By Ralph Nader
Nader.org
King Obesity sat grandly on a huge hassock atop a throne composed of solidified animal fat surveying his domain. The last thirty years have been bullish for Obesity, during which the number of seriously overweight children in America tripled. Eating fat, sugary and salty food while sitting for hours daily looking at video screens, being bused to and from school, and not having to bother with physical education, millions of lads and lassies were following orders.
An agitated messenger arrived in the throne room, breathing heavily from his travels. “Oh, my liege, Obesity, I have disturbing news. Michelle Obama, the First Lady, is launching a nationwide project she calls ‘Let’s Move’ to combat childhood obesity and shed billions of pounds of your stuff. She claims that success would reduce all types of diseases now and later, save on medical costs, as well as raise the energy level and self-esteem of millions of children. Here, Your Eminence, are the complete details of her plan.” No one wants to be like King Obesity. Be more like Michelle Obama. Living in the West Palm Beach area means you can look into tennis lessons West Palm Beach to help you get into shape, prevent future health issues from a lack of exercise and maybe to help you lose weight if this is your main goal.
Obesity was a hard person to agitate. He had heard of these campaigns before. They went nowhere. He shook his heavy jowls and rubbed his many-layered belly, which was his way of saying “ho, hum, here we go again.”
His fleshy fingers clutched the plan by those people he always called the “lean and meaners,” and saw that improvement in the school lunch program’s menu, exercise at school, farmers’ markets and community gardens were at the top of the action list. Obesity chortled at his adversaries’ naivete and reticence.
For some reason, they avoided the real causes of his success in pouring massive amounts of empty calories into the mouths and down the throats of these children who cry out for more and more of them.
It is all about who owns the tongues of these youngsters, not who reaches their brains, mused Obesity. Ownership, Obesity knew, belonged to his most faithful allies—the vast fast food and food processing industry and their clever advertisers. For decades these companies have transformed millions of young tongues into fast food first responders.
The tongue has been turned against the brain for so long that the kids’ parents and even some grandparents accept this conditioned response. Look what they head for in the movies, what they choose in the supermarkets, what they order in the chain restaurants and takeouts. It’s all about the pipeline full of enlarged amounts of sugar, fat and salt, dude! Hour after hour, day after day, these pipelines are flowing to the delight of their video-addicted young customers.
Obesity has been defeating his principal opponents – Knowledge, Nutrition, and Health – for so long, he sleeps most of the day when he is not eating. So, Michelle Obama is going to concentrate on the schools. Hah, not a chance unless she wants a rebellion of the kids, whose habit is to cast aside much of the cooked and raw vegetables even when they’re hungry. The school vending machines are stocked with the perfect junk food and nearby stores can make up for any lack of ready supply.
So, though knowing better, school lunch managers, to quell any unrest, load up on sugar-glazed cookies called Crunchmania Cinnamon Buns and sugar-laden cereals for breakfast. At lunch there are dollops of modified cornstarch, lipolyzed butter oil, high-fructose corn syrup, sugar-flavored milk.
It wasn’t accidental that McDonald’s most successful words to get children to nag their parents were “It’s a Child’s World”. So, if sincere schools can’t get the children to eat their fruits and vegetables, what about the burdened, commuting parents? Can they overcome the daily barrage of junk food and drink that shapes their children into Pavlovian specimens—mere conditioned responders? Don’t be silly. They eat from the same menu.
Obesity continues to bet on the children’s tongues as wards of the irresistible junk food companies. After all, his ranks keep swelling and the Fat Pride movement is picking up steam.
The messenger, standing with military erectness, deferentially asked: “Oh master, what are you thinking?” Obesity looked down on him and rendered his conclusion: “So long as the lean and meaners do not focus on the battle for the tongues and their captors and instead concentrate on presenting nutritious foods to children while explaining why and how they are good for them, I say to you and all messengers of these tidings, do not worry, Obesity is and will continue to be king.”
“Why,” he continued, “just a few days before Michelle Obama’s multimedia White House event announcing ‘Let’s Move’ with former NFL runner, Tiki Barber, Barack Obama was with a group of schoolchildren. As if being at the White House was not enough excitement for the students, what did Mr. Obama do? He presented each of them with a box of red, white and blue M&Ms imprinted with the Presidential seal and his signature, no less.”
With that pontification, a smiling Obesity picked up a dozen triple deck cheeseburgers, a gallon of thick ice cream milk shakes, 100 Hostess Twinkies, topped off with a bucket of sweetened lard to start his third meal of the day.
I got a hunch that the people trash talking this article are TANKS who haven’t seen their feet in a while…
Salt+Fat+Sugar =Your Diet.
in fair disclosure. I am a TRUE regestered Independent: Butte Falls Or. I went to school and college in Eugene. Ralph is one of my Teachers and First Mentors. Until last election I have always supported him. Last Election I wanted Biden -Richardson. I do not vote for any one. I endorsed Ralph. And I always will.
I’ll give earth bound secrets away. We have done such a rotten job with the planet and the society that ET is welcomed to do better!
Off Worlders LOVE humaniods! NaCl, pepper, and lots of gravy!
Future vision: as stadium and theater seats need to be bigger and bigger, house managers will just give up and install couches!
Stick with what you almost know, Nader. We have been greened and grained for decades and been getting fatter every turn—-It was all so predictable!
