5 Foods Michelle Obama Should Banish from American Diets
Jim Young/Reuters
We were awful excited to read in yesterday’s Times that Michelle Obama is taking an extremely public and proactive approach to reforming American diets. After all, as the nation with the highest obesity rates in the world and the greatest direct impact on every other nation’s diets, it’s pretty unforgivable that we eat so poorly.
No doubt Michelle’s emphasis on localism, growing your own food and structuring meals around vegetables rather than meats will help tremendously, but we feel she could be even more proactive. We’re imagining a comprehensive program to make certain dangerous national non-nutritious staples (some of which we love, to be honest) taboo, and we’d start with these 5 Foods Michelle Obama Should Banish from American Diets.
Hot Dogs
No so yummy now, is it?
Not so much because they’re categorically unhealthy (a local butcher shop’s sausage on a grainy whole-wheat bun with home-made relish can be heavenly), but because often they’re an excuse to pig out on a tube-shapped mystery meat product held together with all manner of equally suspect artificial additives and chemicals.
Hamburgers
Again, hamburgers can almost be sort of healthy (with good organic, grass-fed beef, local toppings and good buns), but more often than not they’re with extremely unhealthy ingredients. Also, curbing our consumption of burgers would ease our unhealthy national addiction to beef, which is dangerous and harmful for all kinds of reasons.
Pretzels
Crusted with copious quantities of salt and more prevalent on city sidewalks than anything fresh or healthy, pretzels are obscenely high in sodium and too often become a meal substitute picked up on the go. Topped pretzels, delicious as they may be, just compound the original’s health violations.
Marshmallows
If they were just sugary treats, that would be one thing. But the fact that sugar is just about the only ingredient in marshmallows whose name we recognize is mildly terrifying. That’s not to say they can’t be great when made from scratch, but honestly, how often do you think people eat homemade marshmallows?
Soft Drinks
Often packing as many calories as a lean meal, America’s addiction to sugar-saturated sodas is terrifying. It’s no surprise, then, that many advocates for better childhood health policies are targeting school soda machines.
[...] a week ago we alluded to how dangerous soda can be, especially for kids, but didn’t really offer much credible [...]
Here comes the heavy hand of government telling us what we’re allowed, to eat and drink, say, and ultimately, think. As an american, I demand the right to make my own choices. Where’s it all going to end?
Number 6 on things to abolish: big government and the nanny state