Food

Food Bytes 3: What the Media are Reporting about Our Eating Habits
By Janet Peterson

It’s fascinating and revealing to survey what the media have reported about our eating habits this past year since the publication of “Food Bytes 2” (https://www.meridianmagazine.com/aroundthetable/050512bytes2.html) in Meridian Magazine. The clips are categorized into two sections: Family and Health. Material has been gathered from nationally published magazines, newspaper wire services, individual newspaper articles, and Internet sites.

Family

Dinner is more than what you’re eating; it’s family time together, to unwind and find out what’s happening.

Jean Quanbeck, quoted in Valerie Phillips, “Home Cooking Has More to Do with     ‘Home’ than ‘Cook,'” Deseret Morning News, May 25, 2005, C-1.

When it comes to holiday entertaining, family members pitch in and cook different parts of the dinner in 69% of U.S. households. “It’s a neat cultural thing that the holidays really are family affairs, with Aunt Sally bringing the pie and somebody else the vegetables,” says Tim Ryan [president of the Culinary Institute of America]. “But frankly, I was surprised to see the number of people who are willing to let somebody else prepare their holiday meals.

Another jaw-dropper: Despite our long-cherished tradition of being home for the holidays, more than a third of Americans (34%) now say they prefer to dine out – or have a meal catered in – rather than prepare a big feast.

What America Really Eats,” Dianne Hales, Parade Magazine, Nov. 13, 2005, 5.

“The American palate is becoming increasingly adventurous,” says John Mitchell, a coordinator of prepared foods for Whole Foods market, who sees a growing appetite for fresher, bigger, bolder flavors among consumers. And while Chinese (74%), Italian (73%) and Mexican (73%) foods remain the most popular ethnic cuisines, more than one in five of us also wants to try Caribbean, Greek, Latino, French, Thai, Indian and Middle Eastern dishes.

Dianne Hales, “What America Really Eats,” Parade, Nov. 13, 2005, 5.

That classic of American family rituals – the evening dinner – is rapidly dwindling.

Vaguely remembered are those punctilious post-World War II days of Ozzie and Harriet when the wife prepared meals from scratch to serve to a husband and children gathered around the dining room table at 6 o’clock sharp. Today, surveys of American eating habits look more like the lives of suburbanite Lynette in “Desperate Housewives,” who feeds her family dinners bought at fast-food take-outs.

In their annual survey of American eating trends, the Institute of Food Technologists says fewer than a third of American households are making meals from scratch – a noticeable 7 percent decline from just two years ago. . . .

Part of the reason for changing dinner habits, [Barry Swanson, professor food and nutrition at Washington State University] suspects, is that high schools no longer require home economics courses be taught, although many schools continue to offer the courses as an elective. But he said food is like other trends in American society in which we are inclined to adopt everything that is fast, portable and with us all of the time.

Lance Gay, “Days of Home-cooked Meals Fade,” Scripps Howard News Service, in Deseret Morning News, January 27, 2006, A-6.

In a challenging world, family belonging provides a safe haven for parents and children alike. Family dinners not only satisfy our physical and emotional needs, but also offer a time and place to consciously teach our children the value of caring for others.

Sharing family dinners sets the stage for us to value our family relationships, rather than take them for granted. Consistently having dinner together as a family also keeps us in touch, allowing us to trouble-shoot problems in daily living, as well as keeping us abreast of our family members’ activities and life experience. It is in the family group that we develop an ability to discuss, to express our opinions, to be ourselves and allow others to be themselves. We feel less alone in the world when we know there are people who love and care about us, no matter what we are going through.

The function of a family is to nurture the growth and development of each of its members. The overall “spirit” in a family is like the soil in a garden. Soil rich in needed elements supports growth, while earth anemic in necessary nutrients curtails blossom.

 Gayle Peterson, Ph.D., “Family Dinner: The Value of Sharing Meals,” iVillage.com.

If we are going to lose the unconscious grazing habit and replace it with the healthy new habit of conscientious eating, we need to bring back the old-fashioned value of mealtimes. Good eating habits are established one meal at a time. A great starting place is the family dinner table. All too often our dinner time eating habits become yet another place where the food is fast, “served” in the back of a car amidst a frenzy of activity. Our “dinner conversation” becomes, “Do you want fries with that?” instead of asking about everyone’s day.

