Tuesday, October 2, 2012
Food & Life Manly eating ain't so good
Posted by Cliff Bostock @cliffbostock on Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 11:06 AM
It's about time men got the attention they deserve for their overeating and wacky prostates. The New York Times recently looked at binge eating among men. The lead paragraph sets up the problem:
After downing 70 chicken wings in about an hour, Andrew Walen realized he had a problem.Ya think?
Like so much else in our culture, gender is an issue with binge eating:
Many binge-eating men do not even recognize that anything is wrong. About 70 percent of people with binge eating disorder are overweight or obese, but a higher weight is generally more culturally acceptable for men than for women."There’s nothing wrong with a college guy eating a whole pizza by himself, but with women they would be horrified,” said Roberto Olivardia, a clinical psychologist who specializes in the treatment of body image disorders and eating disorders in men and is an author of “The Adonis Complex.”
If you do continue binge eating, avoid pan-fried meats, especially beef. A new study found that men who pig-out on red meat, are significantly more vulnerable to developing prostate cancer:
"We found that men who ate more than 1.5 servings of pan-fried red meat per week increased their risk of advanced prostate cancer by 30 percent," Stern said. "In addition, men who ate more than 2.5 servings of red meat cooked at high temperatures were 40 percent more likely to have advanced prostate cancer."
Both articles engage in heavy psychologizing to explain the motives behind unhealthy eating among men. Fine, it may have to do with low self-esteem, but it's also true that we live in a culture that at once encourages eating crap and torments the overweight. To eat in a healthy way, one has to buck the entire system.
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