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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Restaurants getting fat by stuffing patrons, group says |
| 2007-02-28 |
| The restaurant industry is promoting "extreme eating" with high-calorie, salt-stuffed food, putting Canadians' health serious risk, a consumer advocacy group says. The Center for Science in the Public Interest says restaurants in Canada and the U.S. are contributing to an obesity problem by serving high-fat foods to consumers. "When you go shopping, you see those handy nutrition fact labels on the sides of packages but when you're going to a restaurant, there's no such information, you're buying blind," Michael Jacobson, the centre's executive director, told CBC News on Tuesday. The CSPI on Monday criticized a series of U.S. chain restaurants, including Ruby Tuesdays, Uno Chicago and the Cheesecake Factory, for their high-calorie fare. But Jacobson noted that many restaurants north of the border are also guilty of marketing fattening food products. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #14 Magic of stats, TW. One can support whatever outcome heart desires. |
| Posted by: twobyfour 2007-02-28 21:55 |
| #13 Heart disease plummeted in Holland and Denmark during the most severe food shortages of World War II That's what not reading history results in, boys and girls. Heart disease plummetted in Holland, at least, because the most susceptible died of starvation after the Germans emptied the country of everything movable. I've seen photos of the bodies lying in the streets, while others not quite so starved literally tore apart abandoned buildings for firewood. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2007-02-28 21:52 |
| #12 the peasantry feasted on perhaps a pound of bread, a spud, and a couple of carrots per day They also consumed astonishing quantities of alcohol. Even children drank beer for breakfast every day. Which incidentally is where the term 'smallbeer' comes from. Smallbeer was the diluted beer given to children. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2007-02-28 19:30 |
| #11 |
| Posted by: DMFD 2007-02-28 17:52 |
| #10 |
| Posted by: ed 2007-02-28 16:55 |
| #9 the peasantry feasted on perhaps a pound of bread, a spud, and a couple of carrots per day And died at age of twenty because a large meat-eating barbarian twice their size decided tp kill thelm fun and the small and weak peasants wre no match for him. |
| Posted by: JFM 2007-02-28 16:46 |
| #8 AlanC, Or the fact that fish ARE animals. Most of the fast food restaurant chains have their nutrition facts easily available - they're not on the wrapper for the Big Mac, but a lot of places have them in a holder nearby the counter, and they're usually available at the restaurant's web site. If anybody cares, that is. |
| Posted by: Rambler 2007-02-28 14:35 |
| #7 " eat...fish, not animals ..." Oh yeah, this guy's got all his marbles...NOT! Do you think someone should clue him in to the fact that plants don't swim? |
| Posted by: AlanC 2007-02-28 13:44 |
| #6 CSPI’s nightmare, of course, is Halloween. The group advises that instead of giving children treats, “you could always hand out low-fat granola bars—and toothbrushes.” Yeah, right, and get my housle rolled and egged. |
| Posted by: Deacon Blues 2007-02-28 12:21 |
| #5 Some of the highlights from their dossier on Activist Cash... The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) is the undisputed leader among America’s “food police.” CSPI was founded in 1971 by current executive director Michael Jacobson, and two of his co-workers at Ralph Nader’s Center for the Study of Responsive Law. Since then, CSPI’s joyless eating club has issued hundreds of high-profile—and highly questionable—reports condemning soft drinks, fat substitutes, irradiated meat, biotech food crops, French fries, and just about anything that tastes good. CSPI’s self-anointed “experts” also encourage “a whole lot of lawsuits” against fast-food restaurants (the group says it is “looking at tobacco as a model”), mostly because they see legal action as leverage to enact all the restrictions on food they have long supported. CSPI co-founder Michael Jacobson considers caffeine such a blight on civilization that he complains about people socializing over coffee. Unsurprisingly, he suggests that Americans patronize a “carrot juice house” instead. CSPI’s in-house food policies are so strict that Jacobson once reportedly intended to get rid of the office coffee machine—until one-third of his 60 employees threatened to quit. CSPI also has a bias against meat and dairy. Jacobson, himself a vegetarian, wrote in an issue of CSPI’s Nutrition Action Healthletter that proper nutrition “means eating a more plant-based diet … It means getting your fats from plants (vegetable oils and nuts) and fish, not animals (meats, milk cheese, and ice cream).” In keeping with his personal vegetarianism, Jacobson quietly sits on the advisory board of the “Great American Meatout,” an annual event operated by the animal rights zealots at the Farm Animal Reform Movement (FARM). Alcohol, even when consumed in moderation, is perhaps CSPI’s most hated product. The group’s Healthletter has asserted that “the last thing the world needs is more drinkers, even moderate ones.” CSPI wants hefty increases in beer taxes, increased restrictions on adult-beverage marketing, and even poster-sized warning labels placed in restaurants. George Hacker, who leads CSPI’s anti-alcohol effort, has accused winemakers of “hawking America’s costliest and most devastating drug.” The thousands of readily available and relatively inexpensive food offerings we enjoy today are for CSPI something to lament. “People tend to eat most healthily during hard times,” Jacobson has argued. “Heart disease plummeted in Holland and Denmark during the most severe food shortages of World War II. Records of English manors in the 1600s reveal that the peasantry feasted on perhaps a pound of bread, a spud, and a couple of carrots per day.” And that, to Jacobson is “basically a wonderfully healthy diet.” Yum. Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health, argues that CSPI’s “obsession” with a low-fat diet reflects “a paternalistic idea that the public is not smart enough to distinguish between types of fat.” Food critic Robert Shoffner puts it more directly when he describes CSPI’s approach this way: “People are children and have to be protected by Big Brother or Big Nanny from the awful free-market predators ... That’s what drives these people—a desire for control of other people’s lives.” CSPI’s nightmare, of course, is Halloween. The group advises that instead of giving children treats, “you could always hand out low-fat granola bars—and toothbrushes.” |
| Posted by: tu3031 2007-02-28 10:05 |
| #4 Time to gather all the loud mouth socialist health freaks and ship their asses to Darfur and Somalia to get to know what 4,000 year of real human history has been about, food shortages and poverty. No quick visit. They get to go native for a couple years. Then we'll see how much they have to say about the 'problem' of the abundance of food. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2007-02-28 08:59 |
| #3 Who the f*ck are you to tell people what they can or can't eat? The "little people" too dumb to make their own choices? SuperNGO to the rescue! With moral authority far beyond that of mortal men... This really pisses me off. Shut the f*ck up! |
| Posted by: Spot 2007-02-28 08:23 |
| #2 I shouldn't have read this story. It gave me a craving for hot pastrami on rye, totally unobtainable in Oz. BTW, The Center for Science in the Public Interest is just an agitprop front for a bunch of nuts. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2007-02-28 03:27 |
| #1 I'm sure Mr. Jacobson only frequents restaurants which leave you wondering how you could pay so much for so little. Slowly but surely our ability to make our own choices in life will be eroded away if we don't fight back. |
| Posted by: PBMcL 2007-02-28 01:07 |