Quote Originally Posted by fred View Post
I have to disagree with this statement to some degree.. If a family is poor then chicharon is a luxury they cannot afford..
The poor families here usually survive by eating things like cheap fish or 2 pesos worth of bagoong with plain rice and local veg like green papaya,malongay leaves etc..The thing that makes them fat is the rice they eat three times a day..Veg like Malungay is stuffed with vitimin C.. More Vit C in a tablespoon full then there is in 8 oranges or so..
The kids round here are also forever snacking on my Guava trees like it was their God given right!! Actually I let them pick as many as they like..
The middle class here all seem to head for Jollibee and Mcdo`s as you probably know.
I take your point Fred, I should not have implied Chicharon was a staple and yeah the 'Jollibee and Mcdo`s' thing is an expression of wealth for the middle class, I prefer the food at Chow King if I have to eat fast food, rice dishes and the likes, but Ana likes to take the kids to Jollibee :(

I am not a fan of burgers anywhere these days, although when my daughter was little back in the late 80's and early 90's we often went to Burger King until around the age of 8 she decided that eating meat was something she did not want to do

I'm probably also a bit off the beam in what I am defining as 'poor' in that post, two family's in my extended family are extremely poor and their diet is closer to what you describe.

My point which I made badly was that many of the family's I have met appear to have a fat intake around 1/3 of their diet, in the west many of us fatties have a much lower fat intake than that but yet we still inflate (sugar's as you say) many don't over there because they burn what they eat i.e. they need all the calories in the diet.

As a kid in Scotland I was encouraged to eat the fat on a bit of meat be it a pork chops or a bit of beef, I find it's similar over there but like us in the 60's they (mostly) don't get as fat as modern westerners and in my view it's a combination of them being more active and eating less processed food but I think the overriding factor is simply being more active.