Newsflash; people who eat potato chips and French fries get fatter than people who eat “real” vegetables! Yep, that’s the dramatic finding of a new dietary study conducted by the Harvard School of Public Health and published by the New England Journal of Medicine last month.
An evaluation of three research programs conducted over a 20 year period of time, representing 120,000 people, found that eating certain foods contributed to specific amounts of weight gain over a period of time while eating other foods contributed to weight loss during the same period.
Certainly the report grabbed headlines, but did it really tell us anything that we didn’t already know?
Find out what's happening in Framinghamwith free, real-time updates from Patch.
There is no lack of “news” these days regarding obesity and people with unhealthy weights, but how newsworthy is the fact that fried potatoes and sugary soft drinks can lead to weight gain?
Perhaps researcher time and dollars would be better spent finding ways to get people to change their behaviors. Overweight and obesity are lifestyle driven health problems that lead to very expensive diseases and medical conditions. Only changes in lifestyle will lead to weight loss or better yet—prevention of weight gain.
Find out what's happening in Framinghamwith free, real-time updates from Patch.
Lifestyle changes won’t happen without people taking personal responsibility for their preventable health issues. Food choices are indeed a critical part of the equation, but so is exercise and eating reasonable portions of the food we choose to consume. Just because a restaurant puts a particular quantity of food on our plates, there is no gun being held to our heads saying that we must eat all of it in one sitting.
Think about the control that we have given to restaurant managers, short-order cooks, beverage and packaged food makers to determine how much we eat and as a result how we look and how we feel physically and about ourselves. That’s a lot of power to hand over to complete strangers with no hope of getting anything in return.
We as individuals need to take control over the portions we eat. We also have to define moderation in 1960’s terms and not in the terms of the excesses of the 80s.
As adults, we don’t have to eat something just because someone puts it on our plates.
When McDonald’s introduced the term “Super-size me,” in their advertising, I wonder if they meant for us to take it literally? The Big Mac has led to a lot of very big guys named Mac. Big Grab and King Size candy bars have led to lots of fat fingers doing the grabbing and candy consumers the size of King Kong.
Big Gulp soft drinks, even diet versions, have led to stretched stomachs that require larger quantities of everything to feel full and as a result bigger bellies jiggling on the outside as well.
It’s time to look at some of the obesity issue through the lens of common sense and to use that insight to change personal behaviors. It’s easy to point fingers and place blame regarding this issue; but in the end it’s our bodies, and we need to take responsibility for what and how much we put into them.
