Diet: Are French Fries Really A Vegetable?

The government, nutritionists, doctors, and dietitians implore
us to eat 5 servings of vegetables a day. Considering that a
serving is only half a cup, a decent-sized side of vegetables
and a big salad does it for the day.

But are we eating that consistently?

For the average American child, 25% of their intake of
vegetables consists of french fries or potato chips. Adults eat
an average of 4 servings of french fries per week. A small (are
there any small servings still out there?) serving of french
fries carries 187 calories – a bag a day is over 68,000 calories
a year, almost 20 pounds of extra weight!

Is it any wonder that 15% of our children are obese and that the
percentage is growing all the time?

For all the diet and health information that daily blares from
our radios, televisions, and Internet portals, we are drowning
in our own fat. We spend half our family food budget on eating
out, primarily at fast food outlets, where the true nutritional
and caloric values of the offerings require the skill of a
Sherlock Holmes to uncover.

Think what it could do for our collective waistlines if we
simply deleted french fries from our diet and substituted real,
live vegetables (a rare commodity in the fast food industry). We
may yet be saved by the lowly green bean.

We can try to get the word out but the U. S. Department of
Agriculture has only two million a year to spend on the cause
and the food advertisers spend forty billion a year to convince
us otherwise.

Oh well, maybe we didn’t want to be slim anyway.

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