The actual statistic of the headline is that people surveyed reported that over the last two years they "sometimes" or "regularly" no longer ate three meals a day because of inflation and the fall in their purchasing power.
No, no, we must open borders and let everyone in so that big corporation do not have to pay more salaries, and so the minimum wage does not increase, and anyway only old people are a burden on the social welfare system right? We have enough doctors and surgeons, comrads.
When I order food they often have a minimum order value in money. It’s usually so much, I just can’t eat more than one meal. I know in advance, so I skip breakfast and get full at lunch, then skip diner too, because I’m still full.
This. Skipping a meal to afford food delivery is not a financial problem. It’s like saying “I am poor because I can only afford to drive one way with my Lamborghini and have to walk home”.
I mean, there are good reasons why people would choose to order food rather than cooking it: no time between three jobs, disabilities and so on. My comment wasn’t meant as an offense.
You misunderstood: I’m not doing it to afford food delivery, but because the restaurant I’m ordering at has a minimum order value and I don’t want to throw half of it in the trash.
For example: I want pizza and it’s 12€, but the place won’t deliver for orders less than 20€. So I have to add some idk lasgna or a second pizza. I end up with food for more than 1 meal, so I skip the other meals to be able to eat it while it’s fresh. Simetimes I save a bit fir later, but it’s nit the same quality.
Sorry, I indeed misunderstood. Looks like, I was not the only one. So, you’re not wasting money, neither do you waste food. It seems you’re just a camel :)
If true, which it’s basically not, this is dumb distraction and click-bait.
So what is this “third meal” that so many people are supposedly giving up? Kebab? Big Mac and fries? Well surely that’s a win for everyone? Duh.
Sorry, but the reality is that poor people are not literally going hungry anywhere in Europe. Anyone who opens their eyes can see that. In almost every country in the world today, i.e. except the very poorest, poor people are fatter than rich people.
Completely inane and irrelevant and insulting to intelligence.
Addendum. To clarify, my point is that the problem with food today is the quality, the calories, the correlation with social inequality. It’s not the quantity and it’s certainly not the number of meals taken. Idiotic.
If only there was some way to confirm, short of only reading the headline, if theres more to this.
Oh, apparently theres further text in the article, for example 29% said their financial situation is precarious. 11% say they regularly dont eat enough, so they have enough food for their kids, 24% say theyre very concerned with coping with the increase in food prices. Oh and 12%, within the past 6 months, have skipped meals while hungry.
So the article sources survey data, you’re basing your claims on better primary data I take it? Or maybe secondary public health database datasets? Something else?
I don’t get this. My problem is being taken to be a fool.
How do you, personally, square these two observations:
There’s a worldwide obesity epidemic affecting all but the poorest of countries, and within each society the fattest people tend to be the poorest ones
Poor people - in rich Europe - are so poor that they can’t eat enough meals
Sorry, but something has to give. Which is it?
Addendum. Downvoting just proves you have no answer to the question.
The two things are actually often related: junk food is faster, more accessible, stores longer, and is cheaper per calorie. So you can be hungry, skip a salad meal (that would need to be bought fresh and prepared) while having “mcdonalds”/microwave meal/high calorie meal for your leftover meal. Third has been the pattern, following US, where it is very common for the poor to eat more calories than the rich, while eating less healthy meals.
It’s not a famine and fortunately no one is calling it that here. What it is, is “food insecurity”.
Eating healthy is already something that most humans don’t manage to do. Even those with money. After all humans are wired to love sugar and avoid work and cooking is work. If I had a penny for every time thought to myself “fuck being healthy” and then ate something, I could solve food insecurity. And I’m not even overweight, so probably mere average in that sort of irrationality.
Adding monetary constraints makes good food choices even less likely. And to make maters there’s also a bunch of other issues that arise people who have to worry about getting enough food. That type of stress is very much not healthy.
With your attitude, you could just go into a drug den and tell everyone there that all they have to do is “say no”. Sure, technically it’s correct, but reality doesn’t work that way.
Reality is that feeding people is fairly cheap option to curb social programs.
Yes, your point is that “hunger” should be interpreted very loosely, meaning in a sort of addiction-psychology way.
I think that’s a sophisticated re-rendering, and that most ordinary folks do associate the word “hunger” with famine, with starving, with terrible deprivation. Which is a real situation in a handful of desperate places in the world. I don’t think we should be conflating these two problems. One of them is far more urgent than the other.
