Better off Poor in UK than Rich in US! (page 2)

breeze

What do u mean nicolaou I can spill....

After all it is ENGLISH....HA HA

BREEZE

Just to add, you may be sceptical about it being to do with the war, but I truly believe that it affected the mindset of a whole generation. It means that I myself grew up with parents who lived through the war and a decade of rationing, and lived with the mentality that what you put on the plate is all you can get, it should be healthy, and you'd better bloody well eat all of it! - kids these days throw a tantrum if they can't go in MacDonalds.

nicolaou

Of course they drive everywhere, if they walked they'd get mugged at gunpoint by some crackhead.

Tea4Two

Times.....They are changing......Today I read......No more soda with sugar in the American schools and less fat filled food in school cafeterias. Only diet soda allowed.

nelly136

can get everything in packets these days, can make complete dinners from frozen and canned or just chuck a whole dinner in the nukem machine, its easier to buy packets than make from scratch. now everything seems to function around convenience.

when i was little my dad used to grow veg in the garden and a sunday roast was got from the garden cept for the meat which came from a butchers and wasnt full of water and hormones, there weren't the playstations and puters so more time was spent outside irritating neighbours.....(go play up your end). these days more pepes tend to go for landscape and pretty. mums/nans used to teach kids to cook, these days a lot of kids dont even know where their food comes from.

it was safer back then to off out on a pushbike for miles round the countryside, and in the holidays sports centres used to run cheap activities and fun days for kids to go use the facilities with sessions on everything, now its megabux to get a sniff at someones trainers as they walk past.

sweets were treats, fizzy pop were a luxury.

things maybe easier in a lot of ways these days but i think its probably helped with the decline in health and other stuff.

Seeker4

In the NPR story fast food and American-sized portions were mentioned as potential causes. An Englishwoman who'd lived in the US for 15 years said the largest portions and the most fat people she'd ever seen were in America.
Among our school children here in the US, it's more like 2/3 are overweight, and half of those are obese.
Adults aren't far behind.
S4

Sad emo

and lived with the mentality that what you put on the plate is all you can get, it should be healthy, and you'd better bloody well eat all of it!

I'm shuddering at the thought of the number of times I ate a cold tea for breakfast the next morning..

The fast food culture has been around much longer in the US but I don't think the UK is far behind - I guess people just don't have the time or inclination to make their own meals - and yet it is often cheaper to get all the ingredients and do it yourself so economically deprived people (of which I am one!) don't really have an excuse - fast food costs more not less - we've all been conned into believing the lie!

looking_glass

That same study said that the English have more access to health care. In the US if you don't have health care, the ability to get into a county run facility for "free" health care is almost impossible unless you are on death's door.

And the other points are spot on. In the US, we are not encouraged to be balanced. It is either you are a stick figure or you are obese. Where is the happy medium. Americans are not encouraged to use public transport or car pooling or even GASP walking. While visiting my mother, she asked me to pick something up from her, the store was 4 blocks away, I said I was going to walk, which I did, I had more people pull over and ask me if my car broke down, if I needed a ride. Yikes people I wanted to walk. The peer pressure of it all.

On average, the typical worker bee in the US gets only 1 possibly 2 weeks vacation a year, 6 to 8 days off for holidays and possibly another 2/3 personal days and 5 sick days. If the average person has children, most of those days are taken to address kid issues, not for personal use.

However, in my office, should you take a vacation, you are considered lazy and not loyal to the firm. People come in at 7 and leave at 7. These are the same people who work 6 days a week and usually don't live in the City so they commute, so add drive time, or public transport time. They eat on the run, sit at a desk all day long, stress over work, stress over their boss, stress over life. So you tell me, did a study really need to be done to say that Americans are fat people, with all kinds of health issues and they die early. I could have saved them the money and told them that.

Americans are taught to work hard. It has come to the point where I think the US will have the mentality, it is noble to die at your desk.

I wonder how the Aussie rank?

KW13

We have smaller cars, smaller homes, smaller cities, less money, take-aways once a week usually at the most for my family, compared to your TV we have a LOT LESS adverts (commercials).

stillajwexelder

In the UK things are geared for walking. You park your car and walk to the bank or Post Office. Here in the US everything is geared for the car - drive through movies, drive through banking, drive through everything. The result is much less exercise. In addition unless there is protein with a meal (especially meat) people do not think it is a meal. Whereas good old beans on toast is considered a meal in the UK. Couple that with soda fountains with free-refills and the additio of High-Fructose Corn Syrup to just about everything (keeps the Midwest farmers happy) and you have a recipe for obesity and poor health.

Better off Poor in UK than Rich in US!