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 Post subject: Re: New Federal Soda/Sweets Tax potentially
PostPosted: Mon Jun 11, 2012 12:05 pm 
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I'd hate to ruffle anyone's PC feathers, and I ask this question without a hint of sarcasm, but would having no job and getting a constant supply of free food tend to lend itself to obesity?

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 Post subject: Re: New Federal Soda/Sweets Tax potentially
PostPosted: Mon Jun 11, 2012 12:18 pm 
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Bee Girl wrote:
I work for licensee of Blue Cross / Blue Shield and we do pay more for our insurance for not controlling our health. We don't get "discounts" for being healthy but we pay a "surcharge" for smoking, a surcharge for an unhealthy BMI, high blood pressure, high cholesterol or high blood sugar. We are required to go through a biometric screening every year to get the numbers and we are charged based on the results. It may be all in the language, but this is happening now, and has been (for me) for years.


Aetna is the same but you do get discounts for exercise and healthy eating. Up to $500 a year for individuals $1000 for families. I track how I eat and exercise everyday it's worth it. You don't pay more for bad biometric results it's info only. You get discounts for taking the test though. It's voluntary. You do pay more for smoking.


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 Post subject: Re: New Federal Soda/Sweets Tax potentially
PostPosted: Mon Jun 11, 2012 4:59 pm 
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EllisEamos wrote:
LittleWing wrote:
EllisEamos wrote:
has anybody mentioned how the buying power (both in business and politics) of fast food companies and big agra has re-made all of the food we eat?


Sorry, "buying power" of big business has simply catered to the food we WANT.
actually, my point was that our love of chicken, bacon, hamburgers, and french fries has enabled the producers of these foods to streamline the processing of each to the point that all of the various forms of chicken, pork, beef, and potatoes (& corn syrup) are essentially the same and, as a result, unhealthy.

not to mention, the largest producers get the biggest share of the agra subsidies. so its not as if they're business is all that sustains them and helps them reap enormous profits.

It's interesting. Even if corn syrup would thrive without subsidies nowadays, it probably only came to dominate with the help of subsidies. It's like we inadvertently applied infant industry policy to unhealthy foods, funding industry development until they could develop huge economies of scale to out-compete other producers (and other forms of sugar, in the corn syrup example).

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 Post subject: Re: New Federal Soda/Sweets Tax potentially
PostPosted: Mon Jun 11, 2012 6:59 pm 
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Maybe we could have everyone enter a lotto system were certain people were awarded the best, healthiest foods and the rest had to try and buy food at the store where only cheap and unhealthy options were available. It would be very fair.

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 Post subject: Re: New Federal Soda/Sweets Tax potentially
PostPosted: Mon Jun 11, 2012 7:04 pm 
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dkfan9 wrote:
EllisEamos wrote:
LittleWing wrote:
EllisEamos wrote:
has anybody mentioned how the buying power (both in business and politics) of fast food companies and big agra has re-made all of the food we eat?


Sorry, "buying power" of big business has simply catered to the food we WANT.
actually, my point was that our love of chicken, bacon, hamburgers, and french fries has enabled the producers of these foods to streamline the processing of each to the point that all of the various forms of chicken, pork, beef, and potatoes (& corn syrup) are essentially the same and, as a result, unhealthy.

not to mention, the largest producers get the biggest share of the agra subsidies. so its not as if they're business is all that sustains them and helps them reap enormous profits.

It's interesting. Even if corn syrup would thrive without subsidies nowadays, it probably only came to dominate with the help of subsidies. It's like we inadvertently applied infant industry policy to unhealthy foods, funding industry development until they could develop huge economies of scale to out-compete other producers (and other forms of sugar, in the corn syrup example).
there's also the guerrilla (or is it elephant?) in the corner that is the Food Additives Market.

my biggest issues w/ our nation's obesity problem(s) rest w/ the production & processing giants influence and the FDA's failure to do its job (much like all federal regulatory agencies).

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 Post subject: Re: New Federal Soda/Sweets Tax potentially
PostPosted: Tue Jun 12, 2012 1:31 am 
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Doks, I had a nice response for you just about finished, and then my computer automatically restarted and I just haven't had the energy to rewrite it. In lieu of that (for now), I give you this. Strange, it comes from your beloved Philadelphia.

Would you care to wage a friendly bet that this will have absolutely no impact on obesity rates?

