Ainsley Earhardt, one of the “Fox and Friends” airheads, is very excited about the appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
We’re all excited about him. How wonderful is it that we don’t — might, we might not have to worry about our children with autism or our kids with, you know, developing cancer or, you know, just — it’s wonderful that he wants to clean up our foods. Our foods, in Europe, when we go to Europe, we can eat pasta, we can eat pizza, we don’t gain any weight. I know you walk a lot, but you don’t gain weight. You feel fresh, you feel clean. You come back here, you start eating pasta and you gain weight immediately.
Again, so there’s something wrong with our foods. It’s the pesticides, the chemicals. We want all of that out. We’re excited that he’s a leader. He’s very knowledgeable. He has said he’s going to give you choice. He’s not going to take away vaccines. Everyone’s not going to get polio. He said if you want a vaccine, you can vaccinate your kids, but I’m giving you choice. And he says he’s going to be transparent.
Yay! RFK will end autism and cure cancer by “cleaning up” our food. He’ll remove “chemicals” from our food!
Let’s not equate autism with cancer, but no, RFK is not going to prevent either of those. He’s not going to eliminate pesticide use. What’s driving our agricultural system is money: pressure to increase yields and lower costs, and corporate consolidation to make farms bigger and service Big Ag. These are Republicans. They aren’t going to change the system, but are more likely to amplify it.
You know, I’m pretty sure that Europe doesn’t have magical pasta and pizza with no calories (Europeans in the comments, tell me if I’m wrong.) What they do have is smaller portions, which, as a resident of the American midwest, I can tell you would elicit howls of protest here if we suggested that maybe you don’t need 3 pounds of carbohydrates with every meal. That’s not going to change, either. Also, another reason you might not get as fat in Europe is that European cities are much more walkable — you don’t drive to the all-you-can-eat buffet at Pizza Ranch. So sure, RFK is going to persuade Americans to drive less, walk more, eat less, and pay more for food from small family farms, and Fox News will call it “wonderful”.
Oh god. The future looks bleak.
Someone who eats roadkill is going to “clean up our foods”?
How much is this idiot paid to be a walking, talking dumb-blonde joke?
I figure the Republicans will just block all reporting of actual autism and childhood cancer rates, so they can say they are fixing the problem with no evidence.
Sorry, but that must be satire.
Our foods, in Europe, when we go to Europe, we can eat pasta, we can eat pizza, we don’t gain any weight. I know you walk a lot, but you don’t gain weight. You feel fresh, you feel clean.
So she’s actually saying Europeans do something better than Americans?! For the Fox crowd (the current carriers of a torch of anti-European hate and know-nothingism that’s as old as America itself), that’s MAJOR progress. So cheer up, PZ — we may not have to listen to this twit much longer!
submoron: Better get used to four more years of loony-right self-parody.
Wow.
Peroxide killed a lot of brain cells that other (normal) people might have otherwise wanted to keep around.
She’s aware that RFK Jr.’s trunk monkey lawyer sued the FDA to remove the polio vaccine from use, right?
Right?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2024/12/13/rfk-polio-vaccine-fda-aaron-siri/
Maybe she could ask Siri. On her phone. Which could give her actual news.
Oh he’s transparent all right. It’s transparently obvious he’s sucking up to the supplements/health woo lobby. Check for insider trading of health supplements stocks. Forsythia!
Nah, he isn’t going to do much of anything.
The Red states lead the Blue states in having higher obesity rates, and shorter life spans.
The MAGAts didn’t elect Donald Trump so they could eat less fast food, watch less TV, and get out and exercise more.
They elected Donald Trump in part so he would go after all the groups they hate. That would be Progressives, Democrats, gays, Trans, atheists, children, women, nonwhites, nonxians, scientists, etc..
@ 1,6 Yeah, that was pretty much my first thought too.
It wasn’t all that long ago that Fox would have ridiculed anyone who talked like this as some hippie-dippy loon who burns sage and fondles crystals to cure life-threatening illness rather than using modern medical science. Then the Alex Jones conspiracy kooks gained prominence on the right and now “Big Pharma” is a totalitarian villain while singing the praises of “natural cures.”
A big factor is the rampant use of corn syrup in all kinds of food and drinks in the US. Here in Germany it’s usually beet sugar and in far smaller quantities than the American palate is likely used to.
