Too bad our leaders can't figure out what it is:
Wrigley conducted one of the first studies of a food desert intervention, looking at what happened when a grocery store was brought into an underserved part of Leeds, an industrial city in northern England. Of shoppers surveyed, 45 percent switched to the new store.Their habits, however, barely changed: Consumption of fruits and vegetables increased by one-third of a cup per day---about six grapes or two broccoli florets.
“The results came out quite small, a very modest increase in consumption of nutritious foods,” Wrigley says. “It seemed an almost nonexistent improvement.”
Similar research in the United States shows much the same.
This is not rocket science, people. If our leaders are really serious about getting us to eat more healthy foods, to cut down on obesity, etc., they can do the obvious thing and make cheaply priced junk food prohibitively expensive through the fucking tax code. We do this with gasoline, with alcohol, and with tobacco, and we know that whenever we raise taxes on those goods, per-capita consumption goes down. Unlike drinking or driving, however, people still need to eat, so if a Quarter Pounder costs more than, say, a composed salad (vegetables, cheese, hard-boiled egg, etc.), some people at least will tend to gravitate toward the less expensive alternative and pare their personal spending elsewhere since starving is not a viable option.
If that seems too draconian, our leaders could simply delete those provisions in the tax code that give junk-food producers a competitive advantage over producers of healthier foods, which would actually, like, encourage free-market competition. Or they could just ban the use of food additives that are hazardous to our health.
But since our leaders aren't proposing any of these things, it's safe to assume that they're not really serious about solving the nation's obesity problem.
---Vitelius
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