For better quality food products, avoid the stronger hechshers
I meet a lot of traditional Jews who would like to eat healthier. I have a way to help you do that. Avoid the stronger hechshers.
I was about to pick up a pack of hamentaschen this evening at the local grocery store, since it sure is a lot easier to celebrate Purim that way instead of going to hear the megillah, and since getting to the point of “lo yadah” isn’t exactly a once a year occurrence in my circles. Anyway, just as I was about to put the hamentaschen in the basket, I saw the (warning?) label: “pas yisroel.” The hamentaschen had been cooked by a “fire” in some way lit by a Jew, in order to avoid some concern or another. You know, some Bais Shammai bullshit.
But the point is, I wouldn’t really care, but this signals something else besides religious interpretation. It means that this product is targeting, at least in part, the haredim. And sure enough, the name of the bakery was…let me say this euphemistically…Hungarian.
Why do I care? Because the haredim do not care about the quality or freshness of the food like secular Jews do. They care more about which rebbe said what. And this market segment is simply not health conscious. Not at all. They eat crap. That’s why they are so fat. I mean, they are disproportionately fat. Because they eat shit, albeit mehadrin l’mehadrin shit.
For those of us with a background, well, we know that kosher is not a health guide. The problem is, all too often when you move into ultra-Orthodox supervised products, it is the inverse.
21 comments
Granted haredim tend to be a little less image conscious (read: more fat) than the general Jewish population. That could be due to any number of things though. Do you have any harder evidence that heckshired food is less healthy? I ask not to bust your beytzim, but because I like to maintain a nice weight myself.
“Do you have any harder evidence that heckshired food is less healthy?”
It has to be, because it is simply less of a priority. You are dealing with a community that has a lot of ignorance and even a casual rejection of scientific method as “narishkeit” and the like. How would their food possibly be the same quality as health conscious educated urban yuppies?
How about this. Go to a supermarket in Boro Park, and a haredi supermarket in Monsey. Then we will go to Whole Foods at Columbus Circle. We will compare the selection of organic goods in each, and see who offers a larger selection.
I’ve never been into the organic craze myself. I have almost as potent a hatred for hippy-dippy Vermont minhagim as you do for haredi ones. Maybe it’s time to get into that stuff though. I’m up for health.
Those guys tend to eat lots of junk, snack on crisps etc., vegetables usually get simmered beyond recognition. The types you most often see among them are either ultra-skinny (surviving on cigarettes and chewing gum; anorexia for the ladies) or beyond chubby. There doesn’t seem to be much of a balanced demographic. I wouldn’t blame it on the kosher supervision as much as on unbalanced diet and old nutrition myths that still linger around those societies. Also, I once spoke to the son of a rabbi from Willi and asked him why many bochurim are so unhealthily skinny or fat, and he told me that usually they are supposed to eat at their respective yeshive, but the food there often is crap, so they either don’t eat anything or fill up on snacks.
There are a couple contributing factors to the weight of haredim:
1) As DK has pointed out, hekshered food is not always so good for you. When you have fewer options, you have fewer low-fat, low-cal etc options. (For instance, it is difficult to find low fat kosher cheese on a reliable basis. In MANHATTAN) Most kosher packaged food is not good for those watching their weight, and most health food is not hekshered.
2) Health and welfare classes don’t seem to be taught in Beis Yaakov schools or comparable Yeshivot. Kids don’t learn about the food pyramid or other health related information, as parents are worried that sex ed info will get snuck in there.
3) Little/no emphasis on exercise. It’s all “bittul z’man.” Why go for a run if you could be learning torah instead? Also, if you’re a woman, there is really no good way for you to exercise, unless you belong to a (costly!) single sex gym.
I could go on and on, but the point really is that unhealthy hekshered foods are just one part of a larger lack of awareness about health and wellbeing in the ultra Orthodox community.
Most haredi jews I know are not fat.
Sarah, it’s cigarettes and coffee, we don’t eat chewing gum.
I was by a doctor for a routine checkup yesterday.
5′11 and 133 with my shoes.
Mohammed, I know plenty that chew gum.
Have you never seen those pear-shaped guys that have a hoops of body-fat around their waists?
133 lbs is how much in kilos? 65? Sounds as if you could do with a hearty meal.
Mohammed–Fat is different than unhealthy. You can be skinny and not healthy at all.
Wow, a discussion premised entirely on absolutely no empirical data on a blog!
Ron, I can only go by those about 120 Chasidim I know and the ones I’ve seen that I don’t know in person, but if it makes you happy, next time I’m in BP I’ll be standing on some corner of 13th Ave and keep note of how many unhealthy looking people I see.
Ron, do you disagree? If so, go ahead. say you don’t believe that the frummer people are, the worse they generally eat. Go ahead. Say you don’t believe my assertion is correct.
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I’m waiting, Ron.
5 pounds is 11 kilos.
fifty is one ten, sixty is onethirtytwo.
fuck healthy.