Well, there’s an exemplar of understaetment if ever there was as one..
i so wish I was wrojng but… don’t think I am. (Natch but; prove me wrong, pleasec please do.)
In my experience from Finland, cheap diners and lunch cafeterias typically provide an unlimited buffet of carbs (bread, boiled potatoes and rice), while meat or similar protein/fat source is sensibly rationed. In slightly fancier dining, the proportion of meat to carbs increases, and any hot dishes are more likely to be loaded with butter and salt. That last thing is what Finnish public health advocates complain about, if anything.
Basic diners will typically also provide a buffet of green salad. It’s made of cheat ingredients, but still it’s said to be something of a Finnish specialty, born out of some sort of political public health advocacy.
I broke down and watched the first episode of Enigma on Netflix about Aaron Rodgers. It was actually pretty good as it chronicled his recovery from an Achilles injury while highlighting his early college and pro football career. I had forgotten the controversial Jesse Ventura like stuff he said about religion. The second episode went full nadir, nosediving into the RFK Jr septic tank and I immediately stopped watching. Uggh!
What is this “four years” nonsense? Do people really believe that if we just hang on for “four years” something legit and face-saving will happen at the end? It seems the reality of what’s happening here is still lost on many.
How quickly they forget… https://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2013/05/10/the-michael-bloomberg-nanny-state-in-new-york-a-cautionary-tale/
Not so very long ago, Michael Bloomberg’s attempt to limit the portion size of sodas was decried as “government overreach” and “social engineering.” Either the worm has truly turned, or else RFK Jr. is about to run headlong into a buzzsaw.
As a European, I remember one specific thing about American food that really, really put me off. As lasius mentions, corn syrup is in everything, and as a result, everything is sweet. The whole time I was in the USA, I desperately craved ordinary, unsweetened bread, and I was not alone.
I was a working seasonal student with J-1 visa and there was a bunch of Czechs, Slovaks, Croatians, Poles, and Russians with at the venue and we all agreed that American bread is shit. We all were poor – we were there to make money after all – but when one Slovak accidentally found a bakery that made “European style” bread at several times the price of ordinary bread, everyone went there and bought one at least once. It was still not as good as it is here, but way better than the American standard and it took the edge of the craving.
When traveling after the season, we had to eat fast-food, because American restaurants were insanely expensive. And when I found out that the hamburger buns at McDonalds in the USA are sweet too, I nearly hurled up. I mean, sweet bun with savory meat? WTF?
I never ever got used to it. To this day it makes my stomach twist.
The other thing that was new to me at that time and that I laughed at was drive-throughs. The concept of buying food from the driver’s seat of one’s car seemed absolutely comical. We do have them now here in Europe, too, but they are not particularly popular or busy.
And what I found particularly hilarious, in a not at all funny way, were ads for walking that were plastered everywhere (1999 Idaho). I have never seen an ad telling people to get out of their cars and walk somewhere as if it were some revolutionary idea before.
Mmm, I can just about guarantee that if you overeat in Europe, you will gain weight nonetheless. Sad, I know… how I wish it weren’t so, especially with the end-of-year eat-a-thon round the corner!
My take on this is obvious: watch portion size. In Europe, they are generally medium-to-large, in Japan quite small (ooooh, Japanes are all so slender… there is a reason, and they comment on it when out of country) and in the US huger than huge. Not that the quality is bad: the servings are simply way big, at least from what I could see in my only two visits to the US. I remember a choc ice cream in LA, excellent but the “small” beaker was half a pound! Bring a forklift for the large!
Anyone want to bet on the annual all-cause death rate in the US decreasing rather than increasing over the next four years? No? Didn’t think so. Even if RFK Jr manages to reduce the negative health impact of something somewhere, against normal Republican policy, the benefit of that will be wiped out by the death toll of the very first measles outbreak and its sequelae.
I suspect Strewth @#3 is on the right track with this. RFK and DJT will make a lot of noise about these things, but do nothing except cut government funding for research and helping people, suppress recording the number of cases, and then declare victory. They’re not going to do anything to make the American diet healthier like removing pesticides or the extensive use of seed oils from highly processed foods. That will cut into the profits of AMD, McDonald’s and so forth. Can’t have that.