One of my passions is making sure people understand that their dinner table is not just a place of good family dinners, but also a place of communion for a family that desperately needs to reconnect at the end of a busy day. Too often the dinner table becomes a clutter magnet – a place to dump the mail, the kids’ backpacks and homework after zipping through the drive-thru. This is a place where not only conscious eating can take place, but the good habit of relationship building and the tying together of heartstrings that may have been inadvertently cut by a rushed parent…

We all know that eating in front of the TV is an almost guaranteed reservation at The Overeating Caf. It also assures that there will be no conversation (except maybe a request for salt being passed or a fleeting comment made during a commercial). It is an interesting phenomenon how once that habit of the dinner table is re-established, the food becomes healthier and more nutritious and, psychologically, the whole family does better.

Good habits like establishing regular mealtimes also have the advantage of an almost built-in control mechanism. Instead of mindless grazing for hours in front of the TV, there is a beginning and ending point to the meal.

Leanne Ely, “The Dinner Diva: Exchange A Bad Habit for A Good One,” Deseret Morning News, Feb. 3, 2006, C-3.

Mealtime, [says David Holcomb, CEO of a multi-million dollar kitchen gadget company and an inventor who holds more than 140 patents], should be something considerably more than just a nuke-and-serve pit stop. He backs up this belief by spending as much time as possible cooking from scratch with his kids.

The kitchen, he says, is the best classroom that parents have for teaching their kids meaningful life lessons. “Cooking with our children is a window through which we can give them glimpses of the most important things in life – a way to carry on family traditions, cement friendships, and even face up to failure and frustration.”

Ken Haedrich, “The Kitchen as Classroom,” Better Homes and Gardens, April 2006, 180, 182.

Read on about the impact of our eating habits on our health.

Health

Type 2 diabetes could become the most widespread, and potentially devastating, disease to attack America’s kids since polio.

A disorder of the body’s power-supply system, diabetes is a slow-moving calamity that profoundly disturbs every cell in the body. At the core, it’s the failure of cells to absorb glucose, the sugar molecules that fuel muscles, nerves, and the brain. When sugar cannot enter the cells, it builds up in the blood, leading over time to devastating complications: heart attack, stroke, kidney failure, nerve damage, even limb amputation and blindness. And when muscle and nerve cells are deprived of glucose, they function more slowly, explaining why early diabetes may reveal itself as fatigue and moodiness. At one time, type 2 was called adult-onset diabetes; nearly all its victims were over 30. But now, type 2 infects children as young as 4, and the American Diabetes Association says it is “approaching epidemic proportions” in teens.

And it may only get worse. Because of rising obesity and lack of exercise, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently predicted that at least one in three American children born in the year 2000 will develop diabetes sometime in their lifetime. That’s potentially 1.3 million of the 4 million 3-year-olds in the US. Among African-American, Hispanic, Asian, and Native American children, the odds are close to one in two, or every other child, says K. M. Venkat Marayn, chief of the CDC’s diabetes epidemiology section. “The fact that the diabetes epidemic has been raging is well known to us. But looking at the risk in these terms was very shocking,” he says.

“Ten years ago, we saw maybe one or two kids a year with type 2,” says Francine Kaufman, MD, a diabetes specialist at Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles and immediate past president of the American Diabetes Association. “Now in children’s hospitals and pediatric clinics, up to 46 percent of all new diabetes cases are type 2.”

Julie Evans, “The New Childhood Epidemic: Diabesity,” Prevention.com, Dec. 27, 2005.

TV, Fast Food, and Overweight Kids

There’s no invading virus or sinister bacteria to blame for this epidemic, no vaccine to ward it off nor quick-fix pill to cure it. Type 2 diabetes is a lifestyle disease – a body-fat disease – caused by too much TV, too little activity, and too much high-calorie junk food. Its rise mirrors the huge upswing in childhood obesity that’s left one in five American kids overweight

“At least 80 percent of type 2 diabetic kids are overweight,” says Judith Fradkin, MD, an endocrinologist at the National Institute of Diabetes and Kidney Diseases in Washington, DC. While some kids have a genetic predisposition to type 2 diabetes, it’s almost always extra pounds and inactivity that push their bodies over the edge.

“People used to think that body fat was just a place to store excess calories,” Fradkin says. “But as it turns out, fat tissue is biologically active, making hormones and signaling molecules that travel to other parts of the body, telling them to be resistant to the action of insulin.”