Ditto King Friday – Perhaps, obesity per se is not associated with eating jams alone, but added to the total caloric intake and your over the top as regards sugar per day ratio for any healthy person just by consuming several tablespoons of jelly. It is not necessarily the “jam” but the bad sugar your body converts it into. I recently had to do a radical reinvent of my diet and wow was it an education as I have a couple of medical asides attributing to the illustrious education I’ve embarked upon but thankfully I have changed and seen my children’s mood swings all but disappear, their intellectual and focus skyrocket. It is hard to not go back, as Lays potato chips beckon me at all times, I don’t know what they put in those but it literally calls my name daily! Potatoes turn to the bad sugar as well and rice the evil of evils for me – converts to sugar! Alas, my diet is fresh foods, dried beans, homemade breads, much consideration but health abounds headache and abdomin pain free, wow, thank heaven. Lastly, I am not as angry as I used to be – sugar made me likened to a bull seeing red. Turns out I have a sugar allergy – Ha!
Hello TimeOut in Texas!
Please note that people are unlikely to consume the same amount of soft drinks per day as they would jams. They would sooner get their mouths tired on chompin’ rather than slurpin’.
Have you checked out soft drinks? I dunno if you like wikipedia, but it is pretty much the most non-biased summation of mankind’s knowledge.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_drink#Obesity_and_weight-related_diseases
I dunno, is obesity associated with jams? Did you know that eating fruits and nuts is more healthy than carbonated soda drinks, for a variety of reasons?
Does your mom still can fruits and make jams? Mine does! Wish more would!
Did you know that there are all kinds of sugars and delivery methods, and that soft drinks contain small amounts of alcohol? Golly, something new everyday.
The information is out there. A healthy diet is not a difficult choice.
22 to 24 grams of sugar in most soft drinks. 1 gram of sugar in a can of rosarita black beans. Nothing healthy about jelly. Anything with a label is suspect. Dried beans are cheapest and best. Ignorance will kill you…….but it will make your children really fat first.
Wow! Extremely imaginative and full of figurative language, I aspire to inspire with a mere pittance of his intellectual agility…
Ralph Nader is enlightened and sugar is KING, salt, salt, what can I not say about salt – it is amazing how a suspected healthy can of beans has more salt and sugar than I eat in a week elsewise. Two tablespoons of healthy jelly – ahh!!! The wonderfully healthy PB&J is a sugar attack! There’s more sugar in two tablespoons of jelly than in many softdrinks.
Wow! Extremely imaginative and full of figurative language, I aspire to inspire with a mere pittance of his intellectual agility…
Ralph Nader is enlightened and sugar is KING, salt, salt, what can I not say about salt – it is amazing how a suspected healthy can of beans has more salt and sugar than I eat in a week elsewise. Two tablespoons of healthy jelly – ahh!!! The wonderfully healthy PB&J is a sugar attack! There’s more sugar in two tablespoons of jelly than in many softdrinks.
Nader is absolutely right. The scientific and medical evidence is conclusive. Anyone with children should change their diets so they give them a good example. No one should drink soft drinks. Our diets should consist of mostly vegetables, whole grains, and fruits. White bread, processed foods, candy, soft drinks, and processed oils are carcinogenic, are the basic cause of our obesity epidemic, and the reason our children are going to be bigger than their parents. The stranglehold that corporations have on our food supply is making us sick. Wake up.
Ok ok, on a serious note, kirkussent, I guess you haven’t been listening to NPR much lately. Or read the article in its entirety.
The basic counter argument to your red herring is that kids do not have access to healthy alternatives to cheap and readily available chips and soda. They are sent to school by busy and budget-minded parents to eat a school lunch; they resort to sponsored vending machines.
You seem to be a real thinker: let’s do a little experiment. Budget 50 cents per diem, and resort to eating catfood.
Do you eat lazy boy recliners? That’s kinda weird, but I would like to hang out with you nonetheless.
Informed,
I don’t think it is brainwashing but rather a lack of willpower. It is easy to blame everyone else for what you put in your mouth. Why not blame lazy boy for the recliners they make. we should ban all comfortable couches and chairs that way people can get off their rears and start moving.
Ralph Nader is not an elitist, nor jaded, nor bitter. I surmise his creative approach is in the face of a not only a fattened society, but an increasingly brainwashed and vitriolic one.
What he says here is constructive entertainment to those that realize that education is useless in the face of increasingly unregulated food production and distribution. On the same token, we have to buy “insurance” at local farmer’s markets. Our products are cheaper, more organic, and have that special TLC, so that makes sense, right?
Let’s say our approach was to simply educate drivers that they should make their own seat-belts, instead of requiring auto manufacturers to make it standard equipment in cars. Or tell teens that the best way to avoid unwanted births is to simply ignore not only our inner biological imperative, but to shun it. Even though we live in an increasingly hyper-sexualized media culture.
Banning trans fat is the first step. Now lets tackle the high fructose hell you and your children find yourselves in.
Oh wait, maybe all that corn production is a strategic reserve to the entire peak oil situation.
Check out “Food Inc.” and “King Corn” before you assert charges of bitterness. Get informed.
What a bitter and jaded man Nader has become. It would not be so bad if he had something constructive to say instead he just throwing bombs at others attempts to do good.
Thanks!
I liked it!
Nader rocks!
NO, Sadly what he say’s, is beyound your limited brains.
YOU make excuses, as you feed your children trash.
Garbage in and Garbage out.
wow…what a surprise. ralph nader is a condescending elitist.
what he lacks in substance, he makes up for in…absurdly written fiction?
no wonder he’s never had a chance in hell of being president.
“The tongue has been turned against the brain for so long that the kids’ parents and even some grandparents accept this conditioned response. Look what they head for in the movies, what they choose in the supermarkets, what they order in the chain restaurants and takeouts. ”
I’m sure Nader takes good care of himself and is careful about his diet. However, if he had kids he might be a little more understanding what parents have to go through to get their kids to eat anything, much less to get them to eat what’s good for them.
And then there’s my daughter. He favorite food is caviar and sparkling cider.
It just makes me want to Ralph!