LAZ wrote:I'd just like to add that, despite all the supposedly evil stuff we eat nowadays, life expectancy has risen dramatically in the last 100 years. In 1900, before the invention of trans-fats, chemical pesticides, synthetic preservatives, trans-fats, fast food, high-fructose corn sweetener and sedentary activities like TV and surfing the Internet, and when -- so some people say -- levels of obesity were lower than today, the average American could expect to live to be 49.2 years old. In 2001, average life expectancy was 77.2 years.

LAZ wrote:I'd just like to add that, despite all the supposedly evil stuff we eat nowadays, life expectancy has risen dramatically in the last 100 years. In 1900, before the invention of trans-fats, chemical pesticides, synthetic preservatives, trans-fats, fast food, high-fructose corn sweetener and sedentary activities like TV and surfing the Internet, and when -- so some people say -- levels of obesity were lower than today, the average American could expect to live to be 49.2 years old. In 2001, average life expectancy was 77.2 years.

I resent deeply claims that fat people are lazy, prone to eat unhealthful foods and/or an expensive drain on society. (Compared to what? How about old people? Think of the savings in Medicare and Social Security if we just stop people from living so long.)

Cynthia wrote:I think the biggest issue is not whether people are leading shorter lives, which they aren't, but rather that they hope to escape disease -- and, in some cases, even death. (As a French friend once said, only Americans think that death is optional.)

LAZ wrote: The point I am trying to make is that, although we may have different health issues now than we had a century ago, we are, as a populace, living much longer and healthier lives. (And this is not really the place to get into the discussion of the complex causes of obesity and whether it actually is a "problem" or a matter of politics, Big Business interests and aesthetics.)

Nobody is forced to eat french fries or drink Coca-Cola.

Anyone who wishes to avoid them in hopes of a few more years in a geriatric ward has that choice. No one who chooses to eat them thinks they're health foods. But legislating away such choices is as abominable an intrusion into personal freedoms as forced calisthenics. It says that your body doesn't belong to you, but to the state.

No one who chooses to eat them thinks they're health foods.

Mhays wrote:I do know a number of vegetarians who eat french fries under the supposition that they're healthier than meat.

LAZ wrote:Well, potatoes are high in Vitamin C.

Bob S. wrote:I'm lost. What is this "choice" people keep mentioning? Who here can introduce me to someone who walks up and down supermarket aisles checking ingredients lists for trans fats, turning down whatever doesn't?

Some time ago, the antismoking lobby pointed out that the cigarette, used in the way it is intended, is the only product that harms its user. Trans-fat products can certainly be added to that list.

Why aren't all the people here yammering about "choice" calling food manufacturers requesting more products without trans fats so consumers have one?

Cynthia wrote:Of course, cooking from scratch is always an option, too. Enjoy a roasted chicken and a tossed salad dressed with a nice olive oil dressing and you don't have any transfats.

The choices are there.

Cynthia wrote:Because I'm self-employed, I often work two or more jobs at the same time, and yes, you can pop a chicken in the oven and go back to work and eat well without taking up more than a few minutes.

Food made from scratch always costs less than processed food, so the "you don't care about poor people" doesn't fly. In fact, getting rid of transfats will raise prices, as the alternatives are all more costly.

Why Eating Well Is ‘Elitist’
Categories: Food
Thanks for all the great posts from readers — you’ve given me a lot to chew on, and there are many questions and comments I plan to address in future posts. But for today, I want to look briefly at the “elitism” issue raised by several of you. As you will see it also ties into the good question raised by Paul Stamler about whether consumer action — voting with your forks — is adequate to the task of changing the American way of eating.

It is a fact that to eat healthily in this country — by which I mean consuming food that contributes both to the eater’s health as well as to the health of the environment — costs more than it does to eat poorly. Indeed, the rules of the game by which we eat create a situation in which it is actually rational to eat poorly.

Let’s say you live on fixed income, and struggle to keep your family fed. When you go to the supermarket, you are, in effect, foraging for energy — calories — to keep your family alive. So what are you going to buy with your precious food dollar? Fresh produce? Or junk food?

A 2004 article in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition by Adam Drewnowski and S.E. Specter offers some devastating answers. One dollar spent in the processed food section of the supermarket — the aisles in the middle of the store — will buy you 1200 calories of cookies and snacks. That same dollar spent in the produce section on the perimeter will buy you only 250 calories of carrots. Similarly, a dollar spent in the processed food aisles will buy you 875 calories of soda but only 170 calories of fruit juice. So if you’re in the desperate position of shopping simply for calories to keep your family going, the rational strategy is to buy the junk.