Quote:
Will Philadelphia’s experiment in eradicating ‘food deserts’ work?
By Sarah Kliff, Published: June 8

View Photo Gallery: A city grappling with obesity begins stocking corner store shelves with nutritious snack alternatives.

Philadelphia has the highest obesity rate and poorest population of America’s big cities. It also has an ambitious plan — launched out of 632 corner stores — to put healthy food on every table.

The $900,000 investment in better health depends on apples and oranges, chips and candy, $1,200 fridges and green plastic baskets. The results could steer the course of American food policy.

Philadelphia is trying to turn corner stores into greengrocers. For a small shop, it’s a risky business proposition. Vegetables have a limited shelf life, so a store owner must know how much will sell quickly — or watch profits rot away. He also lacks the buying power of large supermarkets and is often unable to meet the minimum orders required by the cheaper wholesalers that grocery stores use.

With shelf space at a premium, shop owners must pick and choose the products they think will sell best. Chips and candy and soda are a sure bet. Eggplant? It’s hard to know.

Access to healthy foods has been a cornerstone of the Obama administration’s food policy, dedicating hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funds to projects like this one. The goal is to eradicate food deserts — low-income areas that lack access to nutritious foods — by 2017.

“More parents will have a fresh food retailer right in their community — a place that sells healthy food, at reasonable prices, so they can feed their families the way they want,” first lady Michelle Obama said when she launched the White House’s $400 million Healthy Food Financing Initiative.

More than just a drain on families, obesity is a huge economic drag: The United States spends $147 billion each year treating the condition.

But even as the White House has scaled up such efforts, a growing body of research has questioned its basic assumption: that people will eat better if given better options. Multiple studies have scoured local, state and national data looking for a causal relationship between weight and access to healthy food. None has found it.

“It’s a theory that makes sense, and it’s intuitive,” says Helen Lee, a policy fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, whose research focuses on racial disparities in health outcomes. “But my concern would be that we’re investing in a strategy that may not be very promising. If you’re investing government money, you should carefully be evaluating how much you’ve invested and how much you’re getting out of that.”

That’s where Philadelphia comes in. Along with building the country’s largest network of healthy corner stores, the city is conducting the largest study to date of what happens when nutritious options are introduced into neighborhoods that have traditionally gone without. It’s measuring what people bought before, what they’re eating now and whether that improves.

“Availability of these products is definitely changing,” says Giridhar Mallya, director of policy for the Philadelphia Department of Public Health. “Now we’re waiting to see what is actually happening with people’s purchases.”

The Obama administration is watching, too.

“Research hasn’t caught up with all the interventions, because collecting evidence and evaluating it takes time,” Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Kathleen A. Merrigan said. “That’s why we’re excited about efforts like the one that they’re undertaking in Philadelphia.”

Changing habits is a hard sell

The term “food desert” is a relatively new one in public health policy, tracing to a 1995 paper from a government work group in Scotland. Various definitions exist today, and all describe parts of the country, both urban and rural, where there is inadequate access to affordable nutritious foods.

Public health researchers have long known that lower socioeconomic status correlates with worse health, including higher levels of obesity. Numerous studies have also noted connections between access to healthy foods and lower weight. A 2011 article in the Journal Obesity Review found that “greater accessibility to supermarkets or less access to takeaway outlets were associated with a lower prevalence of obesity.”

If governments could improve proximity to healthy foods, the theory went, it could reduce a rapidly rising obesity rate.

“In the U.K., we’d started making policy about this before there was any empirical evidence,” says Neil Wrigley, a professor of geography at Southampton University in England, who works on urban planning research. “Time to time, this happens, where you get policies that outstrip the evidence. Then the evidence needs to catch up.”

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.

Ohio State University’s Janne Boone-Heineman published a 2011 longitudinal study of food access in Birmingham, Ala., Chicago, Minneapolis and Oakland, Calif. Over 15 years, she traced obesity levels alongside the introduction of healthy food options (grocery stores) and unhealthy venues (fast food restaurants). Her study found no connection between a new grocery store and better health outcomes.

In March, the California institute’s Lee published a paper looking, nationwide, for a connection between proximity to grocery stores, fast food and obesity. RAND Institute’s Roland Sturm published a separate paper this year, one that compared food sold in a neighborhood and children’s diet in California. Neither could find a relationship.

