"TV Dinner!"
For breakfast/lunch, I usually have a bowl of oats and a tin of King Oscar sardines packed in olive oil with garlic. So I get some kind of fish and olive oil every day which I think is important. My wife and I basically cook every night from raw ingredients. And when I snack, it is usually always nuts like peanuts or pistachios. Those are high in fat but the "good" kind of fat (mono or poly unsaturated). The salt shakers are gone from the house and wherever butter would be used, pure extra virgin olive oil is used instead. Makes a big difference, in my opinion. I'm still overweight but at least I'm healthy and I feel good.
I still think the obesity problem is tied to lack of exercise. For the entire history of human civilization - up until modern times - the average human did manual labor all day long. Even those with sedentary jobs had to walk everywhere and do lots of labor-intensive chores at home.
Looking at pictures of medieval times, the only fat people you saw were those in the royal families who were waited on hand and foot by servants all day. Well these days, we all live like royalty. The average Joe today has luxuries that kings and queens could only dream about just 100 years ago. Until humans evolve with a lower metabolism (to compensate for the lack of physical activity), I'm afraid obesity will continue to be a huge social problem.
Sardines in Olive Oil and garlic. Yum.
I started buying real olive oil this year. I love dipping bagels in it with some Syrian Zaatar mixed in. That's a once a month treat.
Please tell me you're not putting olive oil on blueberry muffins. That's just so wrong.
Thats certainly part of it. I once read an estimate that while we were evolving (or when God created us, however), the average person had to forage some 4 miles just to get enough food energy to maintain life. So we did alot more moving around.
The other part(s) of the equation is the calories we eat and absorb. The food we used to eat was very, very high in fiber and "roughage". Maybe up to 100 grams of fiber per day (10 servings of Metamucil!). Today, we have "refined" foods (flours, sugars) and some vegetables which have been bred, to contain alot more absorbable calories than they used to (Rice, for example, wasn't much more than a grass, until we got to it. Potatoes, if uncooked (something early man couldn't do) is inedible). Anyways, that, plus the fact that amount of food we eat has increased (we eat some 30% more per sitting than we did 50 years ago), PLUS we exercise alot let, means we, as a culture, are turning into fat tubs of goo! {/Letterman}
Truly the breakfast of champions.
"TV Dinner!"