
It is somewhat frightening when one considers the unhealthy diet that most Americans have adopted these days. Incidents of obesity and diabetes are drastically on the rise to the point where these two conditions are becoming something most Americans have to look forward to, and all to often it is a condition that manifests itself in children in middle school and high school. Though diabetes can now be controlled pretty well with medical intervention the underlying fact is that it will one day it will kill those with the condition. They may go blind. Circulation problems may one day cause them to lose a leg or two. Their kidneys may eventually fail. Just because you can eat something it doesn’t make it food. Products that are bad for you are priced to encourage those with little money to buy them. Just because you can buy something is a grocery store doesn’t mean they should be eaten. What would happen if certain unhealthy foods that lack useful nutrition to humans were excluded from eligibility for payment with food stamps? If you were on food stamps and suddenly faced with the fact that you can no longer buy snack cakes wouldn’t you consider providing fruit for a snack to your family instead? It is difficult to change the shopping habits of people, but if we were to give a responsible nudge to those on a budget to make better choices, we could help prevent diet based disease down the road which will lessen the burden of the tax payers. It may sound easy on the surface, but you can bet that Hostess and Frito Lay will lobby this action to death. They may even add vitamins to their products to make them more food like, but nothing they can do can possibly turn that stuff into food. If food stamps were only able to buy unprocessed meat, eggs, bread, dairy, fruits and vegetables; an epidemic health crisis among the poor may be stopped and reversed. How about if we take this a little further? How about making it so school lunch rooms are only allowed to vend unprocessed nutritious food. The government runs or subsidizes all sorts of food programs across the country. It’s amazing when you consider just how many there are out there from Head Start to VA Hospitals. Everyone in the military has to eat. It would be to the long term advantage of the government to stop pushing processed foods. I understand that there are those who will say the government should get out of the free meal business, but the fact is that will never happen, and even if it does move food responsibility over to one of the “thousand points of light”, the government still has oversight and control of what is placed into the mouths of recipients. They need to lead the way to get America off junk. | ||||