cake” when it comes to obesity.

Michael Pollan suggests:

Stay out of the middle of the supermarket; shop on the perimeter of the store. 

It is not just what you eat but how you eat.  “Always leave the table a little hungry,”

Families traditionally ate together, around a table and not a TV, at regular meal times. It’s a good tradition. Enjoy meals with the people you love.   In the U.S., 20% of food is eaten in the car.

Wanna balance the budget? Eat real food in the NYT.

In the United States — the world’s most obese country — the most recent number for the annual cost of obesity is close to $200 billion. (Obesity-related costs are incalculable but could easily exceed $1 trillion annually. Wanna balance the budget? Eat real food.) The amount the National Institutes of Health expends for obesity-related research is less than $1 billion annually, and there is no single large, convincing study (and no small study will do) that proposes to solve the underlying causes of obesity. If the solution were as simple as “salt, fat, sugar” or the increasingly absurd-sounding “calories in, calories out,” surely we’d have made some progress by now.

Fast food messes with your bank acount?  University of Toronto

“Fast food represents a culture of time efficiency and instant gratification,” says Chen-Bo Zhong, who co-wrote the paper with colleague Sanford DeVoe to be published in a forthcoming issue of Psychological Science. “The problem is that the goal of saving time gets activated upon exposure to fast food regardless of whether time is a relevant factor in the context. For example, walking faster is time efficient when one is trying to make a meeting, but it’s a sign of impatience when one is going for a stroll in the park. We’re finding that the mere exposure to fast food is promoting a general sense of haste and impatience regardless of the context.”