I don’t know any that chew gum, and I would presume I know a couple more than you do.
DK
if you want, we’ll both wake up early one day and go to shachris in Satmar williamsburg. that should be hungarian enough for you. after, you can tell me what percent you estimate is overweight.
I can help you a bit with that, Ron. I won’t be so shameless as to plug by own blog here, but I have written a few blogs referencing articles that show that IGF-1, a by product of rBGH, which is in all non-organic milk and diary kosher products, is a direct cause of breast cancer, metabolic disorders, obesity, heart disease and strokes. There is plenty of research out there - not only on non-organic milk and dairy products, but on bleached white flour, processed white sugar, corn syrup, hydrogenated oil - all the uber-processed foods that get kosher certification.
But the rabbis don’t care about the health effects of what the cows were shot up with before they were kosher slaughtered. They don’t care what kind of crap the cows ate - even if they ate ground up other cows, making them carnivores instead of herbivores.
No, as long as they were wide awake when their throat was slit, they’re “kosher.” Like the US government, the Rabbis don’t care if something kills you slowly over time. They allow GMO foods whose seeds don’t “reproduce after their kind,” that have been mixed with genes from other species, even unclean species - but Hashem forbid there might be a microscopic bug on your fresh produce. Can’t eat that stuff - it’s unclean. What is “clean” is glorified cardboard, starch and fat.
See the drift here? You are what you eat, in every sense of the phrase. So the cheredi diet is full of chemical toxins, contaminates, unclean DNA, and uber-processed “food” products stipped of all their micro-nutrients, enzymes, probiotics, and nutrition.
It’s not rocket science. It’s Torah.
I would say that from my observation, there is a very serious obesity problem in the frum community. I come home from the mikva every erev Shabbos and tell my wife how grateful she should be for her Adonis of a husband — in relation to what is on display there, anyway. (She does not buy this argument, in particular, by the way.)
But the generalizations here, as usual, are posited as against a vague and unspecified, and non-existent, ideal, as opposed to being compared to the population at large. I don’t know for a fact if frum people are more or less out of shape than (a) the population at large, or (b) others of comparable socio-economic status and age.
I have four kids, aged nine through 16. They are exposed to identical nutritional environments. None of them gets nearly enough exercise, of course. Two are wiry and have six-pack abs, not the result of any workout regimen or special diet, but entirely genetic. Two are saftig. We have virtually no candy or junk food in stock. The skinny ones do not eat, drink coffee or have eating disorders, thank God. I mean, in my house alone these generalizations don’t stack up.
Ahava, you make some nice points, but again, you are speculating about what people actually eat, and how we are defining “people.” Many frum people, including a lot of BT’s, are health nuts. Your imagined menu does not in the slightest allow for the actual preparation and ingestion of fresh vegetables and fruits, which do not require any kind of supervision. And the premise of it — that “rabbis” should “care” about anything other than kashrus, which is all they are trained to “care” about and all they are paid to certify — is a non-sequitur.
Mohammed, we might know different people.
There’s a rule-of-thumb for the ideal weight of adult men: body height [cm] - 100 -> kg, give or take 10%. So, if 1 inch equals to 2.56cm, then you’re height in centimetres would be 181.76cm. 10% of 81.76kg = 8.176kg, so your ideal weight would be between 73.584kg and 89.936kg, so yes, youcould do with a hearty meal. 
But don’t you worry, one of my brothers weighed 55kg at 2metres in height till he started university.
Ron, I’ve read in the current edition of Süddeutsche Zeitung: Wissen (in article on new measuring techniques used in an attempt to standardize clothing sizes internationally) that in statistics, Europeans have been getting taller and wider while the height growth, in average, of Northern american has been stagnating and that they have just been getting wider. I don’t know in how far though those data considered the various ethnicities / immigrant groups and their impact on statistically average height and waist & hip circumference. My observation is that in the FFB world things seem pretty extreme.
Sorry for the typos above. I’m struggling with my keyboard today…
Sarah, you clearly have access to lots of empirical data here on the big picture, as well as a better of understanding of the methodology required to generate that data, to extrapolate it and to apply it to prospective policy-making that I do. So I would expect you to extend that degree of rigor to a discussion like this, which is rife with generalizations and which is to a large extent the product of fairly gross prejudices that one or more participants in the discussion have never been particular to hide!
What part of me stating that I was going by my experiences was too confusing?
No one said he was confused.
The rabbis shouldn’t care that they’re eating carnivores? The rabbis shouldn’t care that they’re eating franken-foods that most certainly do not “reproduce after their kind?” These are the very definitions of “food,” established by the Torah itself. How can it not be relevant?
Please visit my list of kosher food ingredients at
http://www.hechshers.info/ingredients/index.htm
If you are eating any kind of kosher processed food then it’s worth asking whether a kosher ingredient is a healthy ingredient.
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