Julie Evans, “The New Childhood Epidemic: Diabesity,” Prevention.com, Dec. 27, 2005.

Victuals vs. Vitamins

You’ll come out ahead if you opt for nutrient-rich foods over vitamins to stay healthy, says Alice Lichtenstein of the Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging at Tufts University. Why? Science consistently shows that well-balanced diets keep you healthy, while the outcomes for nutrient supplements are inconsistent. A case in point: Research has shown that people who report eating diets high in fruits and vegetables have lower risks of developing heart disease and cancer. By comparison, similar studies using vitamin supplements have produced fewer positive results.

The Year’s Best Food News,” Parade, Nov. 13, 2005, 8.

Faced with a national obesity epidemic that the U.S. Surgeon General says could make this generation’s children the first in American history not to exceed the average life expectancy of their parents, schools everywhere are counting the calories in their lunches to ensure they don’t put students at greater risk…

Obesity has pervaded American society, with multi-faceted causes and effects. To defeat what many physicians now define as a disease, educators say they must attack on many fronts. Adults must serve as role models: eating healthy foods and exercising regularly. Schools must offer a regimen of nutritional foods. Teachers must make healthy living a part of the curriculum.

 Mike Cronin, “Schools Fight to Reverse Epidemic of Obesity,’ sltrib.com, Oct. 27, 2005.

“Parents set the standard. They do the shopping and cooking. Children are big mimics and they mimic what they see their parents do,” [Marty Lamb, dietitian, LDS Hospital Health and Fitness Institute] said.

Does that mean never eating out or always avoiding fast food? Of course not, Lamb said. “All foods can belong in a healthy diet. It’s balance and making good choices. In a fast-food restaurant, get a single hamburger instead of the bigger one. Instead of fries, have a baked potato, side salad, chili, fresh fruit. It’s not that you can’t ever have fries – but not always.”

Food patterns develop from the “choices we make, and we owe it to our children to be good examples so that when they grow up and are on their own, good habits are developed,” she said.

Lois Collins, “Modest Weight Cut = Big Benefits,” deseretnews.com, Dec. 10, 2005.

Food marketing strongly influences what children eat, the Institute of Medicine said in a comprehensive review of scientific evidence on the issue. Overwhelmingly, food and drinks marketed to kids are high in calories and low in nutrition, the report said.

“It’s putting our children at risk,” said panel member Ellen A. Wartella, psychology professor at the University of California, Riverside…

“If marketing to children affects their food choices, then it’s time to stop marketing to them,” said Susan Linn, a psychiatry instructor at Harvard Medical School who helped found  the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood.

The panel [of scientists] said growth in new food products targeted to kids has been huge, from 52 in 1994 to nearly 500 introduced last year.

Obesity rates have tripled over the past 40 years for kids and adolescents from ages 6 through 19, raising their risks of type 2 diabetes and other diseases.

Libby Quaid, “Junk-food Hype Called Risky for Kids,” Associated Press, in deseretnews.com, Dec. 7, 2005.

Feed Your Heart

This means eating a portion-controlled diet that’s low in saturated fats, trans fats, cholesterol and simple carbohydrates, and high in fruits and vegetables, lean meats, beans, fiber-rich whole grains and unsaturated fats, like those found in nuts, olive oil and wild-caught salmon.

Norine Dworkin-McDaniel, “8 Ways to Be Good to Your Heart,” Family Circle, February 2006, 98.

To keep your arteries clear, cut down your intake of both saturated fat (the kind that’s solid at room temperature and found in many types of animal products) and trans fats (processed vegetable oil in which hydrogen has been added to the molecule to make it more solid and give it a longer shelf life). Both types raise your body’s level of “bad” LDL cholesterol – much more so than any cholesterol you get from food. When too much LDL cholesterol circulates in the bloodstream, it can slowly build up on the walls of arteries feeding your heart and brain, forming thick, hard plaque. Trans fats also lower “good” HDL cholesterol, making them doubly bad for your heart. HDL cholesterol is beneficial because it reduces plaque buildup by ushering excess LDL from artery walls and back to the liver, where it’s passed from the body.

Food fix: Aim to have no more than 30 percent of your calories come from fat, with 10 percent or less from saturated and trans fat. “Limit butter, vegetable shortening and lard in cooking,” suggests Bethany Thayer, R.D., a spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association in Detroit. Instead, use olive and canola oils, which both contain heart-healthy monosaturated fat.