Also, you may end up paying full price for your vaccines, particularly for children, assuming you can get them at all.
This is one of MANY reasons I refer to it as the ‘mainslime media’. Insanity, ignorance and violent fanaticism is growing in this failing society and these media monsters are pushing it ever faster.
And, these health crackpots are poised to facilitate a new pandemic of bird flu. And, I’m sure tRUMP and his magats will murder over 1,000,000 again if they are given the chance.
I am scared spitless by the growth of threatening violence, both physical and verbal.
Recent flu and covid shots cost over $321 total per person. And, if these miscreants, including ‘president muskrat’, have their way, Medicare won’t cover that, WTF
P.S. The corrupt, abusive, greedy ‘corporate food industry’ is killing us every day.
Dare I say it again: welcome to the New Dark Ages. Here’s your 2for1 coupon for a meal at the ‘texass roadkill cafe’.
(He said, stumbling off his soapbox.)
Charly: when I lived in the US, I went out of my way to buy bread from the good bakery. Few of them would survive in Montreal because supermarket bread here is better than what those “good” bakeries make.
(Although we still have an aisle dedicated to sliced rectangles for some reason.)
Rich Woods: US all-cause mortality should normally rise over the next 4 years as the population ages, no matter who was in power.
What is wrong with your food is high fructose sugar, particularly in soft drinks. Drink water.
These statements from Ainsley can be labeled bimbo and blond. The only FOX watchers that have gone to Europe are ones who were in the military and were ordered to go there. The stunning stupidity is on full display. All I know is polio paralyzed many people and killed some of them. Then we had the polio vaccine and polio basically disappeared from the America. If they are successful in ending mandates for the polio vaccine, we will go right back to people being paralyzed and dying. And somehow, they will still deny the evidence.
15 Dennis K got it right. “It seems the reality of what’s happening here is still lost on many.”
@Raven and others.
Off Topic but I thought it might be of interest.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics has released the results of official government surveys regarding sexual orientation.
Apparently around 4.5% of the overall population identify themselves as being LGBTQIA+. The percentage was considerably higher in younger age groups so around 9.5% of 16 to 25 year olds are estimated to identify as part of the LGBTQIA+ community.
I can’t see it being much different to the US.
A bit higher than I expected and a major voting bloc which the conservatives don’t appreciate.
see
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12-19/lgbti-population-abs-data/104746854
Andrew
There’s a channel dedicated to that:
https://www.businessinsider.com/fast-food-portion-sizes-us-vs-uk-mcdonalds-kfc-dominos-starbucks-2023-1
@numerobis #25:
OK, so it would have to be corrected for the boomer bulge.
As a European, I am surprised to learn that we can eat pizza or pasta and not gain weight. My scale is just as surprised as I am.
@8 Raven “The MAGAts didn’t elect Donald Trump so they could eat less fast food, watch less TV, and get out and exercise more.”
Yeah, well, to you and everyone else commenting on what they won’t do… the MAGAts didn’t elect Trump because they thought he, or any of the crazies he invited in, would do anything to them at all, just to “those other bad people”, and some of them are in such insane depth of denial (even as others are already realizing they screwed up), that I daily hear coworkers talking about what great things he is already doing, when not even elected yet from oblivious idiots who refuse to, still, believe that project 2025 is happening, that he will raise prices on them, that he plans, if not apposed, to deport anything that isn’t white enough, based on a misreading of language that created an anti-citizen loophole for freaking Native Americans. who where not “subject to the jurisdiction of the state” (being born on, you know, “sovereign” reservations), etc. So, that they, and even non-MAGA GOP politicians didn’t want, expect, or imagine the depths of madness we are already seeing, and they have claimed to want to do, and some politicians are now backing out of fear they will lose any power they have left, has almost nothing to do with what Trump, et al, will actually do to the nation.
So, yeah, I am increasingly not hopeful that RFK won’t utterly F thing up, despite attempted resistance from the rich people that own the industries he has taken aim at. We are a hairs breadth, imho, from having posters on the side of what remaining book stores (and libraries) exist in the US which read, not unlike China, “No item shall be presented to the public, or sold here, under penalty of law, which threatens the will of the state.” What would what farmers do to stop it? Or, big companies, who could profit even bigger by selling us sugar pills and homeopathic water (and already do in some cases, as an “alternative”), etc., and why would they bother, if they still made billions, and they could just ship their own kids to a country with real medicine if something bad happened (like, again, they sometimes already do now)?