“While some studies find a correlation between food accessibility and BMI and obesity, the causal pathways are not well understood,” the Agriculture Department concluded in a 2009 review of food desert research, noting elsewhere that “interventions aimed at increasing access to healthy foods may not be successful in addressing obesity.”

To date, no study has found a causal relationship between improving access to healthy foods and improving health outcomes. “You have more people starting to poke holes into what’s a simple thesis, that poor people are overweight because they lack access to healthy food,” Lee says. “My concern is that we might be investing in something that might not be very promising, at the cost of not investing in something that works.”

Candy vs. cantaloupe

One pervasive theory of why food access interventions have not worked has to do with what, exactly, corner stores sell. Even when they offer fresh fruit and produce, they also stock chips and candy. The latter are often less costly, more calorie-dense and require little to no preparation — just the sort of thing, in other words, that people will grab on the run.

Others question whether proximity is a good metric for defining access. Adam Drewnowski at the University of Washington recently surveyed Seattle residents on where they bought groceries. He found that most people don’t shop where they live — access is determined as much by price and public transit, for instance, as proximity.

“If you live next to a Mercedes dealership, that doesn’t mean you’ll buy a Mercedes,” he says. “And it’s the same with living next to a grocery store: That doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll start eating salads.”

Others point to a lack of rigorous study of planned interventions: Most have been small in scale, involving a handful of stores. A 2012 review article looked at efforts in 16 cities to improve food access. Only four measured impact on weight; none found any change. And often, after a city’s initial investment, there was no follow-up.

“One big gap in much of the work has been a lack of detailed evaluation,” says Joel Gittlesohn, a public health researcher at Johns Hopkins University who has published extensively on food access issues. “Programs are often implemented by local departments with very little evaluation of what’s going on.”

Philadelphia’s study, distinct in scope and scale, may deliver a breakthrough.

The city has, in many ways, been the epicenter of American efforts to improve food access. Of the country’s 10 largest cities, its population is the lowest-income, and it has higher obesity rates than New York City and Baltimore. It’s home to The Food Trust, a nonprofit that has risen to national prominence as an advocate for increasing food access for low-income Americans.

Working with Food Trust, in the late 2000s Philadelphia began piloting healthy corner stores. In 2010, it ramped up efforts significantly when it received $25.4 million in stimulus funds meant to combat obesity and tobacco use. That initial grant was bolstered with $1.5 million more in funding from the Affordable Care Act’s Prevention and Public Health Fund, a $15 billion commitment to projects that promote preventive health.

“It was a historic investment in public health,” says the public health department’s Mallya, who oversees the initiative for Philadelphia. “I don’t know if we’ll ever get that level of investment again. So for us, it’s very much been transformative.”

‘Just one piece of the puzzle’

The city has recruited 632 corner stores — of 2,500 overall — to its Get Healthy Philly initiative. Of those, 122 have gotten more intensive support, been supplied with new fridges to store produce and connected with wholesalers from whom they can buy at lower prices. It is also working with schools to improve nutrition and helping neighborhoods launch farmers markets, a multifaceted approach officials hope will improve public health.

“Access to healthy food is just one piece of the puzzle, and we are committed to doing the work to help improve public health,” Merrigan, of the USDA, said.

Anecdotal reports from shop owners suggest that sales of fresh produce have indeed increased alongside the surge in supply.

“Almost every day, people grab lettuce or something,” says Catalina Morrell-Hunter, who has owned her corner store in North Philadelphia for 15 years. Apples and oranges go fastest, and cilantro has proved popular in the largely Hispanic neighborhood. “I don’t say I sell like an entire market does. But when people are short a carrot, they can come to the convenience store.”

But whether that will have a health impact remains to be seen. Temple University’s Center for Obesity Research is working with the city to study how shopping habits do, or don’t, change when healthy options are introduced. Last year, before stores added nutritious options, researchers stopped 7,000 shoppers on their way out of the store to look at their purchases. With the new foods now available, researchers are doing another 7,000 stops.

“I don’t think we know much about how well this works,” says Gary Foster, director of the center. “It’s a field in its infancy  . . . nobody has really done at such a big scale.”

Foster expects the research on urban corner stores to publish in about a year and, when it does, it will be “the largest study by a long shot.”

