Breaking the Link Between Poverty and Obesity
Poor Americans are trapped into spending their money on unhealthy, high-calorie, processed foods. But can anything be done to stop this problem?
Like millions of aging suburban dads across this continent, summer for me means family time, road trips, and pit stops for food at places we wouldn’t ordinarily go to.
As a child, I remember that gas stations were particularly uninspired places when it came to snacking. Outside a few choices of potato chips – with uninteresting flavors and in bags that (in retrospect) were very small – the gas station was a place for gas, yesterday’s newspaper, and not much more.
No longer. I’m not exactly sure when gas stations were transformed into food oases, complete with tony coffees and millions of varieties of energy bars, but today’s fill up has multiple meanings.
Gas stations with their many food options seem to be more about snacking then, well, gas. And that Twinkie, the giant candy bar, and the super-big bottle of Coke come with modest price tags.
It’s long been noted that in recent years, fruit and vegetable prices have been rising in the United States. In contrast, those sweet drinks that your kids beg you for at the Exxon off the I-95 have gotten cheaper.
Writing in The New York Times Magazine, Michael Pollan quantifies that change:
[T]he real price of fruits and vegetables between 1985 and 2000 increased by nearly 40 percent while the real price of soft drinks (a k a liquid corn) declined by 23 percent.
It’s also true, however, that measured by price per calorie, yields an even more surprising result. Pollan draws on the work of Adam Drewnowski:
A few years ago, an obesity researcher at the University of Washington named Adam Drewnowski ventured into the supermarket to solve a mystery. He wanted to figure out why it is that the most reliable predictor of obesity in America today is a person’s wealth. For most of history, after all, the poor have typically suffered from a shortage of calories, not a surfeit. So how is it that today the people with the least amount of money to spend on food are the ones most likely to be overweight?
Drewnowski gave himself a hypothetical dollar to spend, using it to purchase as many calories as he possibly could. He discovered that he could buy the most calories per dollar in the middle aisles of the supermarket, among the towering canyons of processed food and soft drink. (In the typical American supermarket, the fresh foods–dairy, meat, fish and produce–line the perimeter walls, while the imperishable packaged goods dominate the center.) Drewnowski found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of cookies or potato chips but only 250 calories of carrots. Looking for something to wash down those chips, he discovered that his dollar bought 875 calories of soda but only 170 calories of orange juice.
Pollan and Drewnowski were very much on my mind as of late. So were Neil Gandal and Anastasia Shabelansky, both from the Tel Aviv University. They considered BMI and price sensitivity at the supermarket.
What did they find?
[Other things equal,] we find that a woman of average height who stated that prices were “not important at all” when purchasing food products had a weight circumference 4.5 centimeters (roughly 1.8 inches) smaller than those who stated that price was “very important.”
The full paper, published in the Forum for Health Economics and Policy, can be accessed with free registration here. (Or without registration here.)
It’s become popular to tout a soda tax as a way of addressing rising obesity rates. The argument: if Pollan, Drewnowski, Gandal and Shabelansky are all correct and high-calorie choices are motivated by less affluent shoppers making “value” purchases, why not push up the price of that cola? But as a trip to Exxon or Shell reveals, it’s not just the soda that’s the problem. So much of the American diet has become high-calorie foods.
What then to consider? How about the farm bill, which subsidizes corn and other crops?
As Pollan notes: “Like most processed foods, the Twinkie is basically a clever arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans and wheat – three of the five commodity crops that the farm bill supports, to the tune of some $25 billion a year.”
In an age of record deficits, do we really need to fund our own obesity problems?