But Poon, now a research associate at the University of Massachusetts Boston, warns that there are downsides to having huge numbers of Asian-Americans on a campus. [...] “Some Asian-American students feel that they lost something by going to school at a place where almost half of their classmates look like themselves – a campus like UCLA. The students said they didn’t feel as well prepared in intercultural skills for the real world.’’

This doesn’t make sense to me. How is “having huge numbers of Asian-Americans on a campus” the problem? I wasn’t aware that all Asians have the same culture.

Fair enough. That sentence was not intended to blame obese people for being obesity — it was, however, to point out that obesity is one of the few national epidemics that can be greatly reduced with better politics.

Obesity occurs with a combination of insufficient education and insufficient access to proper nutrition and physical activity options. There are absolutely food deserts that occur far too readily throughout the nation, and for many families, a corner convenience store (that carries mostly junk food) is the primary source for groceries.

However, what I was trying to point out is that the food desert issue is not the SOLE problem; for many Americans, there’s rampant misconceptions or misunderstandings about nutrition. People know that McDonald’s has high calories, or that there is a difference between trans fats and non-trans fat — but they don’t know what all of it means. We don’t really teach it in schools, and we certainly don’t encourage parents to teach their children the benefit of physical activity. Furthermore (and perhaps most importantly), our politicians are not educated on the facts about fitness and nutrition that could help them make better policy decisions.

So, while you’re right that my sentence is a bit misleading, I don’t think we can disregard the education factor here. And pointing out that Americans — regardless of their BMI — are miseducated about health and fitness isn’t blaming the obese (or non-obese) individual; it is pointing out that, as a society, we don’t provide that education.

This is problematic; it suggests that the obese individual is completely responsible for her obesity, and ignores some extremely important socio-geographical factors — indeed, factors that underlie the correlation between obesity and poverty that you’ve pointed out here.

A key concept here is food desert. Poor communities, both urban and rural, often lack physically close and economically affordable grocery stores. If it takes you 20 minutes each way on public transit to get some fresh veggies that would kill your food budget for the day, it doesn’t matter how well educated you are; you’re still going to go around the corner to eat at McDonald’s or 7 Eleven for a couple bucks.

I have heard that the preservatives used after WW2 have been responsible for increase in cancer and other health issues.

What you say makes absolute sense and it actually refreshes the documentary I saw – I don’t think it was GM food so much as it was pest-controlled food for the mice experiment.

Oh man, I cringe at the thought of a Big Mac meal. I actually live in Canada (Toronto) and I have heard some people say that as soon as they cross the border, the cup size from Tim Horton’s drastically grows bigger – e.g: a large here in actually a small-medium there. O_O And the McDonald meals in the U.S. are gigantic! I’ve never seen to the U.S., so I may be wrong for just relying on other people’s reflections.

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/121580373/PDFSTART

Basically, the author focused on a few pest-resistent crops that have been created to increase agricultural production. Studies basically involve feeding animals with normal or modified versions of the crops and looking for differences in the animals.

As reported in most other reviews, this author notes that most studies done this way show virtually no differences between GM-fed animals and non-GM-fed animals. He notes that most differences that have been found (primarily associated with a GM-soybean) are ultrastructural — changes in the cellular morphology of pancreatic cells, for example.

I’m skeptical that genetically modified foods are primarily or even directly responsible for the obesity epidemic.

1) It’s hard to imagine how the presence of a genetic modification in a plant can make one obese, even if one could imagine that making a plant resistent to a pest could remove some population pressure on the plant to make it ever so slightly nutritionally different than it’s “normal” counterpart. These aren’t tomatoes that glow in the dark or something — the genetic modification simply means that the plant has been altered. Consider that basic crossing and selective breeding (the process that introduced the world to grapefruits, donkeys and every breed of dog) also relies on “genetic modification” — just in a slower and more primitive way.

2) These were mice fed exclusively one kind of food for (in some cases) two generations. In relation to what a human might eat, the amount of genetically-modified soybean some of these mice ate was astronomically huge. People don’t eat nothing but genetically-modified soybeans all day every day. In other words, the changes induced by the GM-soybean might require unrealistic amounts of that food in humans.

3) The review notes that in no study was body weight of the animal altered by feeding with genetically-modified food.

So, I don’t know. It’s possible that there’s a link and we haven’t found it yet, but I’m thinking that a bigger culprit is the amount of fatty foods we eat. A large-sized Big Mac meal at McDonald’s (sandwich + lg. fries + lg. coke) is 1350 calories. In other words, (without exercise) you put on 1/3 of a pound every time you eat one of those meals!!!!

Also, regarding the obesity problem, I don’t know if this is true (as I don’t have proof/back-up data to link), but I heard that part of the obesity problem is the food we eat as well? For example, most of our food is now genetically-modified (producing more at a cheaper rate through scientific technology) in order to “have enough for everyone,” but the thing is, GM food is actually really bad…? As I said, I unfortunately don’t have proof to back this up. I just remember watching a documentary last year in which a scientist in Britain found out that the rats who ate GM-type food developed significant, organ problems, lived shorter lives, etc. However, I don’t know if obesity is one of the side effects, though.