Well, the CDC has gone further to say that
those children born in the year 2000 could be the first generation
in our country’s history to die at a younger age than their parents,
and it’s because of what we feed them.
And who teaches us to feed them that?
Big companies spent twenty billion dollars a year marketing
non-nutrient foods to kids….
They spent 500 dollars marketing foods kids shouldn’t eat
for every one dollar marketing healthy nutritious food.
She feeds school children in Berkeley.
You might think that would be easy, but when she started,
it was just as bad as anywhere else:
…extremo burritos, corn dogs, pizza pockets, grilled cheese sandwiches,
everything came in plastic, in cardboard, the only kitchen tools my
staff had was a box cutter; the only working piece of equipment
a can crusher.
So she set out to fix it,
and did.
And if she can, we can.
We spend our lives being paranoid about death, murder, homicide,
you name it, it’s on the front page of every paper, CNN…. Look at homicide at the bottom, for God’s sake!
Every single one of those ones in the red is a diet-related disease.
Any doctor, any specialist, will tell you that.
The top three are heart disease, cancer, and stroke.
Number 6 is diabetes.
Those are the ones in red on Jamie Oliver’s graph.
Homicide is number 15.
See CDC for numbers.
(
In 2006 72,449 people died of diabetes and 18,573 of homicide.
You’re almost 4 times as likely to die of diabetes.
And about 40 times more likely to die of heart disease.)
I want to show a picture of my friend Brittney.
She’s sixteen years old.
She’s got six years to live.
Because of the food that she’s eaten.
She’s the third generation of Americans that hasn’t grown up within a food
environment where they’ve been taught to cook at home
or in school.
Or her mum. Or her mum’s mum.
She has six years to live!
More pictures of people with very round faces and rounder bodies:
This is a normal family, guys!.
We need to change normal.
That’s what Jamie Oliver wants to do.
Obesity leads to diabetes and heart disease.
And what leads to obesity?
Lack of exercise combined with food stuffed with
high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), salt, and fat
in massive portions.
Fast food has taken over the whole country, we know that.
Time to take it back.
I wish I could come up here today and hang up a cure for AIDS or cancer,
you’d be fighting and scrambling to get to me.
This, all this bad news, is preventable. That’s the good news.
It’s very preventable.
How?
Vote with your food purchases.
Demand a food ambassador in every supermarket.
Demand big food businesses back food education.
Get the government to work with the fast food purveyors
to wean us off the fat, sugar, and salt.
Schools, ages 4-whenever: proper fresh food cooked from local sources on site.
Every child should leave school knowing how to cook ten recipes
that will save their life.
Corporate American should feed their staff properly.
You can care and be commercial.
That’s his prescription.
Doesn’t sound so hard, does it?
The hardest part of what Jamie Oliver wants to
do to fix how we eat is to reform school food.
Fortunately, there’s somebody already doing it:
Ann Cooper already showed us how she does that three years ago:
