Obesity in America: America Keeps Getting Fatter Because Meals Keep Getting Bigger
Yet America keeps getting fatter, despite the advent of more nutritious foods available and increased awareness of health, nutrition, and exercise playing a daily role in how we maintain our weight.
There are many factors that can be attributed to this, such as general laziness, nonchalant attitudes towards eating healthier, low willpower, and others. But one factor that I find to have also contributed to helping America grow fatter is our own eating habits, fostered by restaurants, fast food joints, and candy and snack manufacturers.
America has become a society dependent upon large meals, often complaining when a portion of food is seemingly too small. Restaurants have steadily increased the overall size of their meals, with even soups, salads, or appetizers often large enough to be a meal on their own. Yet we are compelled to purchase and eat appetizers, entrees, and desert, along with the accompanying bread basket, despite our bellies telling us that we are full.
Perhaps we do this not just because we are used to having large meals, but also because we want to get the full value for the money we our spending, and so we gorge ourselves. It isn’t always what you eat that affects your weight, but often how much of something you eat.
Not many people get fat from eating an excess amount of vegetables or fruit, and of course we all consider salad, fish and poultry to be healthy as well, but when you order these items in a restaurant, they are often served with fattening sauces, marinades, and dressings, along with other items that help increase our overall weight. And larger portions mean more of the fattening accompaniments.
Comparatively, meals in Europe are often the equivalent in size to a standard appetizer in America, thus accounting for a less concerning obesity problem in European countries. However, with the advent of fast food establishments gaining ground in Europe, Europeans are starting to catch up to America in terms of weight gain.
We are all familiar with the super-size factor in junky fast food, and exhibiting nutritional information on fast food selections has done little to curb America’s appetite for greasy, low-quality, fattening foods. Just watch a little television, and you’ll see commercials from Burger King, Dunkin’ Donuts, and others, offering new giant size meals, each one almost guaranteed to give you a small coronary.
The big meal fervor doesn’t stop there. Peruse the candy aisles at your delis, supermarkets, and pharmacies, and you’ll see new giant-size selections of popular candy bars. The mammoth treats have quietly snuck up on us over the years, and I tend to wonder, when exactly did the regular-sized candy bars become to small for us?
This trend is also exhibited in baked goods, which offer larger muffins and other pastries, and in chips, where the single-size bags have grown slightly larger over the years.
To the credit of many manufacturers and some restaurants out there, there are places where you can purchase a proper-sized meal or portion of food. Unfortunately, I tend to think that these items are severely overlooked in supermarkets because of the smallish amount of food contained within the package. We feel we are being cheated, and so we resort to other products that offer huge amounts of food, concerned only with sating our appetite for excess.
America has to learn to not only regulate what we eat, but also how much we eat. Only then can we begin to combat the obesity problem that looms over all of us.