I hope he crashes and burns, but I fear how much damage he will do on the way down, as he plows through reality based everything, like Godzilla taking a stroll through a city.
outis@18, nah, not all Japanese are skinny. There are chubby Japanese people, and there are overweight Japanese people. Perhaps not as many as North America, but they exist.
I’m pretty sure that Europe doesn’t have magical pasta and pizza with no calories (Europeans in the comments, tell me if I’m wrong.) What they do have is smaller portions, which, as a resident of the American midwest, I can tell you would elicit howls of protest here if we suggested that maybe you don’t need 3 pounds of carbohydrates with every meal.
We don’t, unfortunately. But then again, 1.3 kg of pasta are a damn lot even for us Italians…in my best days I felt stuffed with just 250 g, and that’s triple the standard fare, around 80-100 g. Do you really eat that much pasta, or it’s just a figure of speech ?
Rich Woods:
Also if Trump is lucky, H5N1 will wipe out a bunch of people in his first year and then the mortality rate will fall over the following 3 years. The surviving population will never have been so healthy!
He or his successor will then be allowed to blame Biden, just like Obama caused 9/11.
If more people avoided processed/fast food and did most of their cooking at home, then additives and portion sizes wouldn’t matter since the additives and portions would be at your discretion.
The real problem is eating too much ultraprocessed food, which, by the way, is nearly impossible to make at home unless you have a food labratory in your house.
@36 Walter Solomon
Sadly, we rely “a lot” on processed foods because basic food hygiene in so horrible in the US. Anything with chicken, beef, or pork from the US either is, or would be, banned in most of Europe. I think there are a few cases of false panic with some of it, like you get in the US too, with respect to not comprehending the difference between small, sometimes not even avoidable, amounts of X in a product, vs., “In large enough amounts it is toxic.”, or maybe they just don’t care about the difference and prefer to come down on the side of over caution. That said, to take merely bread as an example. I have three things right now – a small container of pastries that I threw out yesterday, which I thought tasted odd from day one, but had developed obvious mold over night (which means it probably had already started to the day I bloody bought it) – this was made “on demand” by the store bakery, which I have come to conclude is unsafe, unless you like mold, to buy something from, unless you plan to eat it within 24 hours. I have a loaf of “relatively” healthy bread, mass produced, which has few additives, but not none, which lasts long enough to make lunches for the week, but I wouldn’t trust beyond that. I also have, weirdly, a set of onion buns I got a lot longer ago, which has not gone bad, or even shown signs of doing so, nor dried out, etc. Also processed, but I suspect its the onions somehow stopping this, not anything else in it.
Point being, I don’t trust bread, from any source, because the “non-processed”, made to order stuff has to be thrown out, if left on the counter, and goes staler.. somehow if refrigerated, in less than 48 hours, and even the “processed” stuff doesn’t last as long as I remember from when I was a kid. This makes no sense. If the additives are supposed to preserve it, why are they not working as well as they should, and, more to the point, why can’t you buy anything at all that is made from the bakery, using less/un-processed stuff, and have it survive long enough to actually still have some of it left in an edible state by the end of the week, instead of going bad practically over night? And, its not just one store that this happens with either. It seems like its all of them, and two entirely different houses I have had it happen in. In any case, if you buy something and your choice is, “Its going to go bad in 1-2 days, before you have any hope to use it.”, vs., “Or, you can buy it with stuff added in, that maybe shouldn’t be there, but you might actually be able to eat all of it before its trash.”, who in their right mind is going to throw money away on the first one (unless they have a lot of money, and just don’t give a F that other people don’t)?
Same goes with almost everything else. Most of it is as processed it is because, for shipping, over a damn large country, preserving it long enough to get some place, and, yeah, doing it “cheaply”, so the companies can cut corners and push profits, has become a madness. But, the alternative seems to be, “We no longer seem to have a f-ing clue how to stop it from spoiling without over processing it, or we just refuse to do so (see the commentary on meat products above, which we “solve” via not mass vaccinations of animals, but often ineffective ‘chlorine baths’).”