In a couple of recent posts, including part six of Character vs. Chemistry, I wrote that the Grand Plans designed by The Anointed to battle obesity will fail because those plans are based on the belief that weight loss is about character, not chemistry. Well, in the interest of fairness, I feel obligated to point out that not every Grand Plan imposed on us by The Anointed fails because of biochemical ignorance. Most fail because of economic ignorance.
In fact, to believe that the typical Grand Plan proposed by The Anointed will actually work, you pretty much have to be an economic illiterate. You have to believe, for example, that young people who already refuse to buy inexpensive health insurance will flock to buy insurance that costs three times as much if you just run some cute ads encouraging them to spend the holidays wearing pajamas and drinking hot chocolate and #GetTalking with their parents about insurance. That’s how The Anointed believe it should work, so by gosh, that’s how it will work.
Which brings me another Grand Plan to battle obesity: spending taxpayer money to make sure plenty of fruits and vegetables are available in poor neighborhoods. That’s why so many poor people are fat, ya see … they don’t have access to the magical fruits and vegetables that guarantee weight loss. And of course, if we just make the magical fruits and vegetables available, poor people will flock to buy them (elbowing young people flocking to buy expensive insurance out of the way in the process), eat those vegetables, and then lose weight. That’s how The Anointed believe it should work, so by gosh, that’s how it will work.
If you’re a long-time reader, you may recall that I’ve pointed out the economic fallacies in that Grand Plan before. Here’s what I wrote in a post three years ago:
Here’s a simple economics lesson: businesses don’t determine what consumers will buy. Consumer behavior determines what businesses will produce and sell. If fast food restaurants thrive in poor neighborhoods while stores that sell fresh fruit and vegetables don’t, there’s a good reason for it. Using tax dollars to bring more fruits and vegetables to areas where people don’t buy fruits and vegetables isn’t going to reduce childhood obesity. It’s just going to lead to a lot of rotten fruits and vegetables.
In fact, one corner-store owner in Philadelphia agreed, at the urging of The Anointed, to sell 15-cent bags of apple slices so poor kids would eat more fruit. He ended up throwing most of them away – at a loss of $500 to his business.
Here’s what I wrote in another post two years ago:
Even if we’re talking about neighborhoods where there truly aren’t as many vegetables being sold, people get the causality backwards. The local residents aren’t fat because they don’t have access to vegetables. The vegetables aren’t available because people don’t buy them.
… Here’s what people like Mrs. Obama can’t seem to grasp: if enough people in those neighborhoods wanted lettuce and fruit in their kids’ lunches, plenty of greedy capitalists would happily move in to sell them.
… No problem then. The government’s on the job and planning a comprehensive response. That of course means a really expensive and ultimately futile response.
Well, I guess that depends on your definition of really expensive. Since I don’t work in the federal government, a figure of, say, $500 million sounds to me like a huge waste if some comprehensive response doesn’t work. (I mean, geez, imagine if you spent nearly double that on a crappy web site that didn’t work and then had to go spend even more to get it fixed.)
But of course, part of what makes it so awesomely wonderful about being a member of The Anointed is that you get to spend other people’s money to institute your Grand Plans. No need to start small to test your theory. No need to try opening Uncle Sam’s Cheep Fruits and Veggie Stand in a few poor neighborhoods to see if people eat more vegetables and lose weight. No need to stock some existing grocery stores with cheap fruit and track the sales. Nope, if you’re a member of The Anointed, you may as well go whole-hog and plunk down $500 million in taxpayer dollars.
So here are the latest results:
With the obesity epidemic in full swing and millions of American living in neighborhoods where fruits and vegetables are hard to come by, the Obama administration thought it saw a solution: fund stores that will stock fresh, affordable produce in these deprived areas.
But now, three years and $500 million into the federal Healthy Food Financing Initiative, there’s a problem: A study suggests it’s not working.
Adding supermarkets to areas with short supplies of fresh produce does not lead to improvements in residents’ diets or health outcomes, according to a report published Monday in the February issue of Health Affairs.
So The Anointed in government thought they saw an untapped market for fruits and vegetables that the greedy capitalists somehow missed, but it turns out they were wrong. Boy, I’ll bet nobody saw that coming.
When a grocery store was opened in one Philadelphia food desert, 26.7 percent of residents made it their main grocery store and 51.4 percent indicated using it for any food shopping, the report found. But among the population that used the new supermarket, the researchers saw no significant improvement in BMI, fruit and vegetable intake, or perceptions of food accessibility, although there was a significant improvement in perception of accessibility to fruits and vegetables.
Well, if people perceive that they have more access to fruits and vegetables without actually buying them, that’s certainly worth $500 million … although it would have been cheaper to just run TV ads telling them that fruits and vegetables were in great supply.
The report was authored by a team of researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Penn State University’s departments of sociology, anthropology, and demography. The study was funded by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences with support from the Population Research Institute, although neither had a hand in the research design, collection, or analysis.
Awesome. So we’re spending taxpayer money to study why spending taxpayer money on yet another Grand Plan didn’t work. Is this a great country or what?
The study needs to be replicated in other neighborhoods and other parts of the United States to confirm or refute these findings, said lead researcher Steven Cummins, professor of population health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. The results do, however, mirror findings in the U.K., where researchers created a similar comparison of two neighborhoods in Scotland and observed no net effect on fruit and vegetable intake.
Wow. It’s almost as if the laws of economics apply all over the world. But we don’t know that for sure, so we really need to spend more taxpayer money to confirm that spending taxpayer money on yet another Grand Plan didn’t work.
And if the conclusion is borne out, it would suggest that policymakers rethink the Healthy Food Financing Initiative if they want to promote healthier eating and healthier citizens.
Hmmm, let’s see if I can remember what The Anointed conclude when a Grand Plan fails … okay, it came to me:
- The plan was good but people didn’t implement it correctly because they’re stupid.
- The plan was undermined by people who opposed it because they’re evil.
- The plan didn’t go far enough – we need to do same thing again only bigger.
Cummins said in an email that lawmakers ought to consider policies that will change community behavior to incorporate healthy food into everyday diets.
“These might include economic initiatives such as taxes on unhealthy foods and subsidies on healthy foods, marketing initiatives that focus on in-store promotion of healthy food, and programs that focus on skills related to buying and cooking components of a balanced diet,” Cummins said.
Yeah, what we need to do is spend even more taxpayer money trying to tell people what to eat – because it’s worked so well so far. Then if that doesn’t work, we can spend more taxpayer money to study why spending taxpayer didn’t work. Oh, and let’s tax the unhealthy foods too.
Anyone care to bet that The Anointed would correctly identify the “unhealthy” foods?
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We’ve posted the first speaker, Dr. Eric Westman,
from our Central Coast Nutrition Conference on
Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbwUWNg9M9U&feature=youtu.be
Hope you like it.
As a genuine poor person, I can explain to the experts exactly why I crave fast food and not fresh food:
1. Storage and prep space — scarcer than they probably think
2. Tired. Must have energy. Now.
3. Treats represent celebration and care, whereas simple fare represents fear and scarcity. Depressed = craving something to cheer me up.
4. Portability. My workplaces rarely have a place to keep a homemade lunch, and the commute is a long walk or bus ride, often in the heat. Spillage and spoilage are big issues.
5. Time. I often find myself with a few minutes to get out of a building, across a parking lot, across a boulevard, into a food place, to the head of the line, buy food and eat, and get back. A few minutes total. Cook? How?
I can get fresh veggies. I like fresh veggies. But my life just doesn’t always have room for them.
Tom
You accept that the govt can influence food choices (eg food pyramid) and food pricing/availability (subsidies etc) – in other words, the govt can affect what people eat.
You also point out that ‘overall health-consciousness’ is a factor in unhealthy eating. In other words, people need further information and education (indeed, your site is all about your progress toward educating yourself and others).
Thus there does appear to be a potential role for government in this equation – or a role for some form of education/information dissemination.
