Soft drinks and food stamps: From bad to worse

When it comes to legislation that controls the health of its residents, New York leads the pack.

In 2006 the New York City Board of Health passed a law that required certain restaurants to list calories on their menus.

In 2008 Governor Paterson proposed a tax on drinks that contain sugar: the soda tax.

This past January Mayor Bloomberg announced a national campaign to persuade food manufacturers and restaurant chains to reduce the salt in their products. (It has to be a national campaign to be financially viable for manufacturers.)

In March a Brooklyn assemblyman proposed a bill that would make it illegal for restaurants to use salt when they prepare food.

And now Mayor Bloomberg has proposed a law that would prevent the purchase of soft drinks with food stamps.

The salt issue is controversial, and not the main point I want to address here. I do recommend, however, an excellent article by Gary Taubes called “The (Political) Science of Salt,” in which he says:

After decades of intensive research, the apparent benefits of avoiding salt have only diminished. This suggests either that the true benefit has now been revealed and is indeed small, or that it is nonexistent, and researchers believing they have detected such benefits have been deluded by the confounding influences of other variables. (These might include genetic variability; socioeconomic status; obesity; level of physical exercise; intake of alcohol, fruits and vegetables, or dairy products; or any number of other factors.)

A similar statement could be made about the confounding influences on obesity, a poorly understood condition that the media covers relentlessly with misinformation.. Obesity has been called the problem of a thousand paper cuts – there are thousands of possible explanations for why people seem to be gaining more weight now than they did 50 years ago. (But not necessarily 100 years ago, when weight was a sign of affluence and social standing.)

It’s true, for example, that more children drink soda these days and more children are overweight. But did the ubiquitous Kool-Aid of babyboomers’ childhoods have fewer calories? Children have always had a sweet tooth.

We don’t know what’s going on with obesity, and there’s certainly no single answer. You can be sure the solution won’t turn out to be as easy as eliminating soft drinks.

Let them drink sugar-free!

It gets worse. The Atlantic has an article on food stamps and soft drinks by Hank Cardello, a former executive at Coca-Cola, General Mills, and Cadbury-Schweppes and currently associated with the conservative think tank, the Hudson Institute. He proposes a better way to use food stamps to fight obesity: Limit the number of calories food stamps can purchase.

Rather than create a modern-day Prohibition on specific foods or beverages, the food stamp program should be restructured to cap the total calories purchased each month. This would align the program with the need to reduce calories, the primary contributor to obesity.

So instead of each account being credited a certain dollar amount, food stamp recipients would receive a monthly calorie allotment. And since food stamp benefits are delivered electronically, each Electronic Benefit Transfer (EBT) card could be programmed with a monthly calorie limit.

Using the magic of bar codes, calorie allotments could be reduced annually – Cardello suggests 1% — so that in a decade low-income people would be purchasing 10% fewer calories with their food stamps.

He continues:

Lest anyone be concerned about deprivation, recipients can still consume the same volume of food and drink, just lower-calorie versions of the products. For example, if a family normally purchases regular Coke or Pepsi, it would now be more inclined to buy no-calorie Coca-Cola Zero or Pepsi Max.

Don’t you just love the way soft drink executives are concerned for the health of our citizens? Let them drink sugar-free! It’s the same profit. If Cardello’s only criterion is volume, with nary a concern for nutrition, the poor would certainly be better off drinking water to relieve their thirst and saving food stamps for something more substantial.

Blame the victim

The scientific evidence for eating fewer calories as the “solution” to obesity just isn’t there. To quote Gary Taubes again, this time from his book Good Calories, Bad Calories,

The trouble with the science of obesity as it has been practiced for the last sixty years is that it begins with a hypothesis – that “overweight and obesity result from excess calorie consumption and/or inadequate physical activity,” as the Surgeon General’s Office recently phrased it – and then tries and fails to explain the evidence and the observations. The hypothesis nonetheless has come to be perceived as indisputable, a fact of life or perhaps the laws of physics, and its copious contradictions with the actual observations are considered irrelevant to the question of its validity. Fat people are fat because they eat too much or exercise too little, and nothing more ultimately need be said.

The more closely we look at the evidence and at obesity itself, the more problematic the science becomes. Lean people will often insist that the secret to their success is eating in moderation, but many fat people insist that they eat no more than the lean – surprising as it seems, the evidence backs this up – and yet are fat nonetheless. As the National Academy of Sciences report Diet and Health phrased it, “Most studies comparing normal and overweight people suggest that those who are overweight eat fewer calories than those of normal weight.” Researchers and public-health officials nonetheless insist that obesity is caused by overeating, without attempting to explain how these two notions can be reconciled. This situation is not improved by the prevailing attitude of many nutritionists, obesity researchers, and public-health authorities that it is evidence of untoward skepticism to raise such issues, or to ask questions that lead others into contemplating the contradictions themselves.

Science aside, I find it objectionable to single out low-income people for control by their government. Let’s not further insult the dignity of those who need food stamps in these difficult economic times by fighting the obesity battle on their backs.

Resources:

Image source: Malstron’s Articles News

Hank Cardello, Don’t Ban Soda Purchases: A Better Way to Put Food Stamps on a Diet, The Atlantic, Octobger 12, 2010

Gary Taubes, The (Political) Science of Salt, National Association of Science Writers, August 27, 2006

Gary Taubes, Good Calories, Bad Calories