Mr. Drewnowski explains that we are driven by our evolutionary inheritance to expend as little energy as possible seeking out as much food energy as possible. So we naturally gravitate to “energy-dense foods” — high-calorie sugars and fats, which in nature are rare and hard to find. Sugars in nature come mostly in the form of ripe fruit and, if you’re really lucky, honey; fats come in the form of meat, the getting of which requires a great expense of energy, making them fairly rare in the diet as well. Well, the modern supermarket reverses the whole caloric calculus: the most energy-dense foods are the easiest — that is, cheapest — ones to acquire. If you want a concise explanation of obesity, and in particular why the most reliable predictor of obesity is one’s income level, there it is.

The question is, how did energy-dense foods become so much cheaper in the supermarket than they are in the state of nature? This is not a function of the free market. It is very simply a function of government policy: our farm policies subsidize the most energy-dense and least healthy calories in the supermarket. We write checks to farmers for every bushel of corn and soy they can grow, and partly as a result they grow vast quantities of the stuff, driving down the cost of the processed foods we make from those commodities. In effect, we’re subsidizing high-fructose corn syrup. And we’re not subsidizing the growing of carrots and broccoli. Put another way, our tax dollars are the reason that the cheapest calories in the market are the least healthy ones.

That situation is a public problem and can be addressed only through public action — by rewriting the rules of the game by which we eat. We need farm policies that will somehow right this imbalance, so that healthy calories can compete with unhealthy ones — so that it becomes rational for someone with little to spend on food to buy the carrots instead of the cookies, the orange juice instead of the Sprite. Until that happens, eating well will remain “elitist.”

Bob S. wrote:Always? How many of those can you spread on your typical Illinois LINK Card? Are the supermarkets that would allow them to do that even in neighborhoods where LINK Card usage is more common?

ToniG wrote:

Michael Pollan, NY Times blog from May, 2006 wrote:Why Eating Well Is ‘Elitist’

One dollar spent in the processed food section of the supermarket — the aisles in the middle of the store — will buy you 1200 calories of cookies and snacks. That same dollar spent in the produce section on the perimeter will buy you only 250 calories of carrots. Similarly, a dollar spent in the processed food aisles will buy you 875 calories of soda but only 170 calories of fruit juice. So if you’re in the desperate position of shopping simply for calories to keep your family going, the rational strategy is to buy the junk.

ToniG wrote:

Why Eating Well Is ‘Elitist’
Categories: Food
It is a fact that to eat healthily in this country — by which I mean consuming food that contributes both to the eater’s health as well as to the health of the environment — costs more than it does to eat poorly. Indeed, the rules of the game by which we eat create a situation in which it is actually rational to eat poorly.

Let’s say you live on fixed income, and struggle to keep your family fed. When you go to the supermarket, you are, in effect, foraging for energy — calories — to keep your family alive. So what are you going to buy with your precious food dollar? Fresh produce? Or junk food?

For African-Americans who live in "food deserts" on Chicago's South and West Sides, where fast-food restaurants are plentiful and grocery stores are scarce, a lack of choices is more than an inconvenience. A provocative new study from the University of Michigan concludes that residents are more likely to die prematurely from diabetes, cancer and other ailments.

More than half a million Chicagoans live in food deserts, the study finds, and about 400,000 live in areas with an imbalance of food choices, meaning that residents often find it more difficult to eat an apple instead of a candy bar, a salad instead of French fries.

On average, blacks travel the farthest distance to any type of grocery store--.59 miles compared with the city average of .45 miles--and their low-access neighborhoods cluster on the South and West Sides.

In a typical African-American block, the nearest grocery store is about twice as far as the nearest fast-food restaurant, which makes following dietary recommendations more difficult for the 521,000 who live in the 287 worst grocery-store-access tracts, the report said.

People who live in food deserts are more likely to die prematurely and at greater rates from diabetes, cancer, cardiovascular disease and obesity, according to the study, which also tabulated years of potential life lost.

And in general, as grocery store access decreases, obesity increases, the study found.

Chicago Health Commissioner Dr. Terry Mason wondered, however, if other factors besides physical distance to grocery stores explain dire health outcomes for blacks, including access to quality health care and cultural differences.

"Whether you have a PhD from Harvard or you were a high-school dropout, in most African-American families on Sunday everybody is eating the same thing," said Mason, who is black. "We have a pattern of eating that contributes to diseases."

Adam Drewnowski, director of the Nutritional Science Program at the University of Washington, who has studied why obesity affects mostly minorities and the poor, said the health disparities cannot be separated from economic inequity. Though he had not read the report, he said he suspects it suffers from what he dubs the "Chernobyl model of nutrition"--a model that would suggest mere proximity to McDonald's means people will be obese and diabetic, while living nearer to Whole Foods would make people healthy.

"Physical access, I suspect, is not as important as economic distance," Drewnowski said. "The issue of economic distance is trickier to handle. Higher minimum wage? Health insurance? What do you do?"

Courtesy of the Chicago Tribune

Cynthia wrote:How many small businesses are going to be out of business if this law passes?