When kids come into Guillermo and Denise Rodriguez’s store, they often buy the bananas at her urging. “It’s not a problem getting them to buy the fruit,” Denise says. “It’s a problem trying to get them to keep buying the fruit, and stay off the junk food. You have people who buy what they want to buy.”

Sometimes they’ll hand out fruit for free, to encourage kids to try it. The goal, says Denise, is to familiarize kids with healthier foods.

That’s a hard way to run a business.

“It’s all good but, you know, when the moment this money stops flowing, things go back to normal,” Drewnowski says. “There needs to be a longer-term business model.”

The Rodriguezes say they are committed to the business; aside from the equipment they received from the city, the sales of fruit and vegetables make the new venture sustainable, if not quite profitable right now.

“There’s not too much of a profit,” Denise says. “We’re not really worried too much about the profit right now, not until we see a profit later on. Right now, we’re just selling the fruit and making things healthier for other people. That’s good enough for us.”

Kliff wrote this article with the assistance of the Dennis A. Hunt Fund for Health Journalism, which is administered by the California Endowment Health Journalism Fellowships, a program of the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

© The Washington Post Company

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 Post subject: Re: New Federal Soda/Sweets Tax potentially
PostPosted: Tue Jun 12, 2012 1:47 am 
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A lot of this is just a cultural problem. Many people from the South especially just don't understand what sugar/simple carbs do to you, and the most popular items of "Southern" food are all horrible for you. If I still ate a lot of the stuff that I grew up eating everyday at school and home on a regular basis, I'd probably be pretty overweight right now. The question is, how to you get people to go away from what they're used to when it's killing them?

Also to the person that mentioned the Paleo diet, if I'm not mistaken you're only supposed to eat grass-fed meat if you subscribe to Paleo. Not exactly cheap.

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 Post subject: Re: New Federal Soda/Sweets Tax potentially
PostPosted: Tue Jun 12, 2012 12:26 pm 
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It seems we can all find a study to confirm our preconceived notions:

When examined in a multi-level modeling framework, differential exposure to food outlets does not independently explain weight gain over time in this sample of elementary school-aged children. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22381683

No robust relationship between food environment and consumption is found. A few significant results are sensitive to small modeling changes and more likely to reflect chance than true relationships.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22261208


Every way we looked at the data, it was clear that the use of food stamps was associated with weight gain
http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/foodstamp.htm

Also, in the first study that Thodoks linked, being more than 1/2 mile away(!!) from a chain grocer is considered living in a "food desert" (or food "desserts", as he likes to call them).http://www.npc.umich.edu/news/events/fo ... _et_al.pdf

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 Post subject: Re: New Federal Soda/Sweets Tax potentially
PostPosted: Tue Jun 12, 2012 12:37 pm 
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Give everyone a calorie counter and tell them they get 2000 cal a day. When they realize that what they eat daily equals out to 4000 cal they'll figure out why they're fat.


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 Post subject: Re: New Federal Soda/Sweets Tax potentially
PostPosted: Thu Jun 14, 2012 5:20 am 
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I have a feeling this won't be the last time I'm bested by desserts/deserts.

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 Post subject: Re: New Federal Soda/Sweets Tax potentially
PostPosted: Thu Jun 14, 2012 12:50 pm 
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Orpheus wrote:
A lot of this is just a cultural problem. Many people from the South especially just don't understand what sugar/simple carbs do to you, and the most popular items of "Southern" food are all horrible for you. If I still ate a lot of the stuff that I grew up eating everyday at school and home on a regular basis, I'd probably be pretty overweight right now. The question is, how to you get people to go away from what they're used to when it's killing them?

Also to the person that mentioned the Paleo diet, if I'm not mistaken you're only supposed to eat grass-fed meat if you subscribe to Paleo. Not exactly cheap.

i was in a nashville company's offices earlier this week and they had cases of soda piled up in every conference room. it was ridiculous.


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 Post subject: Re: New Federal Soda/Sweets Tax potentially
PostPosted: Thu Jun 14, 2012 2:20 pm 
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Orpheus wrote:
A lot of this is just a cultural problem. Many people from the South especially just don't understand what sugar/simple carbs do to you, and the most popular items of "Southern" food are all horrible for you. If I still ate a lot of the stuff that I grew up eating everyday at school and home on a regular basis, I'd probably be pretty overweight right now. The question is, how to you get people to go away from what they're used to when it's killing them?

