Quote Originally Posted by Trek420 View Post
I'm just going to stumble in here and ask "who's they"? Parents? Teachers? Both? The entire village that it takes?

So I'll just ask this question for the group: In a society/culture that does not reward or teach a healthy lifestyle or healthier choices how did you learn? Was it in the home, in the kitchen? Classes? Community? A little of both?
I took a nutrition course as a science requirement in college, and that helped me a lot to understand about how the body needs nutrients, how nutritional deficiencies are the cause of many disease, and how nutrition interacts with exercising the body. Then in the 1990s, the community hospitals really got proactive with putting together classes to educate patients and the community at large with respect to cardio health, preventing diabetes, minimizing arthritis, maximizing the fitness level, nutrition for weight loss without dieting, and so on, classes in just about every hospital in North America, either free or low cost. Like other people in this thread have said, it is about education, but you have to seek out the knowledge for yourself, learn what is fact and dismiss the inaccurate fad diet type of books. Mostly though, the person has to come to a realization that their health has to be balanced with the other top priorities in their life and to make time to gain the knowledge, to make the dietary changes, and to embrace exercise as being critically important. Taking classes at the local hospital can be the first step in the right direction.

Ignorance of nutrition and fitness isn't just in the poor neighborhoods. I am appalled at the number of people I encounter who have hypertension, yet know nothing about the Dash Diet, the diet that the USDA Food Pyramid is based on, and thus know nothing about eating the low-fat low-sodium low-sugar fresh portions from each food group every day for maximum health that is proven effective at normalizing the blood pressure without medications, along with daily cardio exercise. I know of people who are educated professionals, who take double or triple medications for blood pressure, and their blood pressure is still high, like 170/100, and they won't give up the high-sodium fast food meals or the highly processed packaged grocery store meals. They rarely eat fresh fruits and vegetables or whole grains, and they don't exercise at all, not even an evening walk around their neighborhood. Meanwhile they are getting hardening of the arteries, kidney damage and the other ailments that high blood pressure brings about, and our health care costs go up as a nation.

With respect to obesity, what is most important is to get rid of the fat that you can't see, that is inside the body cavity, squeezing itself between the organs, invading the liver and heart, pushing up the lungs so that a person can't even take a full breath. The rule is that the waist needs to be 50% or less than your height in inches, and if the waist is over 50%, then the person is at high risk for internal fat that will lead to diabetes, coronary disease, liver disease, kidney disese, and so on. However the rule is not always applicable because a person of normal weight who never exercises can have this internal fat that brings on all of these medical conditions, as cardio exercise is what burns the inside fat.

Just one final thought, and that is a growing number of nutritionists and people in the medical community believe that the gaining of excess body fat is actually brought about by continually eating food that has no nutritional value. The body becomes nutritionally deficient, becomes hungry, and so the person eats more, but more of the same fast food non-nutritional garbage. The hunger really isn't about emotional problems, or being scarred in childhood, or eating to fill a void, but the hunger is caused because there are nutritional deficiencies in the body. The insides of the intestines, where the food is absorbed, might be thickly coated with sludge due to a lack of soluble fiber in the diet and so the person can't absorb the nutrients, or the person is just eating garbage day-after-day, and their diet is devoid of entire food groups that contain essential nutrients to maintain health. When the person cleans up their digestive system and makes it healthy, focuses on eating their portions from each food group every single day, and exercises, the hunger dissipates and the strange cravings disappear entirely. Thus, over time the person will lose body fat without engaging in unhealthy fat diets.