So I’m wondering whether your view is:
a. the govt shouldnt be involved at all, and we should let people do their own research. If they can’t/wont/do not understand that research, then thats their problem;
b. the govt at the moment is making things worse (because it is giving out the wrong information) and therefore they shouldnt be involved unless and until they get the right information, but if they provide the correct advice then you wouldnt have an issue*; or
c. the US govt is so distorted, with subsidies/interest groups/vested interests that it can never give good advice so (b) is never going to be achieved so the govt should just get out of the whole field.
(*its off topic a bit, but I do feel that for many people, following the food pyramid will not make them obese. It will not help them lose weight, but it will prevent them gaining weight. If followed – which is often isnt. Low carb may be better for more people than the food pyramid.)
c. would be closest to my opinion. As I pointed out in my most recent speech, before the government got involved in the health-advice business, we did fine relying on the Wisdom of Crowds to decide what we should eat. And as Weston A. Price pointed out in his book, it was wisdom passed down from generation to generation that told “primitive” people which foods kept them healthy.
We’ve posted the first speaker, Dr. Eric Westman,
from our Central Coast Nutrition Conference on
Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BbwUWNg9M9U&feature=youtu.be
Hope you like it.
Tom,
You and I are both professional software developers. I presume you’ve done test-driven-development, where you provide automated tests to ensure that your code does what you intend it to do. If the tests pass, your code can be said to be working properly. If your tests fail, then the code isn’t working and needs to be fixed.
I propose we demand Test-Driven-Legislation. At the front of every law passed is a simple one paragraph statement describing its expected outcome, along with an objective test to determine its success or failure. If a law does not achieve its outcome within a reasonable amount of time, as indicated in its test, it is automatically repealed.
I suppose we might see such a thing right after we see the paragraph at the beginning of each bill citing the constitutional authority under which it is proposed.
Thomas Sowell pointed out in “Intellectuals and Society” that intellectuals get away with their wacky ideas partly because the results aren’t known for years or even decades, whereas in fields like engineering and software development, your design either works or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, nobody cares how eloquently you can explain why it should work.
If every law had to cite the Constitution to justify its reason to exist, we could probably skip that whole testing thing. Most of the stupid laws imposed by The Anointed would never pass the Constitution test in the first place.
Actually Tom I have a thought – I’ve noticed that since I went off wheat/grains my tastebuds have improved steadily and as I am able to really taste salads with a bit of good dressing and butter etc I happily eat them, in fact make sure to eat some.
I think it might make a difference or is at least significant.
I prefer meat and eggs and cheese if I don’t feel great – it seems to be something I can do that doesn’ take much effort (slight addictive element too) – but I do notice I digest better with vegetables but sometimes it’s more of a conscious choice to actually get them or choose them. Vegetables/salads seems to be a higher-order mental choice, but when I eat them I am invariably happy that I ate them even if I automatically go for protein with no veg sometimes.
Tom,
You and I are both professional software developers. I presume you’ve done test-driven-development, where you provide automated tests to ensure that your code does what you intend it to do. If the tests pass, your code can be said to be working properly. If your tests fail, then the code isn’t working and needs to be fixed.
I propose we demand Test-Driven-Legislation. At the front of every law passed is a simple one paragraph statement describing its expected outcome, along with an objective test to determine its success or failure. If a law does not achieve its outcome within a reasonable amount of time, as indicated in its test, it is automatically repealed.
I suppose we might see such a thing right after we see the paragraph at the beginning of each bill citing the constitutional authority under which it is proposed.
Thomas Sowell pointed out in “Intellectuals and Society” that intellectuals get away with their wacky ideas partly because the results aren’t known for years or even decades, whereas in fields like engineering and software development, your design either works or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, nobody cares how eloquently you can explain why it should work.
If every law had to cite the Constitution to justify its reason to exist, we could probably skip that whole testing thing. Most of the stupid laws imposed by The Anointed would never pass the Constitution test in the first place.
Actually Tom I have a thought – I’ve noticed that since I went off wheat/grains my tastebuds have improved steadily and as I am able to really taste salads with a bit of good dressing and butter etc I happily eat them, in fact make sure to eat some.
I think it might make a difference or is at least significant.