Also to the person that mentioned the Paleo diet, if I'm not mistaken you're only supposed to eat grass-fed meat if you subscribe to Paleo. Not exactly cheap.


Here in Brazil it's mostly grass-fed anyway. :P

But this would be a quite hardcore concern, the fact remains that a bunch of veggies, fruits and roots and some kind of meat (be it fish, pork, chicken, beef) is not really expensive at all, actually it's cheaper than a fast food meal.

A funny aspect of american culture is that while there are lot of fatties, there is also a lot of people obsessed with shape and conditioning.

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 Post subject: Re: New Federal Soda/Sweets Tax potentially
PostPosted: Thu Jun 14, 2012 2:29 pm 
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Human Bass wrote:
But this would be a quite hardcore concern, the fact remains that a bunch of veggies, fruits and roots and some kind of meat (be it fish, pork, chicken, beef) is not really expensive at all, actually it's cheaper than a fast food meal.


That's not always true. The cost transporting food, storing, and preparing it is not low. The cost of the McDonald's Dollar Menu is low. For price sensitive consumers, especially people who don't hang out on message boards all day at work, it's hard to sell to say 'go home and cook'. It is their choice not to cook, but it's a combination of many factors other than just material inputs.

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 Post subject: Re: New Federal Soda/Sweets Tax potentially
PostPosted: Thu Jun 14, 2012 2:38 pm 
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too nuanced; didn't read

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 Post subject: Re: New Federal Soda/Sweets Tax potentially
PostPosted: Fri Jun 15, 2012 8:08 pm 
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broken iris wrote:
Human Bass wrote:
But this would be a quite hardcore concern, the fact remains that a bunch of veggies, fruits and roots and some kind of meat (be it fish, pork, chicken, beef) is not really expensive at all, actually it's cheaper than a fast food meal.


That's not always true. The cost transporting food, storing, and preparing it is not low. The cost of the McDonald's Dollar Menu is low. For price sensitive consumers, especially people who don't hang out on message boards all day at work, it's hard to sell to say 'go home and cook'. It is their choice not to cook, but it's a combination of many factors other than just material inputs.


The food obtained by Mcdonalds isn't transported, stored and prepared? It magically appears? No way a food already cooked and with a decent profit margin (specially the potatoes) is cheaper than buying them raw in a super market.

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 Post subject: Re: New Federal Soda/Sweets Tax potentially
PostPosted: Fri Jun 15, 2012 8:31 pm 
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Human Bass wrote:
No way a food already cooked and with a decent profit margin (specially the potatoes) is cheaper than buying them raw in a super market.
that's sort of what i was getting at earlier. the process of making french fries dominates the potato market to the point where its incredibly cheap and profitable for fast food eateries. which actually works counter to the raw potato industry b/c raw potatoes don't fetch the same buyers. this cycle stifles the "whole food" industry and rewards those that cater to the fast food giants (i.e. those that cover the costs of preparing them into fries and freezing them before McDonald's even buys them).

and more specifically to your statement, the processed, already cooked fries have additives and preservatives w/in them that make them last much longer than "raw in a super market." so yes, transportation costs are similar, but the added costs of processing the foods (done before they're sold so very very cheap) do not equate to the raw food not being bought (after they've already been purchased so they go as a loss to the supermarket).

i'm basing all this on my reading of Fast Food Nation, which was a few years ago now, so, as always, i could be quite mistaken.

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 Post subject: Re: New Federal Soda/Sweets Tax potentially
PostPosted: Fri Jun 15, 2012 9:32 pm 
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I do not favor any ban or tax over junk food at all. But the idea of fast food being for the poor is absurd. What actually happened is that fast food become affordable enough for poor, something that hasn't happened yet in a lot of places. Truly poor people are glad if they have rice, beans and some 2nd rate beef to eat everyday.

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 Post subject: Re: New Federal Soda/Sweets Tax potentially
PostPosted: Fri Jun 15, 2012 9:40 pm 
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Human Bass wrote:
I do not favor any ban or tax over junk food at all. But the idea of fast food being for the poor is absurd. What actually happened is that fast food become affordable enough for poor, something that hasn't happened yet in a lot of places. Truly poor people are glad if they have rice, beans and some 2nd rate beef to eat everyday.
to be fair, poor USAians aren't complaining about this, b/c as you said, they're happy to have "food" to eat.

