Nope, it’s not that. This is why we’re fat:
A group of researchers at the UW’s Center for Public Health Nutrition tracked the cost of roughly 380 food items over the course of four years…The price of healthy food—produce and whole grains, among other things—rapidly outpaced the price of items like soda and jelly beans.
“That’s not a good pattern,” said lead researcher Pablo Monsivais. “Already, the foods that are the most nutrient dense are the most costly to begin with. It’s kind of making a bad situation worse.”
The chart to the right shows the longer-term food price trends for the US using data from the Consumer Price Index. Since 1985 fats, oils, and sweets have gotten cheaper, after adjusting for inflation, while fruits and vegetables have gotten more expensive.
The results speak for themselves. The USDA’s Economic Research Service finds that American diets contained 31 percent more calories from fat per day in 2008 than in 1985, and 8 percent more sugar—but fruit and veggie consumption over the period remained basically unchanged. And over the same period US obesity rates simply skyrocketed.
Which all reminds me of this fascinating paper on obesity in the developed world. The authors tried to estimate how much weight gain was due to eating more vs. exercising less, and found that the bulk of our increasing bulk can be explained by higher-calorie diets. And diets, in turn, are largely a function of the economics of food: when fats and sweets are cheap, we eat more of them! Low prices are a powerful inducement for poor eating. Simply offering healthy food choices alongside junk food doesn’t necessarily make us eat more healthfully—in fact, seeing healthy foods on a menu seems to make people feel OK about indulging. Even subsidizing fruits and veggies may not do much to improve eating habits, since many people use the money they save on produce to buy more junk. Which all makes me think that as long as sweets and fats stay cheap, more and more of us are going to feel like we need to go on a diet.
Alan Durning
This makes me think that, for food as for fossil fuels, promoting and subsidizing healthier alternatives will never be enough. We know that windpower subsidies without a price on climate-changing carbon pollution will never move us to a clean-energy economy. Just so, it sounds like promoting and subsidizing farm-market tomatoes and local, whole-grain foods will never suffice, unless we also raise the price of—say—commodity corn.
MicheLynne
And invest in more zzzzs.
Matt the Engineer
Subsidizing vegetables especially doesn’t help when those vegetables are corn and soybeans…
MicheLynne
They’re holy soy! Miracle Beans.
Michelle Venetucci Harvey
So Alan, maybe a good way to solve that would be to transfer existing corn subsidies to, say, organic farming subsidization?? The price of corn would have to increase.
Levin Nock
The paper mentioned above, “Why is the developed world obese?” is interesting, but it does not appear to account for commuting and errands. Page 7 mentions that “moderate intensity activity of approximately 45 to 60 minutes per day is required to prevent the transition to overweight or obesity”. That sounds to me like an active (walk or bike, or walk to the bus) round trip daily urban commute, plus a few errands by foot or bicycle. Eighty years ago, most children walked to school, and most adults walked to work, or at least walked to the streetcar. Today we spend the same 30 to 60 minutes each day commuting, but most people sit still for the whole trip.As I recall, studies in Australia and Scandinavia, which I read about on Sightline, have shown that bicycle commuting adds years to a person’s life expectancy. Please do not dismiss the connection between obesity and exercise because of this study, unless commuting is fully included in the model and I missed it.