Sandra Gordon, “The Heart Smart Diet,” Family Circle, February 2006, 104.

“Most people… eat out a lot. When they go out they’re brainwashed into thinking portions have to be huge, when really what they’re eating is two to three times the normal serving in a single meal.”

Ray Grass, “Diet + Exercise = Healthier Me,” Deseret Morning News, January 26, 2006, C-2.

Amid aggressive marketing of unhealthy foods and an increasingly sedentary environment, there are more overweight children in the United States today than at any other time in history, one BYU researcher said.

In fact, in the last 20 years – as computer games and fast food super-sizing became popular – the number of obese children in the U.S. has risen from 4 to 16 percent, a 400 percent increase, said Steve Aldana, a professor of health and human behavior

Brother Aldana now fears that if trends continue, today’s youth may become the first generation in the past century to live a shorter life span than their parents. Without a healthy diet and exercise, the average person will die 10 to 20 years prematurely, he said.

Brother Aldana said people often assume genetics is impacting the disturbing trend of increased childhood obesity. But ‘it has nothing to do with genetics. It has everything to do with environment. We have sedentary kids who now have access to large quantities of food.

“Kids are for the most part products of their environments,” he said. ‘If we have overweight, unhealthy children who are eating poor food, it is because someone is buying these foods and bringing them home.”

The problem, he admits, is complex. ‘We have a culture of food, especially in the Church. We are not allowed to do a lot of things. One of the things we can do? We can eat.’

He urges Church members not to go overboard, to not make unhealthy food a part of every celebration/youth activity.

Sarah Jane Weaver, “Healthy Children,” Church News, January 28, 2006, 11.

Chicken, salads, soup and breakfast.

From the way McDonald’s is touting its lineup of healthful items and other nontraditional menu choices, you would think it doesn’t even sell hamburgers any more.

Healthy items look good, but McDonald’s makes its money from the basics.

“The No. 1 entre ordered by men in America is a hamburger,” says Henry Balzer, a vice president with NPD Foodworld who tracks data on eating habits. “And the No. 1 entre among women is a French fry, followed by a hamburger.” NPD Group surveys show that the prevailing wisdom that people are more health conscious today than in past years is mostly myth. The number of people concerned about the amount of fat they consume has actually declined over the years – to 30 percent today from over 50 percent in 1994 – the group’s latest survey showed.

“While McDonald’s does not officially break down sales by menu item, ‘the 80-20’ rule is going strong,” says industry consultant Jerry McVety of McVety & Associates, meaning that 80 percent of the company’s revenue can be attributed to 20 percent of its products, led by its flagship burgers and fries.

“Certainly, soups and salads have added incremental revenue, since they serve that segment that has made a commitment to healthier eating. They also make for effective window dressing, helping to keep critics and regulators quiet.”

Tom Van Riper, “It’s the Burgers, Stupid,” Forbes.com, 2006.

Utah’s religious divide appears to have a physical as well as spiritual side – LDS Church members on average weigh 4.6 pounds more than their counterparts in other religions.

A recently completed study shows that Utah, and particularly its LDS population – for many years seen as a bastion of health in a nation where fitness is on a steady decline – is slipping, especially around the waistline.

The study, involving a cross section of Utah adults from different religions over a nine-year period, also found that LDS Church members are 14 percent more likely (18 percent for males, 9 percent for females) to be obese than their non-LDS counterparts.

The study was compiled by BYU health science professor Ray Merrill, who gathered the data from figures obtained in 1996, 2001 and 2003-2004 by the Utah Health Status Survey.

Merrill’s study suggests LDS Church members may be using excessive eating as a substitute for other socially accepted sources of enjoyment, like smoking and drinking, that the church prohibits.

Jeremy Twitchell, “A Weighty Religious Issue: LDS Heavier,” deseretnews.com, Feb. 14, 2006.

Keep your brain well fed.

Although gray matter makes up only 2 percent of a human’s total body weight, it gobbles up 25 percent of the food energy we consume, so don’t skip meals. “Even if you’re trying to lose weight, you should still eat every three to five hours,” says Dee Sandquist, R.D., a spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association. “Eat less, but don’t eat less often. And make sure that every meal has a balance of protein, healthy fats, and carbohydrates, which helps ensure that you get all the nutrients you need.”