All true, and you are right, it costs $$ to eat healthy, and in many low income areas you can't even find real food available, not to mention that most folks couldn't afford it. It definitely is a vicious cycle..

Forget what people today are putting in their mouths, what they are putting in their brains is far worse.

That would be funny, if not true.
Unfortunately, you can't fix stupid. People believe what they see, hear and read.

Personally, I blame the media. Rupert Murdoch poisoned it decades ago. Today, they flood the masses with inflammatory, devisive, angry topics that are designed to get and keep people watching or listening. Ratings and advertising drive everything.

It's a pandemic of misinformation that feeds upon itself.

I’m sitting on a lounge chair in Jamaica as I type this. Traveled here with my friend that just retired as a Cardiologist. He is mildly obese. He loves wine and drinks nightly. He also loves food. I’m thinking, everything in moderation. Oh… there are some hideous bodies here. I’d post pictures but that wouldn’t be right.

And everything is sweetened to excess with hfcs. That's why I like home made bread or higher end breads that are made like grandma made.

Unless it is something like cinnamon raisin bread. That can be sweeter.

I eat more than 3 meals, but they are all small. 200 to 250 calories for breakfast, salad with protein for lunch, and so on.

I have one major meal a day that is usually lunch. Breakfast is never more than 250 calories. Dinner is often chicken/fish, veggie and a carb. Lunch is most often a platter of olives, tomatoes, crackers and cheese.

I do snack but never a big honkin' serving.

Dropped 20 pounds going more often but less per serving.

Its also laziness. We shop from home sitting our butts in a chair our couch. We no longer have to move to turn on a light. We ask Alexa to so everything for us.

Instead of going out, to shop or eat. Food gets delivered to us while we wallow away in our easy chairs.

Need I continue?....

.

It's called Beer Gut for a reason.

Although eating and drinking for pleasure is not seen as sinful, eating or drinking to excess beyond reason is a sin.

So I'm hearing the consensus seems to be that people are fat because of the unhealthy food they eat.

How come the consensus isn't that people are fat because they eat too much, unhealthy food or not?

IMO, what people eat isn't the problem. The problem is how much they eat.

Shouldn't it be 'weight challenged' instead of fat people? :D

Thinness challenged. They don’t seem to find weight to be much of a challenge at all - they are rather good at it.

I lived abroad. When I moved here I couldn’t fathom how cheap processed food and meat was vs vegetables. Even now I can buy pork by the lb for less than onions. And I picked onions because they are one of the cheapest vegetables. Steak is close in price to broccoli.

A Ghirardelli’s brownie mix was $3 last week - cheaper than a pound of broccoli. I can’t imagine why people are fat…

It's both, but I think the main reason for the differentiation is as follows.

If you eat healthy food, the amount of healthy food required to become grossly, morbidly obese is A LOT OF FOOD. I think the average person would have a really hard time getting morbidly obese eating healthy food.

The problem is that most folks eat crap food, and most crap food has tons of sugar which greatly increases calories, which leads to obesity.

I guess you could say "sure, go ahead and eat ding dongs and ho-hos and wash them all down with syrup from Starbucks" as long as you don't eat too much of that. But if you eat a normal volume of that food, it's probably got 3-10x the calories of a healthy meal.

So yes, eating in moderation is also key, but the (IMO) bigger factor is the quality of food that you eat.

Agreed, quality of food AND quantity of food should both be considered.

If you fill yourself with high calorie food (and drinks), and do not burn off those calories, you're going to gain weight.

There is no single problem, but the number of calories you consume to feel full matter.

I think that is excellent advice. But it seems less than easy to play sports now. Too many pay to play leagues.

While true, completely off topic

Like so many things, it is a failure in parenting. Fat kids with poor eating habits, people without money management skills and so on, parents taught them wrong

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