I see this as just another instance of disingenuously sensationalist language and I would prefer people used the correct terms for what they are in fact talking about.
For the underlying substance, I agree with you and all the other censorious downvoters. I am just concerned about vocabulary and manipulation.
Yes, your point is that “hunger” should be interpreted very loosely, meaning in a sort of addiction-psychology way.
I’m saying that it simply isn’t well defined. There’s a reason we have terms like “malnurished” or “undernourished”. Your definition is only as narrow in certain contexts, e.g. “world hunger”. I personally wouldn’t use the word in the context of first-world issues either, but that’s because it’s ambiguous, not because it’s wrong.
So if “malnourished” is better, as you imply, let’s use that instead. The issue is not hunger by any non-academic definition of the word.
You’ve made your case. Mine is that this is a clear example of sensationalist lexical inflation. Like calling everyone right of center a Nazi, it is intended to provoke engagement and emotion rather than to describe a fact.
I agree with you on the fact that this inflation is a problem. I just think that we need to avoid inflation in terms of complaining about it as well. As it stands now anything that’s at least not contradicting the dictionary is tolerable in my opinion. Well, at least on social media. In academia your approach is obviously best.
Just because people can consume pure lard, and gain a tonne of weight, it doesnt mean theyre not malnutritioned. It also doesnt mean they dont experience hunger.
If you take a step back and consider the primary question that needs to be answered is it
a) What weight is a measure of hunger/poverty - people must be over x weight irrespective if health and were good. b) What food availability us a measure of hunger/poverty - people must have reasonable acess to a basic set of nutritional inputs and were good.
You seem to be following a - people are fat, so hunger doesnt exist
When it would be equally truthful, with a different conclusion to say - people are feeling hunger and experiencing malnutrition. When they can eat, what they can afford causes increased body mass without fulfilling their nutritional requirements. They also continue to feel hungry.
Treat food similar to medicine, the good benefit is the target, but there are also side effects. Cheaper food has a worse profile - fewer (not none) benefits, and higher side-effects.
Theres also more complexity to this - poverty isnt just $. Education, transportation, time, exhaustion, health. Many intersections and impacts that paint a persons life.
You are tying yourself in knots to pretend that that fat people are “hungry”. Why bother? Why not just use appropriate language, instead of mangling English like this?
I do not deny that there is a problem. I just hate being manipulated with language. It is dishonest, disingenuous, insulting. Fat people are not going hungry. Find another word.
Routine addendum. Downvoting does not make you right. It just proves you to be intolerant of other people’s opinions.
Downvoting just proves you have no answer to the question.
The answer is simple: Humans are neither omniscient nor perfectly rational.
Obviously, humans who always make the perfect choice to optimize their long term health won’t get obese just because empty calories are cheap. But if a typical human had such superhuman willpower and intellect, poverty wouldn’t exist anyway and humanity would be occupied with putting up a dyson sphere around Vega or whatever.
In reality however humans are flawed and practically all will make stupid choices if the right ones are harder. Hence we need to create systems that make it easier to chose wisely. Because as individuals that’s not something we’re capable of.
Yes, exactly.** Reading the article disproves the headline. **
When I hear ‘not eating three meals a day’ I do not think ‘has skipped one meal in the last two years.’ (which is how the headline get’s it’s 38% statistic.)
It’s not that deprivation does not exist in the EU, it’s that the scale of that deprivation is of an entirely different order than implied by the headline.
some people skip one or the other because food is getting excessively expensive thanks to our over reliance on fossil fuel (and corporate greed)
I also take exception to your "So what is this “third meal” that so many people are supposedly giving up? Kebab? Big Mac and fries?" and "In almost every country in the world today, i.e. except the very poorest, poor people are fatter than rich people." comment as if poor people regularly eat out. It is not the case.
Poor people also can't afford personal chefs that provide them with proper nutritious food, and for the most part don't have enough free time/energy to have enough exercise to maintain a healthy diet.
You seem to have a violent hatred for poor people. It is strange to me, what has poor people done to you that you despise them so much?
While I think that you’ve got a valid broader point about misrepresentation – my pet peeve is the use of “relative poverty” in poverty infographics, which has got nothing to do with being poor, but rather is a sort of metric of inequality – I’m not sure that describes what is going on here. They highlight Moldova as having a particularly high rate of going without meals. Moldova is not, by European standards, wealthy, but also has a low obesity rate by European standards.
