By calling it a penchant, you make it sound like Americans choose these things. Most of us are held hostage by capitalist interests. Right now, it's much cheaper to eat processed foods than it is to make a similar meal from whole foods. Also, most of our towns over here in the New World were built with cars in mind. It's not generally feasible to walk places unless you live in a large city. Most people don't have 2+ hours to make a walking trip to the grocery store 5 miles away.
For 2+ years I had to bike 12 km each time I needed groceries. In fact, this was in France.
There is no French miracle, it's just that we're lagging a bit with the US (usually 10 or 20 years depending on the matter).
Huge portions of the menus you find in many “resultants” in the US simply isn’t legal in EU because quality of food is simply too low.
The UK isn’t exactly know for it culinary expertise, but returning from the US to the UK is like finding water in the desert when it come the quality of food available.
Yes, a lot of restaurants in the US will have a fair bit of filler (potatoes/rice/other vegetables) in a typical main course. But if I have fish and chips or a steak pie at a London pub, I'm probably not going to finish all the chips and other vegetables there either. I'm not sure I've just about ever looked at a main course in Europe and thought to myself "Oh, what a small portion."
And my experiences in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, etc. are similar.
I do agree that when you get out of major cities in the US, food options can be pretty limited. Even where I live, about 50 miles outside of a major city, there are only a few places I eat at or get takeout from on anything like a regular basis and I wouldn't like to subsist on food from them 7 days a week.
But when you look towards the bottom end of the food quality scale, the bar for saleable food is just abysmally low compared to the EU. You simply can’t buy food of such poor quality here. As a consequence the average quality of food in EU is substantial better, not because the EU produces better food, but simply because it doesn’t accept the low quality stuff the US is happy to eat.
Food and cuisine in the US is highly regional, and varies immensely. In the part of the US where I currently live (Pacific Northwest), the local food is much healthier than is typical in the UK and higher quality. Portion sizes are not uniform across the US either but I would agree that on average the UK is significantly smaller.
I wouldn't characterize typical food in the UK as particularly healthy, it reminds me much more of the diet you see in the Rust Belt of the US. The relative dearth of fresh, high-quality vegetables in the UK is particularly noticeable for people that have lived on the west coast of the US (which has amazing fresh vegetables generally by global standards).
I would say that in France (and Europe generally) they are only true as you (unfortunately) move down the socio-economic scale.
My experience of Europe is that people who can afford it generally do eat well.
As for the driving, I'm not sure I agree. For a start, most US cities barely have any public transport, which automatically pushes people to get in the car (either due to laziness or due to distance). Meanwhile in Europe there are normally plentiful public transport options except for the countryside.
Where I'm from if you have the choice you avoid public transport because it's not very practical: buses are crowded and trains aren't flexible enough.
Overcrowded busses and trains are pretty strong indicator they’re doing something right.
In the US a “frequent” train service is every hour. In Europe a frequent train service is every 20min. In a major EU city, it’s every 90 seconds.
The US isn’t just an extreme, it’s an entirely different, almost incomparable, ballgame.
That being said, I'm in Europe and I typically cycle at least 1h per day from/to work/shopping/etc.
I'm willing to bet $100 that if you buy the pedometer and compare both commutes, the bus commute will mean that you have at least 2x the number of steps when you commute by bus versus when you commute by car (for the actual commute).
Actually no.
With a car, you get into the car outside your house, and you typically aim to park the car as close to physically possible to your destination.
With public transport, you have to walk to the nearest stop near your house, and you have to walk to your destination from the destination stop.
In addition, with trains you will have the opportunity to walk up and down stairs.
You might also walk to run errands around the local area, for example, walking to/from grocery shopping with a few bags, instead of driving to the supermarket, dumping the bags in the back of the car and only walking/carrying the limited distance between your car and the kitchen.
You might also opt to walk a slightly longer route if for example it takes you through a local park.
Walk around any french town, you will see crowds of tall, slender thin people with few overweight folks. Sports are a priority and source of pride, alpinism, climbing or paragliding are deemed as national sports, not some extreme fringe stuff for few adrenaline junkies. Do the same exercise randomly in US, and chances are very good what you will see will be dramatically different. That being said, there are (were at least in 2003) many faces of US - I've spent that summer working blue collar jobs in US as part of work&travel programme US was providing, and already LA was exactly as we discuss. Then I moved to rural Maine and it was night & day, I've met maybe 5 fat people in 5 weeks spent there (but its true racial diversity back there was 0, I've seen 1 black guy in 5 weeks and maybe 2-3 of asian origin, rest looked just like they arrived from Scandinavia).
But judging by various articles and feedback from friends that Maine experience was much less common than LA one, and over time even more so. US portions are simply needlessly big and often unhealthy. The logic is to eat till full, instead of just warding off hunger and enjoying few very finely tasting bites.
I like the example of the American pizza. Its not even crunchy, its more dough than anything else. Its pizza with topping, instead of the other way around.
So USA, just cut your portions in half.
I don't get why people get so up in arms about this, especially as it's socially acceptable to take out leftovers (unlike, say, Italy). Personally, I'm a tallish, moderately active guy and I need some 3.5k-4k kcal a day, and America is the only country I've been to that I don't have to worry about being hungry after a meal out.
No you don't. Unless you're an incredibly athletic giant you definitely don't need twice as many calories as an average man.
https://www.calculator.net/bmr-calculator.html?ctype=standar...
Consider if you had a pet and you were to put out twice as much food for every feeding.
It gets even worse if you think about cultural aspects, like teaching kids to make a "happy plate", which condition them to eat everything served to them.
Sure, studies have not been able to show strong evidence of a causal link between portion size and obesity.[1][2][3]
But it's hard to ignore that American obesity rates and portion sizes have increased over the same period of time.
And, at the very least, decreasing portion size probably helps with maintaining weight. [4]
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4224223/
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/nccdphp/dnpa/nutrition/pdf/portion_size_...
And you know why your average American turns into an unhealthy tub of lard ?
Simple really:
Now, you may choose to try to argue over point (4) if you feel you must be patriotic and defend US agriculture. But points (1)–(3) are, regrettably hard truths.It's not rocket science.
Eat Less. Eat Better. Do Some Exercise. Your body will thank you.