I prefer meat and eggs and cheese if I don’t feel great – it seems to be something I can do that doesn’ take much effort (slight addictive element too) – but I do notice I digest better with vegetables but sometimes it’s more of a conscious choice to actually get them or choose them. Vegetables/salads seems to be a higher-order mental choice, but when I eat them I am invariably happy that I ate them even if I automatically go for protein with no veg sometimes.
@Steve:
“So, theoretically, they could just take the subsidies from the grain farmers and give it to the fruit and veggie farmers since they will never get rid of subsidies.”
That can’t happen. Fruit and veggie farmers don’t need a new $1 million combine every couple of years, or need tons of fertilizer and pesticides every year. And real fruits and vegetables don’t need to be chemically treated and processed to be turned into something that will pass as edible.
Keep in mind, it’s not really the grain farmers being subsidized, it’s the chemical, equipment, and processing companies.
If you want to drastically improve Americans’ health and wealth in less than a year, just revoke the entire farm bill, which passes all of those subsidies through the farmer conduit on one side and then passes out food stamps so poor folks will keep buying the mac n’ cheese on the other side.
Instead, as Tom points out, it’s a guaranteed bet that they’ll just keep making it bigger.
It’s a crying shame, but hey — more bacon for us.
Cheers
According to the food desert map, I live in a food desert. This is incorrect since there is a full service IGA grocery store with a decent selection of fresh fruits and veggies less than a mile away. It’s an easy walk, too.
Or during the summer, there’s always the backyard garden. If summer ever gets here this year, that is.
If you’re in a desert, that store with the fruits and vegetables might be a mirage.
@Steve:
“So, theoretically, they could just take the subsidies from the grain farmers and give it to the fruit and veggie farmers since they will never get rid of subsidies.”
That can’t happen. Fruit and veggie farmers don’t need a new $1 million combine every couple of years, or need tons of fertilizer and pesticides every year. And real fruits and vegetables don’t need to be chemically treated and processed to be turned into something that will pass as edible.
Keep in mind, it’s not really the grain farmers being subsidized, it’s the chemical, equipment, and processing companies.
If you want to drastically improve Americans’ health and wealth in less than a year, just revoke the entire farm bill, which passes all of those subsidies through the farmer conduit on one side and then passes out food stamps so poor folks will keep buying the mac n’ cheese on the other side.
Instead, as Tom points out, it’s a guaranteed bet that they’ll just keep making it bigger.
It’s a crying shame, but hey — more bacon for us.
Cheers
According to the food desert map, I live in a food desert. This is incorrect since there is a full service IGA grocery store with a decent selection of fresh fruits and veggies less than a mile away. It’s an easy walk, too.
Or during the summer, there’s always the backyard garden. If summer ever gets here this year, that is.
If you’re in a desert, that store with the fruits and vegetables might be a mirage.
Yikes you are going to not like this comment so I apologize in advance…but I have to add it… Government intervention in respect of food safety is important to our food supply. For example pasteurization of milk has reduced exposure to infections which were common place at the turn of the 20th century such as typhoid fever, bovine tuberculosis, diphtheria, and severe streptococcal infections. You even wrote about being apprehensive about making raw egg nog for your girls and you opted out for pasteurized eggs. So my point is I don’t think all government interventions are harmful to our health.
Reference:
Tauxe, R. V. (2001). Food safety and irradiation: Protecting the public from foodborne infections. Emerging Infectious Disease,7(3). Retrieved from http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/7/7/pdfs/01-7706.pdf)
As a small-government libertarian, I don’t view government inspection of the food supply as the worst example of needless government by any stretch. But I also doubt it’s necessary in a modern society. The most rigorous tests for consumer-product safety are conducted by Underwriters Laboratories, which is funded by the insurance industry, which in turn won’t provide liability insurance to manufacturers whose products don’t pass the UL tests. There’s no reason a analogous organization for food safety wouldn’t pop up in the absence of the FDA. And even the author of “Fast Food Nation” noted that McDonald’s food-safety standards are more rigorous than the FDA’s or USDA’s — because McDonald’s has a huge incentive not to poison its customers.
