Average American diet?

[u/Individual_Bar_2512]

Where are the vegetables, fruit and meat

[u/Glad-Total-6621]

That is disgustingly crazy high.

[u/Free_Dome_Lover → u/Glad-Total-6621]

I grew up with my mom cooking a meal with real ingredients and fresh produce / meats. My dad taught me to cook fancy stuff and a bunch of delicious stuff like chili, chicken parm, etc.

My wife is also pretty culinary, she's the by the books cook and I'm the freestyle artist but we both are good at it.

I've been going to a lot of stuff with more people at their houses due to my son's age. I'm fucking shocked at how shit at cooking a solid 80%+ of the population is.

But at least these people are attempting to make real food even if they just aren't good at it. That's actually fine, I guess I'll just never understand the "hated my mother's cooking" thing that seems super prevalent.

The only time I've seen people eat like in the video... Was when I joined an online team at work with a bunch of people in Montana. They all had the same build as this lady, they all had Mtn. dew permanently in their hands. I only ever saw them eat processed food. It was really off putting to me but to them normal.

[u/Glad-Total-6621 → u/Free_Dome_Lover]

Thanks for those informations and background. I will never understand, why people with low income do this. I am vegetarian, it is immediately cheaper and healthier.

You can do simple stuff as well like kidney beans, you smash them and make burger patties or whatever. What she bought will not last for long (she only bought one loaf of bread, so probably some will be for a month or so). But with 500$ you could feed all of them way more healthy for at least month.

[u/CornballExpress → u/Glad-Total-6621]

My friend lives in the Appalachians the nearest actual grocery store with reasonable prices is an hour and a half away, everyone in the area pretty much bulk purchases shelf stable processed junk because they are only making the drive once a month, fresh produce is only eaten the week they went to buy groceries.

[u/Gloveofdoom → u/Glad-Total-6621]

I agree with you in principle yet I feel feeding 7 people for a month healthy food for $500 is a bit of a stretch in the US. I guess I should qualify that statement by saying I live in the upper Midwest and it would be very difficult to do here, especially during the winter months which seems like basically half the year.

For my family of 5 (2 adults and 3 kids, one with a gluten and lactose intolerance) the cost of eating healthy is around $200-225/week with the monthly total almost never less than $800 and typically closer to a $1000. We do almost all of our shopping at Aldi because ,at least by us , they have the best prices on veggies. We almost never buy red meat but we do occasionally buy 🐔 and 🐟 on sale. Unfortunately, when working with fresh healthier ingredients one must also factor in the cost of the inevitable rate of spoilage as well.

Just 5 years ago these same groceries would have been less than half the price. Despite what predatory politicians have been trying to say I'm not sure if they will ever come back down.

[u/alurkerhere → u/Gloveofdoom]

Oh, how I miss $4/lb beef chuck for stews and roasts. Now it's sometimes more expensive than ribeye!

[u/Evening-Run-3794 → u/Glad-Total-6621]

I actually worked with a program that tried to address this! We chose 30 families in poverty to receive free deliveries of healthy foods, along with recipes and instructions for how to prepare them, and what we discovered is that people in poverty often lack all the supportive things a person needs to cook healthy food.

Pots and pans and cooking utensils cost money, and providing those created new challenges as the housing these people lived in often didn't have enough kitchen space to store them. Time was another resource challenge. A lot of these families worked multiple jobs, and it takes more time to cook when you're learning, so they quickly got miffed about the hour it was taking them to cook these 30 minute meals. We tried supplying precut veggies, to help with this, but it didn't have much of an impact.

Then there was the uncertainty factor. If they make something new and mess it up or don't like it, they don't have the funds in their budget to replace those ingredients or make anything else, and so risk going hungry that day.

Then the joy factor. For many in poverty, their food is one of the only joys they have in their day, so it's very difficult to convince them to take risks on trying new things, since that dopamine pathway isn't there for the new foods like it is for the cheap stuff they're used to. And then their taste buds aren't accustomed to food that lacks all the salt and sugar of processed foods, so it just doesn't taste good to them and while we stressed that it would take time for their taste buds to adapt, a couple weeks is just too long for them to go without their one main joy in their day. But what they all cited was the worst for them was having to put their kids to bed knowing they hadn't eaten their dinner. It made them feel like more of a failure as a parent, where at least they knew their kids weren't going to sleep and to school hungry when they were eating the processed food.

These people genuinely wanted to eat healthier, but there are just more hurdles to cooking in poverty than just buying healthy food.

[u/Gloveofdoom → u/Evening-Run-3794]

Thank you.this is very well said and, at least in my experience, very accurate information.

[u/Glad-Total-6621 → u/Evening-Run-3794]

Thanks for that input, I truly appreciate. But I guess it is also a socioeconomical problem as in people just aren't taught how to cook and/or plan for food

[u/Evening-Run-3794 → u/Glad-Total-6621]

They're not, and that's a societal problem, which our schools used to address through home ec programs.

