JimH
Habits are hard to break and unfortunately humans are creatures of habit! I hate it when I have to break a habit, it is so hard !

i41,

Good points.

I’ll be 65 this year, and I had to laugh when the article said, “When looking at the participants’ diets, researchers found that few of the teens — overweight or otherwise — had optimal eating habits.”

C’mon, people! Few teens when I was a kid had “optimal” eating habits. Ice cream, candy, candy bars, etc., were “staples” to us as teenagers. We turned out OK, and very few of us were fat.

There’s a reason for that, and it’s not rocket science: we exercised!! Not the jogging/gymnasium/sychronized bicycling we see today, or other forms of yuppie torture. You couldn’t keep us inside the house unless it was raining, and sometimes not even then. Life in the “outside world” was a daily joy for us, and we took every opportunity to bite that apple.

Our fun was found in the form of exercise itself. Hiking up to Buttermilk Falls or High Point on the mountain to inspect the caves and take in the view, playing softball every night in the summer at the school fields, swimming at “Bare Boys’ Paradise” on the Bozenkill Creek, bicycling out to the apple farm to steal apples, climbing trees, running races, playing touch football, sledding and skating in the winter, bowling, etc., etc., etc.

We didn’t do this as part of an organized recreation, we did it on the fly and as the notion appealed to us. We didn’t “hydrate” every 30 minutes, we drank water when we got thirsty. No knee pads or helmets either, we skinned our knees and got the slivers and bloody noses. Mom had simply said, “be home for supper” and we were GONE.

And what do you see today? Kids running into telephone poles because they’re too busy with their iPods, hanging out in their cave-like rooms for hours a day playing video games, driving to the mall and walking around and calling it “exercise.” Kids and parents fat, dumb and happy watching hours of “American Idol” or other inane TV shows while filling their stomachs with junk and their heads with fluff.

No sir, the country’s got it too good, and has been duped into thinking that “creature pleasures” make you happy. The true creature pleasures are to be found in physical work and play, good books, exploring your world, the spiritual aspects of your life, continuing to learn throughout your life, being thankful for what you have and enjoying the freedom to do all those things.

And yes, by all means, do what your mother told you to do: “eat your vegetables!”

Sorry, I believe you’ve missed the mark.

Sugar in the form of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) finds its way into almost every sweetened product, and it’s a killer. It reacts differently than cane sugar in the body, and I have no doubt that the diabetes epidemic is directly related to it.

The so-called “diet foods” are almost as bad. Ironically, those foods would be so unpalatable that the companies have to put HFCS or other sweeteners in them just so you can get them down.

Fat is absolutely essential to development and maintenance of the brain and central nervous system. Essential fatty acids are a boon, trans-fats are killers. Fats are required by the body, but are dangerous to your health when too much is tored.

The best ways to be healthy are to eat and drink everything in moderation (after reading the food labels), get exercise, and stay away from those doctors that only push pills.

The only way to do that, V., is to shut down the subsidy programs and all the sludge and slush rolling out of Washington,DC to any and all special interests supported by your Congressman and mine.
Shut down all the government health programs that force the patients into a medical system that holds on to patients and presses them into, ONLY, their treatments even when they show no hope of helping or bringing the health in the quickest way possible.
Our govenment is presetly set up to force people to get, buy and have forced on them services and products that are not the most modern, most serviceable, longest lasting realistically effective or worthwhile. That’s what happens when government gets in the business of “helping people” and providing for their needs.

V.
I have to agree with you on the control of kids by their parents. Most are afraid to touch or disaplin them for fear of reprisals. Now we have prisons over loaded with adults that have no self control. I have never seen children that display such disrespect towards their parents and it in my opinion is because respect has never been demanded from them. Respect is not something that you just earn, but there are time when it must be demanded. Parents must gain more control over their children even if it means a spanking now and then.
By the time they are teen agers the time for spanking is over, however my oldest son has found the answer to the spanking in his teenage son. He simply puts him on the ground and rolls him over several times. He isn’t hurt but he can’t over power his dad either and when he gets up dad gives him some time to think about what just happened ! The grandson does his thinking and by the next day he is ready to apologize or come to dad with a different point of view and ready to talk the situation over. His grandpa does the same thing and so grandson doesn’t push grandpa either. He tried one time in the Wal-Mart store and thought grandpa wouldn’t set him down in the store ! He was wrong! It happened so fast that I don’t think that boy will ever forget it. It was an experience that he will one day relate to his children ! We never believed in the hitting and smacking around in our family but if it was really necessary it was going to be done, you just don’t disrespect your elders any time !

ian -
Go away and consume all the junk food you want, what ever you want, whenever you want. Then, don’t come back and bother us for eight – ten years. Then come back and tell us how you feel or have your expenditures taken a sudden shift in budget priorities. But you won’t. Hell, things in those “foods” may not even allow you to lift your fingers on to the keyboard. On the otherhand, things that aren’t in those foods may by then have produced such deficiencies in your system your brain may not even function in a straight line.
We’ve got quite a few people on this site who are already in that sorry condition. You all ought to get together and form your own site and see how long it takes to burn out the logic boards on your computers.

ian,
4000ck is 4000ck. It will all make you fat if you don’t expend enough energy to burn that much, the only difference is both can make you fat but one can make you sick and unhealthy. One can keep you fit the other can increase your cholesterole, and put an increased load on your kidneys and liver. One thing though, if you consume to many carrots or orange squash you can turn your skin yellow !

