The Caucasian Diet Weight Factors in America

A Diet Made in America

The American diet is one of the most remarkable on earth. It is remarkably high in fat, remarkably high in calories, remarkably high in simple carbohydrates, remarkably high in pizza, cheeseburgers, fried goodies, chocolate, ice cream, cookies, Mexican food, Italian food - WAIT. It suddenly appears that the American diet is a mix of ethnic foods - and rightly so.

America is a melting pot of ethnic cuisine which makes it unique when compared to other cultures.

Although the origins of most of these beloved ethnic foods started out healthy, the Americans had to go and Americanize them - adding fat, cheese, triple meat patties, gravies and yes, even going as far to super size these helpless, once-healthy ethnic foods.

We fry the tortilla to create enchiladas. We bathe our pasta in oils because we've grown so accustomed to oil and fat that without it, we don't hardly recognize what we're eating.

And if we're trying to get healthy, we simply switch from corn oil to olive oil. While the olive oil offers better nutrition, it is still identical in caloric values to the corn oil - or for any other oil for that matter.

We added tubs of butter to fresh breads, corn on the cob and popcorn - creations that are shadowed by a healthy past.

We dip elegant, helpless strawberries into vats of chocolate. And some of us have even dipped our Doritos into real butter. Peanut butter is drowned in syrup or sugar; potatoes are shredded alive, then tossed into vats of oil.

While pancakes were once enjoyed plain due to their sweetness, or at maximum - dipped in a tiny well of honey, these days we drown them with the likes of an overweight aunt who resides next to a log cabin and another lady with butter in her last name.

Looking at the distorted picture of the American Diet, it's easy to recognize that one of the problems at hand is what makes us so unique also makes us so overweight.

Our ethic backgrounds are so confused with the assortment of food faire before them that they aren't sure which foods to pick. It's like Randy the Rooster who was transported from the east coast to the west coast - and didn't know what time of day to crow. His crowing clock became temporarily dismantled and confused.

But while the rooster can quickly adjust, it takes we-humans a bit longer, and they claim that we are the smarter beings on this old earth. At times, one does wonder.

So how do we begin to correct the traffic jam? We can start by returning to our roots. If we come from multiple ethnic backgrounds, then perhaps we need a bit from all those worlds.

One of the biggest contributors to obesity in America is the fact that there is an abundance of food AND a variety of food. If we only had fish and coconuts to choose from each day, and even if we had all of the fish and coconuts that we wanted, we'd grow bored with our diet and probably wouldn't run to the coconut tree at meal time to load up.

Because there is such an overwhelming variety of food to be found in America, Food Boredom rarely sets in. So where do we begin to get healthy? By exercising control, and by exercising literally.

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