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 Post subject: Re: New Federal Soda/Sweets Tax potentially
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Human Bass wrote:
broken iris wrote:
Human Bass wrote:
But this would be a quite hardcore concern, the fact remains that a bunch of veggies, fruits and roots and some kind of meat (be it fish, pork, chicken, beef) is not really expensive at all, actually it's cheaper than a fast food meal.

That's not always true. The cost transporting food, storing, and preparing it is not low. The cost of the McDonald's Dollar Menu is low. For price sensitive consumers, especially people who don't hang out on message boards all day at work, it's hard to sell to say 'go home and cook'. It is their choice not to cook, but it's a combination of many factors other than just material inputs.


The food obtained by Mcdonalds isn't transported, stored and prepared? It magically appears? No way a food already cooked and with a decent profit margin (specially the potatoes) is cheaper than buying them raw in a super market.


The food obtained by McD's is transported, stored, and prepared, but not by the consumer. All of that cost is born by the producers and the corporation, meaning that even though the cost of raw potatoes at the store is in many cases lower, the opportunity cost of making food is much greater than buying food from a drive through McD's, so many consumers choose the short term time gain over the long term health benefit. This is the basic economic principle behind fast food services. By scaling production to the levels McDonald's and other chains have, the cost to produce crap food in large volume yields goes down, meaning they can lower prices, making an even more attractive bargain for the consumer.

The poor (American poor, not the global standard for 'poor') can quickly become hooked on the economic bargain that fast food presents. It's a fatty-salty-sweet hamburger, french fry, Coke combo for $3.18 that takes under 15 minutes to purchase, consume, and clean up that can be eaten almost anywhere. That frees up time to spend with children and family, do house work, complain about the 10 club, or get to a job.

I am not advocating fast food for the poor, I just think it's better to try and understand the economic motives behind the over-consumption of it, and by extension things like Coke and Pepsi, than to just go around banning things that will just be substituted with something else equally as bad if not worse.

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 Post subject: Re: New Federal Soda/Sweets Tax potentially
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broken iris wrote:
Human Bass wrote:
broken iris wrote:
Human Bass wrote:
But this would be a quite hardcore concern, the fact remains that a bunch of veggies, fruits and roots and some kind of meat (be it fish, pork, chicken, beef) is not really expensive at all, actually it's cheaper than a fast food meal.

That's not always true. The cost transporting food, storing, and preparing it is not low. The cost of the McDonald's Dollar Menu is low. For price sensitive consumers, especially people who don't hang out on message boards all day at work, it's hard to sell to say 'go home and cook'. It is their choice not to cook, but it's a combination of many factors other than just material inputs.


The food obtained by Mcdonalds isn't transported, stored and prepared? It magically appears? No way a food already cooked and with a decent profit margin (specially the potatoes) is cheaper than buying them raw in a super market.


The food obtained by McD's is transported, stored, and prepared, but not by the consumer. All of that cost is born by the producers and the corporation, meaning that even though the cost of raw potatoes at the store is in many cases lower, the opportunity cost of making food is much greater than buying food from a drive through McD's, so many consumers choose the short term time gain over the long term health benefit. This is the basic economic principle behind fast food services. By scaling production to the levels McDonald's and other chains have, the cost to produce crap food in large volume yields goes down, meaning they can lower prices, making an even more attractive bargain for the consumer.

The poor (American poor, not the global standard for 'poor') can quickly become hooked on the economic bargain that fast food presents. It's a fatty-salty-sweet hamburger, french fry, Coke combo for $3.18 that takes under 15 minutes to purchase, consume, and clean up that can be eaten almost anywhere. That frees up time to spend with children and family, do house work, complain about the 10 club, or get to a job.

I am not advocating fast food for the poor, I just think it's better to try and understand the economic motives behind the over-consumption of it, and by extension things like Coke and Pepsi, than to just go around banning things that will just be substituted with something else equally as bad if not worse.


I think, obviously, there is another level of poverty in America that many of you aren't aware of. Having been in the grocery bidniss for 25+ years, I can tell you that, factually, there are many American poor who don't eat fast food because they can't buy it with food stamps; it's viewed as a relative luxury.

Which, of course, is the reason I brought up the food stamp/obesity connection, which seems to be irrefutable, unlike the food desert studies, which will tend to break down, depending on your defintion of "food desert".

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