* Use breakfast cereals based on oats, barley and bran
* Use breads with wholegrains, stone-ground flour, sour dough
* Reduce the amount of potatoes you eat
* Enjoy all other types of fruit and vegetables
* Use Basmati or Doongara rice
* Enjoy pasta, noodles, quinoa
* Eat plenty of salad vegetables with a vinaigrette dressing

Bekabot, you have a future career waiting as a Fox News analyst.

I’m pleased to hear it, ‘cuz they sure need a Democrat on their side.

(I don’t count Alan Colmes. The Donkey’s never been a sacrificial animal.)

The economy doesn’t need a food sector more distorted by daft government programs than it already is. If you want to give money to the poor, give it to them. Even if they spend it all on drugs, it will hardly be much worse than spending it all on increasing their already astronomical obesity rates.

Hey, why not do what Ayn would do and cut directly to the chase? Which is to say, give the drugs directly to the poor. Hand the meth right over to that chubby hick chick, because not only will it basically cause her hunger pangs to flat-out disappear, it will also ensure that, however much a waste of space she may be, she’ll be a waste of just that much that space less.

There’s nothing in this idea that McArdle’s basic premises disallow. But I guess she’s simply not that much of a whaddayacall radical thinker…

Since taking my daughter off dairy and switching back to a mostly vegan, whole-foods diet because of suddenly occurring food allergies, I found I spent all of my food stamp allotment for my family in two weeks. My food budget is now coming out of my financial aid, which was supposed to go toward buying a vehicle. :: dizzy ::

I never realized the solution was just to STOP EATING.

F!ck.

What the poor really need are food vouchers to local farmer’s markets… ACCESS to those farmer’s markets (the nearest one to me right now is over 200 miles away)… as well as well-enough paying jobs they can afford the TIME to go exercise! When all of our time and energy is spent working two or three jobs for long hours and meagre pay how the hell are we supposed to stay healthy?

Actually, size-acceptance people have said things like that for years — not that it’s justifiable that employers have that kind of prejudice against fat people, only that many of them certainly do.

Oh, I know that. And that wasn’t McArdle’s explanation of her statement, that was me trying to figure out what the hell she was thinking. That’s part of why I got all tied up in mental knots because there was a tiny possibility of some truth among her crap, like an inverse pearl.
But employer discrimination against fat people isn’t enough to explain the scale of the correlation between fatness and poverty. It doesn’t explain why poor children are obese, for example. So it’s not that there is no causation going in that direction– it’s that she said whatever causation there is in the link between income and obesity almost certainly runs the other way, ie no causation from poverty to obesity.

Which is fucking insane. Maybe she thinks that fat=lazy=poor? But if that is her hypothesis, she’s said it wrong– that’s not causation from fat to poverty, that’s a third variable causing both. Plus, if she thinks that, it’s still insane and offensive.

And– mental KNOTS.