Dead Horse Interchange

BlueberryRagamuffin wrote: ↑

Tue Feb 19, 2019 1:33 am

Once you start getting up there in years, an extra 200 pounds starts to take a toll.

I guess the good news is that if you're 200lbs overweight then there will not be too many years to get up to.

But they will surely live those few years being more healthy than any of us.

How does one even get fat at those young ages? The metabolism is running at full speed and you don't have a car yet and go out with friends on foot or drive somewhere with a bike and whatnot. I don't get it.

Kugelfisch wrote: ↑

Sat Feb 23, 2019 12:50 am

How does one even get fat at those young ages? The metabolism is running at full speed and you don't have a car yet and go out with friends on foot or drive somewhere with a bike and whatnot. I don't get it.

Based purely on my 16 y/o niece and the spawn I see walking around at my work it's because most of them have phones so they just text, call, facetime, etc.

Then when they do hang out they play video games, watch movies, and sit in silence all doing something separate on their phones, only stopping to show a random Facebook post to each other. They also shovel sugary, greasy snack foods into their mouths like kids are want to do.

Stop buying kids smartphones (I had a Nokia prepaid for emergencies only) and implement a sugar tax and the problem will be solved.

Kugelfisch wrote: ↑

Sat Feb 23, 2019 12:50 am

How does one even get fat at those young ages? The metabolism is running at full speed and you don't have a car yet and go out with friends on foot or drive somewhere with a bike and whatnot. I don't get it.

It's harder for kids to gain weight but it's hardly impossible. Feed anyone a diet of 3000+ calorie junk and they'll gain weight unless they're some kind of super autistic athlete. 3 restaurant meals will get you over that number easy in burgerlandia.

Eating out a restaurants is a big culprit for obesity too, because the portion sizes are nuts in burgerland, the food itself is very low quality and everything has way too much oil, grease and salt on it.

Restaurant vegetables, for example, often have tons of hidden calories in the form of dressings, oils and butter. Something that you could make at home for yourself as a healthy meal would be unhealthy if you had it at a restaurant. Because it's not the same food. It just looks similar.

Kids are more sedentary than they used to be, but I also think they have more stress at young ages because of greater pressures

Dunno about you guys but I didn't have the cash as a child to stuff my face all day. The little I got was usually beer money for the weekend.

I never did either. My sister (and other parents her age, she's 9 years older than me) would rather spend money on fast food and easy junk to avoid cooking.

On top of that, once you buy them junk long enough real food doesn't taste good or appeal to them any more. Thanksgiving dinner is always great as the meat gets rejected, the homemade bread isn't good enough, and the vegetables are refused.

5 minutes after dinner is over they're immediately searching for grandma's stash of junk food despite, "not being hungry."

It's probably more an American problem than anything but it's disgusting and pisses me off.

It's a general problem in industrialized nations. If you grow up with too much sugar and artificial flavors, you start losing interest in the more subtle flavors of real food.

(A common example used by Kraut media is some tale about kids preferring fake strawberry flavor over real strawberries, though I dunno how much this actually happens IRL)

Happens a lot, actually. Fake strawberry is super sweet. Real strawberry has that lovely tartness on top of the sweet. They taste nothing alike so kids prefer the purely sweet one.

Artificial strawberry really does taste nothing like the actual fruit. For that reason I always felt that it's pretty disgusting. Tastes like pure chemicals mixed at BASF or something.

I guess I was just lucky growing up like I did. My mother is a fantastic cook because all my grandmothers were. My great-grandparents had a farm and the garden was a treasure trove for a 5yr old boy. Peas, carrots, blue and yellow plums, gooseberries, currants, blackberries, rhubarb, radishes and so on. I never understood why people would not like vegetables because I've always liked all that stuff.

I can't imagine ever having kids and giving so little of a fuck about them to serve them garbage food.
They will eat plenty of garbage later in their life but they can never quite make up for having been missing all those vitamins for their most important years. Hell, they dig up bones from people that died hundreds of years ago and can see shit like "this guy must've been about 40 and there seems to have been a famish when he was twelve".