Why are we so fat?

It tastes like chocolate in the US now. Really sickly sweet taste. The poor taste does not stop the Americans gorging themselves on it, just like here. Fast food in the US also tastes gross in general yet people cannot get enough of it.

Not sure why people consume vast quantities of gross poor tasting products. Maybe when people become overweight it is a bit like an addiction or people's tastes change. I find healthy people of normal weight find sugar blended with oils and crap disgusting.

Deep fried mars bar is touted as national cuisine in Scotland.

I suppose we have the jumbo breakfast roll.

Everyone's tastes are different. Im sure the Americans think their junk food tastes great. I think people's taste buds do change and food manufacturers spend millions taking advantage of this. Sugar blended with oils is what can make food addictive. I eat plenty of healty stuff like porridge, eggs, chicken breast and veg but I never crave any of this.

All that nice stuff to eat and it is not going to eat itself.

I’d take a plum any day. Not sure the kids would. Also, I would put fruit and nuts above handfuls of popcorn or loose, unwrapped, jellies.

They’ve been given out around here, I know it’s just old people who don’t know any better but it’s not ideal.

We're not allowed to talk about why 🤣

Here's a good post on the subject:

Cheese:

"Speaking of cheeses, you see a drastic change here in the late 1600s, which coincided with the land confiscations during and the Cromwell era and the turmoil that occurred here.

Ireland had, like all of Europe, a long standing cheese making tradition, with historical references to a wide variety of soft and hard cheeses. All of these suddenly disappeared and the entire dairy industry moved to the production of butter, largely for expert.

Ireland’s cheese making completely disappeared to the point it was almost unheard of through the 1700s and 1800s. The only references you see are to cheese as an ultra luxury product, either imported or produced on a tiny scale.

There was basically no cheese at all in the mainstream Irish diet though the 1700s and 1800s. Industrial cheddar was introduced in the early 1900s, with most of it being exported as processed cheese, as there was no domestic demand.

You don’t really see Irish artisanal cheese emerge again until the 1970s, and that was largely down to interaction with continental Europe, rather than a rediscovery of lost cheese making.

It’s basically a tale of colonialism, forced displacement, attempts at ethnic cleansing, oppression and an extremely drastic disruption of rural life wiped out a whole food culture, to the point we don’t really even know what it was like. Irish food became extremely bland and was just subsistence rather than a cuisine. That ultimately leads up to the Great Famine, which is basically the outcome of a total disruption of rural life here after that cromwellian era. It didn’t just continue to evolve like most of Europe.

Whatever our food culture was, it was fairly dramatically erased and replaced with early industrialisation of commercial farming, focused on very few large scale basis products, very much for export.

We’ve more in common with places that were colonised, or with places that had rural life disrupted later by communism in Eastern Europe and Asia than we do with wealthier parts of Western Europe in terms of food culture.

While the reasons and politics were different, and it occurred earlier and was more prolonged, our rural life and living structures were dismantled and completely and totally disrupted. We basically don’t have any long standing food culture at all, until we reinvented one in the second half of the 20th century.

That’s why we don’t really have any traditional regional dishes, other than a few bread recipes. It may also be why things like fish were very much absent in Irish diets. You don’t see much in the way of traditional smoked meats or anything at all really, yet if you dig into older history you see a lot of references to fish, cured meats, cheese etc. So it’s basically a culture we lost.

It’s one reason I get annoyed with the potato jokes and the slagging off of the lack of depth of Irish food culture and Ireland’s rapid adoption of influences from other food cultures. If you’re mocking it, you’re basically mocking a rather tragic erasure of a whole culture, famine and a period of ethnic cleansing that’s centuries ago but left horrific scars here and scattered us to the ‘New World‘."

Having big bones was always a good one, but elbows moving faster than metabolism is a better reason.

I think most people shovelling **** into them daily is more laziness than lack of education. Everyone has a basic understanding of what's good or bad for you these days rough area or not. You could argue rougher areas care less about what they eat but more education would fix nothing I'd say.