I admire your response tremendously for two reasons. First, what you stated is enlightening my perception of business and government, and second, you did not bite my head off with criticism for stating an opinion.
I only bite people’s heads off if they ask for it. Disagreeing with me or expressing another opinion respectfully isn’t asking for it by any means.
Yikes you are going to not like this comment so I apologize in advance…but I have to add it… Government intervention in respect of food safety is important to our food supply. For example pasteurization of milk has reduced exposure to infections which were common place at the turn of the 20th century such as typhoid fever, bovine tuberculosis, diphtheria, and severe streptococcal infections. You even wrote about being apprehensive about making raw egg nog for your girls and you opted out for pasteurized eggs. So my point is I don’t think all government interventions are harmful to our health.
Reference:
Tauxe, R. V. (2001). Food safety and irradiation: Protecting the public from foodborne infections. Emerging Infectious Disease,7(3). Retrieved from http://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/7/7/pdfs/01-7706.pdf)
As a small-government libertarian, I don’t view government inspection of the food supply as the worst example of needless government by any stretch. But I also doubt it’s necessary in a modern society. The most rigorous tests for consumer-product safety are conducted by Underwriters Laboratories, which is funded by the insurance industry, which in turn won’t provide liability insurance to manufacturers whose products don’t pass the UL tests. There’s no reason a analogous organization for food safety wouldn’t pop up in the absence of the FDA. And even the author of “Fast Food Nation” noted that McDonald’s food-safety standards are more rigorous than the FDA’s or USDA’s — because McDonald’s has a huge incentive not to poison its customers.
I admire your response tremendously for two reasons. First, what you stated is enlightening my perception of business and government, and second, you did not bite my head off with criticism for stating an opinion.
I only bite people’s heads off if they ask for it. Disagreeing with me or expressing another opinion respectfully isn’t asking for it by any means.
@Patti
“pasteurization of milk has reduced exposure to infections which were common place at the turn of the 20th century such as typhoid fever, bovine tuberculosis, diphtheria, and severe streptococcal infections.”
Which diseases and outbreaks, of course, showed up in milk after dairy operators “industrialized” and started bringing cows into large enclosed confinement operations in the city, bunching them together in filthy conditions and feeding them crap.
Instead of suing these operators out of existence and letting consumers get the message that they should be watching where their milk comes from, the gubmint stepped in with mandatory pasteurization.
In other words, let “Big Milk” keep the disease-promoting conditions, just kill the pathogens down to an acceptable level. Plus, since every “solution” the government develops has to be “one size fits all,” and that size has to accommodate lots of bureaucrats and rules and paperwork, it helped kill off the small dairy/raw milk folks where it wasn’t banned outright.
I’d recommend anyone interested in the raw/pasteurized milk history and debate check out the Weston A Price Foundation to get the real story.
Cheers!
I second that suggestion. Sally Fallon & company make it pretty clear that pasteurized & homogenized (i.e. processed) milk is not better for us than raw milk from a 100% grass-fed cow. If you’re comparing p&h milk to raw milk from cows raised in squalid barns with no sunlight, force-fed corn & cardboard, and had chalk added to its product…well, who the hell wants to drink that?
Eat Fat, Lose Fat (Sally’s book coauthored with Dr. Mary Enig) tells the story of how pasteurization coincided with improvement in industrial cow conditions–the latter of which likely made most of the improvement in the milk, but the former got all the credit.
Odd, the food deserts in my town (from http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-access-research-atlas/go-to-the-atlas.aspx) are, in my experience, not particularly desert-like…
The biggest area is served by a number of small groceries and is less than a 3-min drive from a chain grocery store… Another area is mostly a high school’s large property and some undeveloped forest/farmland.
Maybe the biggest problem with these studies is that they didn’t identify “food deserts” in the first place?
I’m starting to think some of these deserts are mirages.
@Patti
“pasteurization of milk has reduced exposure to infections which were common place at the turn of the 20th century such as typhoid fever, bovine tuberculosis, diphtheria, and severe streptococcal infections.”
Which diseases and outbreaks, of course, showed up in milk after dairy operators “industrialized” and started bringing cows into large enclosed confinement operations in the city, bunching them together in filthy conditions and feeding them crap.
