Meatless Monday Misguided Move

I was listening to NPR today on my way to work and caught this article: Campaign Aims to Make Meatless Mondays Hip. I think the gentleman behind Meatless Monday is a bit misguided (one woman in the article applauds her healthy meatless meal of tempura—for my East Coast readers, tempura is a Japanese dish of battered and fried vegetables).

Even the sentiment behind the campaign is admirable, but foolishly simple: if we could just get people to make one small change, then somehow that will help make our diets healthier. However, the obesity epidemic in America isn’t the fault of one food or another. Plenty of diets have tried to completely remove fats, sugar, carbohydrate, or specific foods like meat. But, obviously, the elimination of one element of our diet has not proved to be a cure-all.

I think the first step to truly making change happen is to educate people about food: how food works in our bodies, how to combine foods to make them work better, how to make better choices of the foods that surround us.