No matter how "noble" a diner might feel in tipping his or her server, it basically amounts to nothing, especially when she splits her tip with the rest of her co-workers.
The unfortunate fact of this circumstance is that most "tipped" workers earn sub-minimum wages. There would not be an illegal immigration problem regarding restaurant workers if it were any other case. But most Americans are fat, lazy, oblivious and don't care.
So. The next time you go out to eat, especially if it's a large nationalized chain (like Denny's or McD's) take a look around at how many of your fellow diners speak Spanish. Look at your hostess/cashier who is making federal minimum wage without tips . . . then look at the restaurant and kitchen workers who are serving you, and decide just how "valuable" it is to go out to eat. Don't pat yourself too much on the back for being a fan of capitalism.
Flip to now where I eat 5-6x a day and have a nutritionist. Time and a place.
where exactly do you go about finding one? how much does it cost? what exactly do they do for you - plan meal by meal?
I usually buy what protein is on sale and plan meals around that. It has a nice side effect of varying my diet.
I have to laugh at one thing:
"where bar bills can run up to $20/night"
Man, you should hang out with my friends for a night. :)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6933744.stm
...it is better than subsistence on what is often very low quality (i.e. nutritional value) food.
Lard is the highest calorie per cent food you can buy.
That just seems to be the epitome of penny-wise and pound-foolish for 99.9% of people, who would be far better off trimming their budget in other categories so they could eat healthier instead of viewing food as just a source of calories.
In my case, I buy vats of lard at the local grocer and use it liberally. It tastes delicious.
I also work out at least an hour a day. No one feels the need to moralize about people failing to work out an hour a day, and yet that will have 10 times the benefit of micromanaging the nutrients in your diet. I'm strong and fit and my cholesterol is low.
Despite the fact that everyone knows I'm fit, they still say, "Imagine how much healthier you would be and how much more energy you would have if ate "better"?"
!!
Since, I'm the one who's fit, shouldn't you be asking me for advice?
Moralizing about people's diets is part of the same line of thinking as the Progressive movement that sprung Prohibition on us. And, of course, the Progressive movement can trace its philosophical lineage to the Puritans, so there you go.
Eating lots of fruits and vegetables and low-fat foods is not a good in and of itself. A diet is only healthy or unhealthy to the extent that its quality is reflected in your own health.
So you're telling me that if you eat McDonald's for every meal for thirty years, you'll experience no health issues as long as you exercise enough? Tell you what: let's have this conversation again in thirty years, provided you're still around.
An anecdote about a personal experience over a relatively short period of time is of limited value to me. Study after study has shown that the western diet has severe detrimental effects in the long run, including diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. Can you mitigate some of that by exercising more? Absolutely. But thinking that you can put whatever you want into your body with no ill effects as long as you exercise enough is ridiculous.
Fantastic Voyage, Kurzweil and Grossman, Chapter 22.
If the study showed that incredibly "fit" people who smoked occasionally and had a sightly elevated blood pressure and/or cholesterol had a "lower adjusted death rate" (what is that, exactly?) than people who sat in front of the computer all day but had none of the above factors, that would be one thing.
If the study showed that slightly "fit" people who smoked heavily and had an extremely elevated blood pressure and/or cholesterol had a "lower adjusted death rate" than people who sat in front of the computer all day but had none of the above factors, that would be something else.
The same could be asked of the fitness vs obesity results. How fit and how obese?
Also, have the results of the study ever been replicated? Or do they conflict with the results of other studies?
The groups were significantly different. The "obese" people in the study had BMIs of over 30. The "very obese" group had BMIs over 35. The "thin" people had BMIs under 25. Similarly, people with diagnosed hyper-tension were compared with those of low-risk blood pressures. A variety of fitness levels were examined, ranging from couch potatoes to daily (but not competitive) runners.
The study found that fitness had a protective effect against each of the other risk factors. In fact, the only other statistically independent predictor of mortality for men and women was smoking.
>Also, have the results of the study ever been replicated?
Yes. There have been a number of very large studies that have produced similar results.
S.N.Blair et al. 1989 "Physical fitness and all-cause mortality" JAMA Nov;262: 2395-2401 (over 13,000 subjects)
I.M.Lee 2003 "Physical activity in women: how much is good enough?" JAMA Sept 10;290(10) 1377-1378
C.D. Lee, S.N.Blair, and A.S. Jackson 1999, "Cardiorespiratory fitness, body composition, and all-cause cardiovascular disease mortality in men." Am J Clin Nutr. Mar;69(3):373-380.
Care to point to even a single one where the problem of fast food was not that people tend to vastly exceed their calorie requirements when eating fast food?
I'm genuinely curious. If you eat a "supersized" meal a day, you can easily exceed your calorie from that single meal depending on what you choose and how active you are. Of course you'll get fat and get other health problems in that case, but all that tells you is that eating too much is bad for you.
There are plenty of other things to worry about beyond our weight when it comes to health.
I'm not saying that eating lots of fast food isn't correlated with being fat. However, I would say that since it's quite possible to be skinny and eat enormous amounts of fast food, fast food cannot be making people fat. I would expect that the same character traits which lead someone to eat lots of fast food would lead to being fat for people predisposed to that body type.
What? The fact that some people eat enormous amounts of fast food without getting fat hardly means that fast food cannot be making anyone fat.
Additionally, you seem to be assuming that skinny = healthy, and fat = unhealthy.
Finally, I'm fairly certain that studies have shown that as western fast food restaurants expand internationally into new cultures, incidences of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease all rise in those cultures.
Ceteris paribus, skinny tends to be healthier than fat, with longer life and better quality of life. One study cited here even indicates skinny people don't even have to be that healthy otherwise to outlive fat people. It's a simple "assumption" that requires more debunking than you have given here.
Studies have also shown that obesity is well linked to disposable income. Is it any surprise that restaurants also expand as disposable income increases?
For breakfast get an egg mcmuffin, no hashbrown and grab a coffee or orange juice.
If you just stick to those two meals when you have to have fast food it does basically no harm.
Fast food gives you the rope to hang yourself with, you don't have to do use it.
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Super-size_me...
- Cyanide is "natural".
- Hemlock is "natural".
- Mercury is "natural".
- Cobra venom is "natural".
Semantics aside, I'll gladly grant you that lard is a food that has been eaten in the past. But, once again, that doesn't mean it's necessarily better than other foods that haven't been eaten in the past.
An good example is "golden" rice. An argument could be made (and has been made) that golden rice could save millions of people from devastating vitamin deficiency which they would continue suffer from were they to avoid golden rice for their "traditional" foods.
Plenty of traditional foods just aren't very nutritious or healthy.
I think that tradition, like cuisines, is an ever changing thing, however.
(B17/Laertrile is banned in a lot of places US/Aus/etc - for links/containing/Cantbebotheredreadingthestudies Cyanide).