Michael Pollan Links Food Reform to Health Insurance

Health care reform is a bandaid. I think it will take a crisis of food on a massive scale to make Americans consciously demand a healthier system.

For watching, I reccomend YouTubeing “The Omnivore’s Dillema” if you are not inclined to reading the 411 page book; his address on the book includes a sustainable and more secure method of agriculture.

Also, look up Joel Salatin

It’s the result of excitement/stimulation in the cortex (as with any sweet/fat/salty food), which temporarily overwhelms the ‘I’m full” feeling received from the stomach via chemical messages to the brain stem.

It’s an idea, though I sincerely doubt it will begin to address the problem. There are fat people now (and always have been) before Fast Food restaurants. A more relevant question might be: how do other societies, with FF rest’rnts, not have so many fat people as we?

No, it was an ad hominem reply.
If fast food chains were forced to cut those giant soft-drink glasses by half, there would be a great impact in public health.
If someone is given a giant glass of soft-drink they will drink it all up, but if they receive a smaller one they’ll feel satisfied. Maybe this behavior is the reminiscence of the cave man, when they didn’t know when they would have the next meal.
I think this simple change could be more effective than tons of advice.

Ad Hominem attack. If and when you come up with a relevant argument, I’m glad to discourse.

Straw man.

Hum. . .

But you are the one living in The Wizard of Oz’s world.

Actually Pollan talks quite coherantly about how to solve this problem without the government in the long version of this show. It’s a surprising solution, but it makes A LOT of sense. I’ve been chewing on it for a week or so and think it may have merit. Tell me what you think.

Straw man argument.

I don’t know of any environmentalists (and I know a lot, including myself) who advocate dumping the problem on the govt. We’re realists, though, and we know that corporations have profits to make and aren’t going to change because its the right thing to do. Instead, they are going to use advertising campaigns to make themselves look better while cheating behind our backs. Actual laws are the only solution.

Yes, I see. So your proposal is to wait the human kind to reach a new level of consciousness, then the problems will be solved by themselves.

If you had the keys to the prison system, you would unlock the doors, because you believe in social change.

Indeed, they wouldn’t do anything wrong after they heard what a marvelous person you are.

If you haven’t read it, then you’ve not searched it out. It’s out there — that’s why Europe has banned GMOs.

Prohibition.

The War On Drugs.

The War On Terrorism.

Government-sponsored prohibitions just flat out do not work. Societal change does.

Therefore: education and freedom. Efforts of every person to help raise us all up. Dumping it on ‘government’ to fix will not only not work… it’s also kind of lazy. I garden heavily, am taking classes in permaculture, started a club at work, and am working on swaling and replanting local deforested hillsides with food guilds.

You?

In some countries people are aware that junk food can’t be a way of life. Government can control the food that is served at schools, overtax fat and reduce the price of fruits and vegetables, and even hold parents responsible for negligence when they have exploding fat kids.

Now you have managed to put your message across. Well, self-promotion through a particular idea or cause sounds like professional politics or religious leadership, which we all know the results.
But there is no other way out to deal with the problem, and even though scientists may not be totally correct about global warming, the world couldn’t pay the price to put it to the test.

I’ll have to disagree — junk food impacts health as much as it is eaten. It has nothing to do with local conditions.

Governmental campaigns have done nothing at all. Prohibitions are useless. The only time a society has globally discarded something is because it was universally accepted as culturally abhorrent. Peer pressure is the ultimate campaign.

Once again, forever and always, education and freedom are the answer.

Mansanto are criminals. While i am sure there are plenty of scientists toiling for them who have no goal but to increase the knowledge and technological capacity of mankind for the betterment of the whole planet, their management and legal activities should get them shut down. Its disgusting. I am well aware of that.

But GE itself is just a powerful tool. We shouldnt go for this neo-luddite scare-tactics against the whole idea of ‘messing with nature’, this is about the abuses of power.

Google Monsanto,cotton,India if you want to see how wonderful GE cotton is. /satire

My experience and study after study here and in the EU have shown GE crops are not an answer. And instead of using less pesticides, the advent of chemically resistant strains has increased the use of pesticides as it has brought about the unintended consequence of herbicide tolerant *superweeds* which require the application of more and different(deadlier) toxins.

You missed my point and changed the object of discussion; that’s the only thing I was pointing out.

Global warming is a fact, supported by tons of evidence. Whether some people uses it for self-promotion is totally irrelevant, since it doesn’t change the fact it is a threat to humans as a species.

It is even sadder that lots of anti-environmentalists are trying to confuse people about this issue, even though the scientific community is unanimus.

Ok, if you can find an answer to whether many environmentalists are using the cause for their own self-promotion (for one, Al Gore), without revolving facts, just by using abstract formulas, congratulations for you.

Junk food is all around the world but it produces greater health impacts in some countries, which means the local conditions have something to do with them. I guess the countries where bad eating habits are epidemic there will not be change without an aggressive governmental campaign.

I’ve yet to read anything scientific about GMO’s being dangerous to eat. Now I’m not in support of terminator genes being placed into our food (mainly cause I’ve a nagging worry over them spreading through pollination.)

As for the rest of your comment, people need to learn personal responsibility. Just like we don’t need to make more and more things illegal because of people abusing them.

Genetically modified food has already increased yield for wheat, massively cut the pesticides required to grow Cotton, and more. The problem isnt GM, the problem is the companies that employ it, genetic patents, etc.

It’s maybe logical but It’s irrelevant to my point.

-> means “implication” in formal logic.

We need food reform for real. Genetically modified food, over sugary products, and unhealthy fast food kills us.

I think global warming is crap. That being said I think we have a lot to gain from eco-friendly farming.

fat doesn’t make us unhealthy, bad fats do. And actually it’s children of unhealthily-eating mothers who have the most to fear. The medical literature is quite clear, though not trumpeted.