Instead of suing these operators out of existence and letting consumers get the message that they should be watching where their milk comes from, the gubmint stepped in with mandatory pasteurization.
In other words, let “Big Milk” keep the disease-promoting conditions, just kill the pathogens down to an acceptable level. Plus, since every “solution” the government develops has to be “one size fits all,” and that size has to accommodate lots of bureaucrats and rules and paperwork, it helped kill off the small dairy/raw milk folks where it wasn’t banned outright.
I’d recommend anyone interested in the raw/pasteurized milk history and debate check out the Weston A Price Foundation to get the real story.
Cheers!
I second that suggestion. Sally Fallon & company make it pretty clear that pasteurized & homogenized (i.e. processed) milk is not better for us than raw milk from a 100% grass-fed cow. If you’re comparing p&h milk to raw milk from cows raised in squalid barns with no sunlight, force-fed corn & cardboard, and had chalk added to its product…well, who the hell wants to drink that?
Eat Fat, Lose Fat (Sally’s book coauthored with Dr. Mary Enig) tells the story of how pasteurization coincided with improvement in industrial cow conditions–the latter of which likely made most of the improvement in the milk, but the former got all the credit.
Odd, the food deserts in my town (from http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/food-access-research-atlas/go-to-the-atlas.aspx) are, in my experience, not particularly desert-like…
The biggest area is served by a number of small groceries and is less than a 3-min drive from a chain grocery store… Another area is mostly a high school’s large property and some undeveloped forest/farmland.
Maybe the biggest problem with these studies is that they didn’t identify “food deserts” in the first place?
I’m starting to think some of these deserts are mirages.
CNN is about a half-step above a celebrity gossip magazine at this point but for some reason I still go there occasionally. This morning had a great piece on how we’re all about to get a lot healthier.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/19/health/time-cholesterol-statins/index.html
13 million more people on statins! Could just have bacon and eggs and stop cramming sugar down your throat but powerful drugs are better!
I’m preparing a post on exactly that subject.
CNN is about a half-step above a celebrity gossip magazine at this point but for some reason I still go there occasionally. This morning had a great piece on how we’re all about to get a lot healthier.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/03/19/health/time-cholesterol-statins/index.html
13 million more people on statins! Could just have bacon and eggs and stop cramming sugar down your throat but powerful drugs are better!
I’m preparing a post on exactly that subject.
Interestingly, the evil corporate fast food giant McDonalds has been offering Happy Meal substitutions of milk or juice instead of soda and green salad or apple slices instead of french fries for at least a decade where I live (in the San Francisco Bay area.) McDonalds apparently figured out that parents would buy more Happy Meals for their kids if McDonalds offered those healthier substitution choices, thus McDonalds — in its evil, profit-motivated way — began offering those substitution choices in order to sell more Happy Meals and make more money.
My pediatrician gives me grief for how often we eat at fast food restaurants but I think a cheeseburger with milk and green salad/apple slices is pretty healthy. We are also big fans of getting a side of pintos and cheese with a scoop of rice in it from Taco Bell ($1.29) again with milk.
People who blame fast food for the nation’s health issues need to stand in line at a grocery store and watch what most people buy. Most of it is carbage.
Interestingly, the evil corporate fast food giant McDonalds has been offering Happy Meal substitutions of milk or juice instead of soda and green salad or apple slices instead of french fries for at least a decade where I live (in the San Francisco Bay area.) McDonalds apparently figured out that parents would buy more Happy Meals for their kids if McDonalds offered those healthier substitution choices, thus McDonalds — in its evil, profit-motivated way — began offering those substitution choices in order to sell more Happy Meals and make more money.
My pediatrician gives me grief for how often we eat at fast food restaurants but I think a cheeseburger with milk and green salad/apple slices is pretty healthy. We are also big fans of getting a side of pintos and cheese with a scoop of rice in it from Taco Bell ($1.29) again with milk.
People who blame fast food for the nation’s health issues need to stand in line at a grocery store and watch what most people buy. Most of it is carbage.