Obsessed: America's Food Addiction--And My Own by Mika Brzezinski Page A
Authors: Mika Brzezinski
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menus” and consumers perceive fast food meals as bargains. There is definitely a payoff in the corporate bottom line. Marketing dollars spent translates into food eaten. One survey by the RuddCenter showed that the week before it was conducted, 84 percent of parents had taken their child to a fast food restaurant. 4
I remember watching fast food ads when I was a kid, and I clearly remember that they sparked cravings in me. And I am certainly not the only one to hear the food marketers’ siren calls. My friend Gayle King, who co-hosts CBS This Morning , says she has never stopped being motivated by commercials. “You’re talking to somebody who saw a McRib commercial and left the house in the rain,” Gayle chuckles. “I put on some boots and took an umbrella because the McRib sandwich was a limited-time offer! So I went to McDonald’s in the rain, though the whole time I’m saying to myself, ‘Turn around. Turn around. Turn around.’”
Supermarkets jump into the game, too, deliberately placing candy bars, sweet snacks, and sugary cereals where children will see them. “In most places, the bad food is about eye level of where the kids are,” points out Dr. Emily Senay, a Morning Joe regular who teaches in the Department of Preventive Health at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and is the medical correspondent for the PBS show Need to Know . “The candy, the chips, all that stuff is low enough in the store where they can easily see it. If you have little kids, it makes going out on a simple excursion a battle. The world we live in conspires against us when it comes to healthy eating.”
Even if you avoid fast food chains and choose healthy foods in the market, eating out a lot is also asking for trouble because serving sizes in most restaurants have grown so dramatically in this country. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that restaurant portion sizes are more than four times larger now than they were in the 1950s.
If portion sizes had increased overnight, says Lisa Powell, director of Nutrition at Canyon Ranch Health Resort in Tucson, Arizona, “people would be horrified. But it was just a little here, a little there, and our eyes got used to it and our stomachs got used to it. It makes me fear for people who are under thirty years old because it means they’ve never seen normal portions modeled.”
The world that Dr. Katz calls “obesigenic” is also a place where takeout and packaged foods dominate, and healthy home cooking has become increasingly rare. A report led by Harvard University economists says that in the 1960s, “the bulk of food preparation was done by families that cooked their own food and ate it at home. Since then there has been a revolution in the mass preparation of food that is roughly comparable to the mass production revolution in manufactured goods that happened a century ago.” 5
In 1965, a married woman who didn’t work outside the home spent over two hours a day cooking meals and cleaning up afterward. By 1995, that same woman spent less than half that time in the kitchen. As we moved into the twenty-first century, those numbers fell even further. We spend less and less time preparing meals at home, and people eat more and more mass-produced foods. Cooking from scratch seems to have become a hobby for a small group of people and a chore that the rest of us no longer bother with.
“My grandmother’s full-time job, basically, was to feed a big family, and she worked from morning till night,” says CanyonRanch’s Lisa Powell. “In the sixties, women were beginning to enter the workforce, and the notion of convenience foods became popular. As our society changed, the environment was ripe for packaged and processed foods, which saved time. Today, you get your food out of a box or a can, you don’t have to think about it, you don’t have to mess with it, and you don’t have to touch it.”
The less frequently we cook, the more we rely on
I remember watching fast food ads when I was a kid, and I clearly remember that they sparked cravings in me. And I am certainly not the only one to hear the food marketers’ siren calls. My friend Gayle King, who co-hosts CBS This Morning , says she has never stopped being motivated by commercials. “You’re talking to somebody who saw a McRib commercial and left the house in the rain,” Gayle chuckles. “I put on some boots and took an umbrella because the McRib sandwich was a limited-time offer! So I went to McDonald’s in the rain, though the whole time I’m saying to myself, ‘Turn around. Turn around. Turn around.’”
Supermarkets jump into the game, too, deliberately placing candy bars, sweet snacks, and sugary cereals where children will see them. “In most places, the bad food is about eye level of where the kids are,” points out Dr. Emily Senay, a Morning Joe regular who teaches in the Department of Preventive Health at Mount Sinai School of Medicine and is the medical correspondent for the PBS show Need to Know . “The candy, the chips, all that stuff is low enough in the store where they can easily see it. If you have little kids, it makes going out on a simple excursion a battle. The world we live in conspires against us when it comes to healthy eating.”
Even if you avoid fast food chains and choose healthy foods in the market, eating out a lot is also asking for trouble because serving sizes in most restaurants have grown so dramatically in this country. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that restaurant portion sizes are more than four times larger now than they were in the 1950s.
If portion sizes had increased overnight, says Lisa Powell, director of Nutrition at Canyon Ranch Health Resort in Tucson, Arizona, “people would be horrified. But it was just a little here, a little there, and our eyes got used to it and our stomachs got used to it. It makes me fear for people who are under thirty years old because it means they’ve never seen normal portions modeled.”
The world that Dr. Katz calls “obesigenic” is also a place where takeout and packaged foods dominate, and healthy home cooking has become increasingly rare. A report led by Harvard University economists says that in the 1960s, “the bulk of food preparation was done by families that cooked their own food and ate it at home. Since then there has been a revolution in the mass preparation of food that is roughly comparable to the mass production revolution in manufactured goods that happened a century ago.” 5
In 1965, a married woman who didn’t work outside the home spent over two hours a day cooking meals and cleaning up afterward. By 1995, that same woman spent less than half that time in the kitchen. As we moved into the twenty-first century, those numbers fell even further. We spend less and less time preparing meals at home, and people eat more and more mass-produced foods. Cooking from scratch seems to have become a hobby for a small group of people and a chore that the rest of us no longer bother with.
“My grandmother’s full-time job, basically, was to feed a big family, and she worked from morning till night,” says CanyonRanch’s Lisa Powell. “In the sixties, women were beginning to enter the workforce, and the notion of convenience foods became popular. As our society changed, the environment was ripe for packaged and processed foods, which saved time. Today, you get your food out of a box or a can, you don’t have to think about it, you don’t have to mess with it, and you don’t have to touch it.”
The less frequently we cook, the more we rely on
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