Yeah, that’s probably something I need to look into as I don’t really drink milk. Not sure if whole milk has ‘too much’ fat as I also don’t want to gain weight in a bad way. I’m looking to build muscle and get lean but nothing crazy like under 15% body fat. I’d be happy with 220 lbs and 20-25% body fat.
Peanut butter sandwiches can get really calorie dense rather quickly.
My go-to “energy sandwich” that I will eat before a day of surfing has crunchy peanut butter on both slices of bread, and dried apricots, cherries, cranberries, raisins, or banana slices, with some granola and a drizzle of maple syrup.
They’re delicious, and about 1000 calories per sandwich
That sounds like my kinda sandwich. I was thinking of drinking my calories via smoothie with oats, protein powder and almond butter with some frozen fruit like berries.
I’m at 97KG right now and I started at 93KG but my starting weight was all fat (45%+) and zero muscle whereas now, I’m 4 months into a 5 day workout with weights so I’m reversing those numbers and trying to eat lean while getting to 100KG with half the amount of fat but I’m still around 35% but also 4KG heavier so I just need patience as I think what I’m doing is working.
Yes, that’s what we are already seeing. People always laugh about USA, but regarding overweight and Diabetes Type 2 we are on a fast track to get even with them. And when politicians want to intervene the sugar lobby fights back really hard. (Here in Germany they came with the argument that a ban on advertising for Sweets would interfere with the freedom of speech 🤦♂️)
It’s not nearly as bad as in the US but unfortunately people are getting fatter here too. What we don’t have is peoole so fat they can barely walk. But 15kg too much on a 60 year old person? Way too common.
Did you count the calories on those meals? Because my meals are always pretty much exactly on 450kcals, so that’s only 1350kcals. With a Banana, a proteine shake, milk coffees and a chocolate bar that would still be way below 2000kcals.
Why is it contra productive? If their daily calorie intake goes down than it is effective. That’s all that matters. Doesn’t matter if they achieve that trough intermittent fasting or calorie restriction.
All our calories are consumed by the metabolism. It’s like saying that all the wood fed to an oven is consumed by fire, it’s in the definition of the thing.
And, no, skipping meals doesn’t slow down the metabolism. What kind of survival strategy would that be, be hungry but don’t have energy to gather and hunt food? Up to about 48 hours of fast you get a metabolic boost on the order of 4 to 16%, then it returns to baseline before going down. And this isn’t fucking new and no I won’t cite anything because it’s been known since we can fucking measure it. If you find a source contradicting it it’s going to be some fad diet propaganda, not actual science. Searching online you’ll find papers and bad scans of graphs from the 70s but the data should go back at least to the 40s or so.
These mechanisms are practically identical in pretty much all living critters on earth as they’re very old because evolutionary speaking food insecurity is the rule, not the exception, meaning our genome is accustomed to it and our bodies right-out need periods of fast to switch on certain crucial programs, such as autophagy – which isn’t just starvation-grade “let’s eat all the muscle mass” but also “hey that skin is quite loose now let’s shrink it a bit”. General maintenance work, gotta rip out and recycle some old stuff once in a while to keep everything running smoothly.
And that’s before getting hunger and satiation hormones into play. “Just eat less calories” is kinda hard to do when you’re choosing the maximally difficult way to do it – compare and contrast the Minnesota starvation experiment. Sure all those diet comparisons generally show that equal reductions in calories imply roughly equal reductions in weight but have a look at which diets are ad-lib (eat as much as you want, but only certain stuff, or at certain times of day), or not (eat only so and so many calories), and how well people are able to actually keep those up.
Not the person you replied to but one reason not to eat all your calories in one or two meals a day would be that your blood sugar levels can spike higher that way, putting you at more risk of adverse health effects from that. Of course it also depends on what you eat and how much in general.
It depends if I’m hungry. Mostly it’s 2 meals and I stop when I’m full.
I think it helps that I treat food like fuel rather than something I actively enjoy doing. On the days I’m more active I’m more hungry and so eat more.
There is no point to this comment other than to put out my odd relationship with food I guess.
When in really into the zone (whatever zone that might be) I tend to not have any appetite and “forget” to eat. But that doesn’t happen all this often. Also, I just like good, or basically yummy food. Makes it kind of hard to change your habits and eat junk only about once weekly.
You don’t eat three meals a day because you want to lose weight
I don’t eat three meals a day because shit is it already 5 pm? Why did my hunger response not say anything? Time to eat my entire daily caloric allowance in one sitting
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