FOOD FILTER
Life’s end will cure what man cannot.
GOVERNMENT REPORT
Last week, the White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity released a report for government and industry – through education and the marketplace – to end the trend of obesity. Called Solving the Problem of Childhood Obesity Within A Generation, it lays out seventy recommendations touching diverse areas as breast feeding, labeling, restaurant portion sizes, food quality, packaging, school lunches, physical activity, marketing to children and even touches on food subsidies (although it stops short of caling for their end) and the need for sidewalks, bike paths and play areas. In The Washington Post, Pulitzer Prize-winning Style editor Robin Givhan, gives a concise summary. Jane Black, also writing in the Post, offers commentary on the feasibility of the report’s recommendations, including the political will that will be needed to implement them.
GOVERNMENT ALLIANCE
This week, Michelle Obama held a Press Conference to announce teaming of the Partnership for a Healthier America with the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation (HWCF) to reduce calories in the processed food supply. Rather like hiring the fox as hen house guard, HWCF is organizing the biggest corporations making food today (Coke, Pepsi, Kraft, etc) to voluntarily make processed foods healthier. But will their stated efforts to improve the food supply net any positive gain or simply pay lip service to the initiative while offering even more of the same essentially bad processed foods to supermarket shelves, the same false claims and manipulative marketing efforts?
Michele Simon has an informative and lively blog, Appetite for Profit, about developments in the food industry. She critiques the recent HWCF partnership with government as being beside the point. I love what she said in her commentary on the Let’s Move initiative:
Let’s Move the corporations out of Washington.
Hear, hear! And end food subsidies.
The simple fact is that we are eating too much of the wrong kinds of food and we need to stop doing it if our goal is to be healthy individuals, now and into the future for generations yet to come. So how do we do that? It’s hard to change habits, especially eating habits with a long history. And tv, radio, magazine and www marketing – print ads, jingles, billboards, verbal messages, give-aways, coupons and special offers – challenge us daily, encouraging us to keep loading up on processed foods and beverages, making us feel powerless to control ourselves. It takes more than will power. It takes a plan.
FOOD FILTERS
If you’re waiting for the government to give you a quick fix to years of poor individual eating habits, you’re going to wait a long time. Everyone has got to assume personal responsibility for their own foodways, and a good way to begin is to apply some food filters.
Adults don’t say everything aloud that comes into their heads. Using a speaking filter, most of us constantly weigh the wisdom of our thoughts against that of holding our tongue. Issues such as relevance, kindness and timing conspire to help us make the best decision of what to say in any specific situation we encounter. Most people do this without much conscious thought by simply speaking appropriately. We don’t notice the filter because it is ingrained and automatic.
In the same way, food filters can help us to train ourselves to eat better every day. Because our automatic food pilot is not always functioning quite as it should, we might want to adopt some guides along the way, to remind us and to teach our children what is important. Each week I will introduce another guide.
MORE MEALS, FEWER SNACKS
It we are eating too much, how, then, do we decide what to eat? Let’s begin with when to eat. Meals are an important concept in eating well. Eating a meal is preferable to snacking because the kinds of foods being consumed as snacks have no food value. Soda pop, chips and dips, cookies, ice cream, doughnuts, hot and cold sugary coffee beverages are all popular snacks eaten between meals, and a big part of the eating-too-much dilemma. By confining eating to mealtimes these foods can be more easily avoided.
Limiting eating to three meals a day with no snacking in between is a meaningful way to reduce the amount of overeating that occurs on a daily basis.  If there is no snacking, then there is no buying snack foods, either to stock the cupboard at home or by grabbing something spontaneously throughout the day. Just as you don’t say everything that pops into your head, don’t eat every time you see food advertised or placed before you.
You decide when to eat, not Marketing. Decide to eat three meals a day, every day. It’s a start.
TODAY’S HOMEWORK
It helps to have someone to talk to, even if it’s only yourself. It may be helpful for you to begin writing about your efforts to eat in a more healthy way. Click on the link above for a guide to beginning a journal. You can record your thoughts and actions, and look back on past efforts and results.
