to take charge of their own destinies

[custardpringle]

So I was watching Gordon Ramsay's F Word just now and there was a segment with a woman going around in supermarkets complaining about misleading labels on food products and how The Law is letting companies get away with this oh noes. There was a very dramatic demonstration involving a bowl of plain yogurt, and a bowl of low-fat yogurt, and when the

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[tacky_tramp]

Except where it's really not their fault. :/ Nutrition education is almost nonexistent (in the U.S. at least and I'd guess in the UK as well). We don't devote sufficient resources to it. I wonder if the food lobby -- and yeah, such a thing exists -- has anything to do with that? Furthermore, some people just aren't very smart, and it's hardly their fault if something's barely been taught to them and they forget or misunderstand.

It would certainly be nice if everyone who wanted to lose weight went out and got a biology degree before going on a diet, but again, we're back to the information and ideology people have thrown at them. When you want to be thin, you want to be thin, and you're going to work with the understandings you have. Which are probably wrong in many significant ways. And that's not by accident, either -- again, the food lobby (especially the corn lobby), the dieting industry, the beauty industry, and the general fucked-up culture are putting out a lot of garbage. When you're not exceptionally clever, it's difficult to wade through that.

Which is a TL;DR way of saying don't blame people for not knowing better when so many people are working so hard to keep them in the dark. Food labeling is sort of a piss-poor way to tackle this, but it's a convenient suggestion because it costs the taxpayers absolutely nothing. Really addressing the problem would require new teachers and new curricula and public service announcements and shifting around farm subsidies and so on. Big bucks.