Full, half, skinny, low, no.

Broadly speaking, in the US, there are two major types of people - those who need to eat more and those who need to eat less. In cruder terms, this could be split into the health freaks and the overweight people. Of course, this is oversimplified - and there are undoubtedly many people in between but on the couple of occasions i've visited major US cities, there seems to be a surprising number of people who fit into these two categories with little room to manoeuvre in between. Of course, being a major source of capitalism in the western world, the companies here have risen to the challenge. Thus, in nearly every restaurant and grocery store there are low fat alternatives (as in the UK admittedly). But then this goes even further over here - with the presence of NO FAT alternatives - such as the no fat baked crisps they have (the make is Lays - the US version of Walkers). Of course the only major side effect of this is that they tend to taste like corrugated cardboard.

Naturally, with all this health food around, you'd imagine that the people are going for it like crazy in an attempt to compensate for that Big Mac they had this morning - but on my experience so far, this isn't the case. Quite simply the no fat stuff tastes of not much at all. I made the mistake of buying some no-fat cottage cheese a few weeks back (I mistook it for low fat) and it was not much beyond a very thin milky nothingness - barely resembling the cottage cheese that i know. Switching back to the low fat stuff was something of a respite. This just proves that you can't change a person by diet alone - the no fat stuff tastes awful and is probably chock full of God-knows-what as well. Me, i prefer to go for the 'eating healthily but not to the point of obsession, and working off the excess calories in the gym'. This way, as an added bonus, you get to check out the talent as they work out!