<\/p>\n
https:\/\/gfycat.com\/EthicalHarshGreathornedowl<\/a><\/p>\n Images of genetically good looking people surrounded by (unhealthy) food that promises “fitness” is the epitome of how dysfunctional the Western diet is. I used to watch Fabio\u2019s \u2018I can\u2019t believe it\u2019s not butter!\u00ae<\/strong> \u2019 commercials<\/a> all the time when I was little. No matter what channel I was watching, I could always expect an appearance from the hunky Italian icon telling me that the butter he was eating was actually not <\/em>butter, but better than butter (NO CHOLESTEROL, but full of trans fat<\/em>). As I grew older, I began to write satirical comics about those Slim Quick\u00ae<\/strong> shakes ads where they would show a skinny model flaunting her \u2018healthiness\u2019 everywhere. I would have over half the page dedicated to the negative \u2018side effects\u2019 of the shake in microfont to show the irony of how we deal with our weight and health. The Western diet embraces and promises this idea of everyone being skinny and hunky, like those people in those food ad campaigns but in reality, the Western diet doesn’t deliver.\u00a0What both the imitation butter and slimming milkshakes signify, at least to me, is that we know that the Western diseases are all around us and that we are trying to find an escape; but as Poullan points out, it’s almost impossible to capture Fabio’s perfect image because the people we look\u00a0to help us won\u2019t because of invested interests. However, Pollan doesn’t have it all right: you can’t just stop eating a Western diet cold turkey like he suggests. There are pervasive images of beautiful people selling those prooducts everywhere. First we have to reevaluate our thinking about what healthy is and what it looks like so that we can actually achieve it — not cheat our way into it with those diet shakes and imitation butters.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Images of genetically good looking people surrounded by (unhealthy) food that promises “fitness” is the epitome of how dysfunctional the Western diet is. I used to watch Fabio\u2019s \u2018I can\u2019t believe it\u2019s not butter!\u00ae \u2019 commercials all the time when I was little. No matter what channel I was watching, I could always expect an appearance from the hunky… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,13,1],"tags":[73,45,72,60,31,74,75,46],"class_list":["post-713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-industrialized-food","category-public-health","category-uncategorized","tag-diet","tag-eating-habits","tag-fabio","tag-michael-pollan","tag-nutritionism","tag-skinny-people","tag-slimquick-shakes","tag-western-diet"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/31"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=713"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/713\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":785,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/713\/revisions\/785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.washington.edu\/ps385s18\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}