GOT TO START SOMEWHERE...

 

GOT TO START SOMEWHERE…

 

As soon as I graduated from high school, I went to the Army recruiting station to sign up. After I got tested and qualified, I was told to report for a physical. At that time, I weighed 112 pounds. You had to weight at least 120 to get approved. Fortunately, the corpsman who gave the physicals lived a couple of houses away from us and passed me on through. He told me I would put on weight after I got in the Army.

Well, he was certainly right about that. I am now at least 25 or 30 pounds heavier than I would like to be and like many of you I must fight on a daily basis to keep from gaining more and more.

What I do know is that when I was in elementary school and high school, we did not have any fat or obese kids. We also did not have any kids with allergies to milk, gluten, sugar, peanuts or shrimp. We ate everything. But we did not have any ‘fast’ food or snacks as we have today.

In 1980 the obesity rate in this country was 15%, not much higher than when I graduated from high school. Today, the rate in our country is 40% and climbing.

We stopped seeing advertisements for cigarettes in January of 1971 and tobacco sales started dropping. After 1971, the tobacco companies started buying up the major food companies such as Kraft, General Foods and Nabisco. There is a lot of documentation on how the tobacco companies started researching ways to keep us craving the food products they produce.

Now we have a new man on the job in the image of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He has shaken up a goodly portion of the country by eliminating junk food from being purchased using food stamps. The government is issuing out some 405 million dollars a day to food stamp programs. The fraud rate for food stamps is 11%...that means that 1 out of every $9 is wasted on fraud. Not very efficient if you ask me.

So, Kennedy has put the kibosh on fat snacks much to the hue and cry of many consumers. “Where will I get my chips and cookies and my soft drinks if I can’t use my food stamps?” well, you may have to use your own money and not ours (taxpayers) and you may have to learn to live on foods that are healthiest for us rather than because they taste good.

Obesity is not good for any of us (including me) it leads to multiple issues such as heart disease, diabetes, strokes and the like. We all know it, we all have known it and are now being faced with the fact that someone needed to stand up and do something to help us to not only help our children but ourselves as well.

Kudos to Secretary Kennedy for stepping forward and taking that first giant step toward helping us get this nationwide epidemic under control. It hurts me to say that carrots and celery are much better for me (and for you) than a cookie.

But you know, I’m right.

See you next week….Peary Perry