Study: Healthy Eating Is Privilege of the Rich
4th August 2011
Read it.
A healthy diet is expensive and could make it difficult for Americans to meet new U.S. nutritional guidelines, according to a study published Thursday that says the government should do more to help consumers eat healthier.
*sigh* No, eating according to somebody’s bogus definition of a healthy diet is expensive. This is just another transparent ploy to get more government control over everyday life.
“We know more than ever about the science of nutrition, and yet we have not yet been able to move the needle on healthful eating,” he said.
That’s because most of what you ‘know’ ain’t so. Get back to me when ‘scientists’ stop flip-flopping on what foods are good for you and what are bad.
The government should provide help for meeting the nutritional guidelines in an affordable way.
All at taxpayer expense. The government should get out of the business of ‘nutritional guidelines’ and do its job, which is keeping the peace.
UPDATE: David Friedman agrees:
The trick is quite simple. The article pretends to be about what healthy eating costs. It is actually about what people who eat healthily spend. Higher income correlates with better education, so people who spend more also, on average, spend better, nutritionally speaking. That is no evidence that good nutrition costs more—and, as a comparison between the price of spareribs and the price of pork and beans or fruit salad would demonstrate, it often does not. Precisely the same analysis could be used to show that people who spend more on rent eat better too.
August 5th, 2011 at 11:30
Healthy eating involves fresh fruits and vegetables, whatever eating pyramid (or prabala, or rhomboid, or other shape) you espouse.
Fresh fruits and vegetables are available at supermarkets and farm markets, none of which are located in the so-named “produce deserts” wherein most of the poor dwell.
Therefore, the substance of the article is true: if you live in an upscale neighborhood, you can easily find a place where fresh fruits and vegetables are available. If you live in the heart of Detroit, you can’t find them. You could drive, maybe, but you can’t afford a car. You could take the public transportation system…oh, wait–that doesn’t go to the upscale neighborhoods. And, assuming you mirabilae dictu! find some fresh fruits and vegatables, you can’t afford to buy them. To stretch your food budget, you must buy canned or frozen stuff, because they’re cheap. Result? Obesity and type II diebetes, for which you will be roundly pilloried by your affluent “neighbors” (even though they wouldn’t dream of moving to your neighborhood.
Yet another example to match our current health-care “system”: the Rich live, the Poor die.
August 6th, 2011 at 05:29
Except that the Poor don’t die, they just get obese. “I want to live in a country where the poor people are fat.”
And if they had fresh fruits and vegetables available, they wouldn’t eat them anyway … too busy scarfing down Happy Meals, as MacDonald’s has learned by trying to sell salads and such. Presumably the ‘progressive’ answer to that is to force ‘the poor’ to eat what the commissars think they ought to eat rather than what they want. ‘Well, we’re all for choice, you understand, just not that choice.’
The ability of ‘progressives’ to ignore reality in favor of their precious mythology is a cornerstone of modern American culture.