People on food stamps are often eat junk food. Often poor people have problems with their health.

In all my years I have not found a proper home economics class in our schools. Even when I was going and that was a long time ago. I had to learn on my own and with my mom teaching me and my sisters and brother. Now days too many people eat most all their meals out and most of that is fast food. When they do shop they pick out instant foods that are quick to fix. Most all of these foods contain sugar or corn syrup and some kind of starch in them. Check it out at the grocery store when you shop next time. Breakfast cereal is the worst. Most kids I know want the high sugar cerels. Capt’n Crunch Sugar frosted Mini Wheats, Cocoa Puff’s and so on. Everything you buy today that is pre-packaged is full of fat and fattening sugar in some form. It is used as a flavor enhancer and it is making us a nation of fatties ! These flavor enhancers also make our children want more of the same kind of food and they will eat more not because they are hungry but because they like the taste of it. Our children have open access to any and all of these things all the time. Parents buy things that are easy to heat in the microwave so Johney or Suzzy can help them self when the get home, because they are hungry and Mom or Dad won’t be home for another two or three hours from work. Fruits can sit in the bowl on the table and not get touched if the kid is not use to eating them. Mom will buy pudding cups and they will be gone in the first day in the house ! Kids are use to getting snacks like pudding cups and sodas from the time they are not much more than babies. I have seen mothers put soda and tea in baby bottles or sippy cups thinking they were not doing anything wrong ! Then they wonder why the child won’t go to sleep at bed time! I’ve heard doctors tell young mothers not to put milk in a bottle and let the todler carry it around all day but they never tell them not to give them soda or tea either. If they give them anything else it is koolade. Some moms can afford to buy a lot of juice and the baby carries juice in the bottle. Too much of a good thing can be bad too and there are a lot of juices sweetened with corn syrup or if it is sweetened naturally it is done with concentrated grape juice. Now if you have ever tasted grapes you know they are very sweet, then you concentrate that juice and you have double the sweet. After eating and drinking so much sweet stuff all day month after month and year after year, the body begins to not be able to handle the load. Then the sugar can’t get into the blood to nurish the brain and so the brain starts yelling I need sweets, so unconciously the child or person starts drifting to more and more sweets. Afterwhile it becomes a real craving and no matter how much sweet they eat it isn’t enough and it doesn’t even taste sweet to them anymore. This is all information that could be learned in home economics or health classes and young women could understand the reasons for not feeding babies junk food before they even become mothers. Mothers have to stop being fast food addicts. It is easier to go fast food than cook a decent meal. The only way to do that is to learn to plan ahead of time and set the meals out the night before or start using that crock pot stashed in the corner of the cupboard ! Plan for healthy snacks. Make some homemade snacks that are healthy such as yogurt. Stay away from prepackaged foods. Hamburger helper, mac and cheese even rice-a-roni has sugar in it ! It is OK to use these foods once in a while but not all the time. I know some women that don’t know how to fix a meal unless they use these packaged foods ! To them I say find a cook book or someone that knows how to cook from scratch. Learn to make your own fast foods on the week-ends so you know what is going into it. It isn’t hard just takes a little time and even the time lessens once you get the hang of what you are doing. Make some dishes ahead of time and put them in the freezer so all you have to do is pop them in the oven when you get home and have one of the kids make a salad and you are good to go. Cut way back on the sugar of all kinds. Any thing that ends in ose is sugar ! You will be a lot healthier and so will the kids. Once you take away the sugar they will loose the cravings for sweets after time. Diabetes is not a fun disease to live with in fact there is one sure fact about it, when you begin to live with it you will surly die with it ! If you don’t control your health noe else will. It is in your hands and only your hands so don’t try to push it off on someone else. Only you put the fork or spoon in your mouth. So don’t dig your grave with your own fork !

Right, Tony -
You know, what’s amazing to me is the fallacy that just because they have no “health complaints” the medical system so ignorant about health that they are willing to let these hings go until stuff begins to get so bad they are able to quantify they diseases an diagnose by their stupid rules. Those rules and guidelines for diagnosis are the reasons why we are so blasted sick as a nation…also why medicine fails so badly in so many areas. People don’t get any kind of diagnosis before they’re good and sick. So they need more treatment and more drastic interventions. The craziest part of this madness is that the brain is what is supposed to monitor and control proper functions throughout the body. But they make no effort to find out what might be happening in the nerve system that might be amiss or just plain keep it working best so people an stay strong and healthy.
Maybe, medicine might not want “strong and heathy.”