young lives at risk in the washington post
Posted by Meg
Having tackled the quality of care for illegal aliens in ICE detention centers last week, now the Washington Post is onto Young Lives At Risk: Our Overweight Children*. Gruesome graphics, scary statistics, chats, and stories guaranteed to warrant popular outcry on all sides of the issue will be included. While I’m so far less than impressed with the series, they did include 10 interesting facts on Sunday, including:
–25 percent of all vegetables eaten in the United States are french fries or chips.
–Soft-drink consumption has increased 300 percent in 20 years and is the leading source of added sugars for adolescents.
Ew? I’m not sure I buy the 25% of all vegetables eaten are french fries or chips bit, but I believe the soda part. My question is: why? Cheap and easy, yes. Convenient: no question.
But when did people stop caring about what their food tastes like, and how it makes them feel? That’s the one thing I want to know most, and I suspect it’s the one thing the Post isn’t going to cover.
* I’d like to note that it certainly hasn’t been a slow news year: why all the feature series above the fold at the Post? Real life is still happening, right? Just checking…
May 21st, 2008 at 9:03 am
Well, what do they mean by ‘vegetables eaten’? How do they define ‘vegetable’? I would suspect that consumption of corn and corn products, such as cereal, cornstarch, and corn syrup as well as soy protein, soybean oil, etc make up way more than 75% of all consumed food products derived from plant matter. The problem is that ‘vegetable’ is not a scientific term, and to cite a fact like this it is obvious that they are counting some plant derivatives and not counting others.
About soft drinks, cola consumption has been pretty slow for growth since the 1980s…all the growth in the last few years has been in specialty and energy drinks. But the idea of kids feasting on soft drinks is hardly something new and scary; soft drinks have been the ‘cool’ thing to drink for at least 50-60 years, if not longer. To be fair, they should really point out the surge in popularity of water and lightly flavored zero-calorie drinks, which have been growing quite rapidly in the last years. Of course, that wouldn’t play into the ‘your kids are eating poison!’ scare tactic…