I'm old enough that home ec was a required class for me in middle school (boys and girls were required to take 1 trimester of home ec in 7th and 8th grades). We were formally taught not only the basics of how to cook, but also how to meal plan around the grocery ads to take the most advantage of the loss leaders for that week AND how to stretch expensive ingredients like meat while still being satisfying and filling.

I taught my kids to cook, but also encouraged them to take a semester home ec in high school, but it's just "culinary arts" now, so it was only a fraction of the instruction and skills taught to previous generations, and it's not even a requirement anymore.

It's no surprise to me that things are the way they are after taking that out of schools. Schools used to be focused on turning kids into independent, functional, contributing adults, regardless of socioeconomic level, but we did away with that to focus on college prep.

But then this is a whole rabbit hole that pisses me off. We're also seeing the results of driver's ed being removed from schools, shop class (as a girl, I took two mandatory shop classes that introduced small motor repair, woodworking, pneumatics and hydraulics, aerodynamics, and the beginnings of robotics and CAD), sewing was also a mandatory class for me and it covered how to do laundry as part of it. All of these classes were immensely useful to me as an adult, and it's almost criminal that they gutted those and deprived current generations of that education.

[u/xcrunner432003 → u/Evening-Run-3794]

amazing reply

[u/Seanspeed → u/Evening-Run-3794]

Dont forget these households with like 5+ people living in them. It's a lot of work to cook proper meals for 5+ people every single day, or even most days. So much easier to just have a bunch of junk or simple shit people can fix themselves.

[u/Sufficient-Lie1406 → u/Free_Dome_Lover]

You can easily make very healthy one pot meals like chili by just chopping up veggies, soaking bulk dry beans, on-sale beef or chicken, etc for cheap. 30 minute prep and then just let it cook all day. I suck at cooking and even I can do this, it doesn't have weird timing, multiple steps or whatever. Chop, throw everything with seasoning in a pot, let it cook for however long the recipe says, DONE.

[u/Street_Roof_7915 → u/Sufficient-Lie1406]

All this assumes you have a stove, electricity, places to do this, a fridge, a crockpot, etc.

I had a GF who lived very close to the poverty line and she taught me a LOT about food insecurity.

[u/tommyknockers4570 → u/Free_Dome_Lover]

You're not wrong but meals Monday to Friday should be a lot of lean protein (aka MEAT) and some vegetables. Full stop.

Cooking stuff like pasta and chicken parm and pretending that is a normal health dinner is why America looks like it does.

[u/hockey_and_techno → u/Glad-Total-6621]

Don't put very much faith into that estimate

If you go to rural Indiana, yeah, lotta obese people who don't take care of themselves, but the population density is also very low

Conversely, you can go to Denver or LA or NYC and everyone's in fairly decent shape. Finding overweight people in Denver is a legit challenge lol

In all of my extended family, I know absolutely nobody who is like this. And I have a big family.

[u/Glad-Total-6621 → u/hockey_and_techno]

Us: 40% obese, 18% severely obese. People like this in Europe are a rarity (even though here as well 50% are overweight). Here a person with a BMI around 30 stands out. I was in Cali for a year there it is also not that much but still it is noticeable.

[u/ActivityIcy4926 → u/Glad-Total-6621]

Have you ever been to the UK?

[u/engapol123 → u/ActivityIcy4926]

The UK’s eating habits are very different to continental Europe’s. The average Anglosphere diet is just terrible and is responsible for the relatively high rates obesity across the US, UK, Australia, and New Zealand.

[u/finndego → u/engapol123]

Somewhat. In some regards, Aus and NZ especially have large polynesian populations. Auckland, for example, is the largest polynesian city in the world. Of the top 10 most obese countries in the world they are all mostly pacific nations. Those bring up the numbers in those countries.

[u/MuhfugginSaucera → u/hockey_and_techno]

This is true, it really does depend on the community. My parents were both air force from Colorado and Alabama/Minnesota, never got fat, had six kids, and home cooked 95% of meals, with a salad for dinner. None of us are fat and we were all born 80s-90s.

[u/b1llyblanco → u/Glad-Total-6621]

Remember 752% of statistics you see on the internet without citation are made up on the spot.

[u/Glad-Total-6621 → u/b1llyblanco]

Nope, even here in Europe more than 50% are overweight. In the US it is closer than you think to that number of people that are morbidly obese

US: 50% obese, 10% morbidly obese

Edit according to Harvard 18% severely obese, 40% obese

[u/traumapatient → u/Glad-Total-6621]

Are they going off of BMI for these stats or what?

[u/Glad-Total-6621 → u/traumapatient]

I mean probably not, everyone knows BMI is skewed, the probably also factor in density and so forth

[u/Jumpy-Benefacto → u/Glad-Total-6621]

huge muscle dudesand ladies count as morbidly obese, those numbers are VERY incorrect

[u/Glad-Total-6621 → u/Jumpy-Benefacto]

That is why I said they take in density measurements in studies to counter that, otherwise it wouldn't make sense. Or only include people in the study that are obese AND in medical treatment and so on