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| Banning the Purchase of Soda with Food Stamps is Not Enough |
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| Written by Richard | ||||||||
| Friday, 08 October 2010 06:40 | ||||||||
 The Mayor of New York would like to ban the use of federal food stamps to purchase soda. According to New York City, there is a strong colloralation between the consumption of soda and the incidence of obesity. Therefore it makes sense to prevent poor fat people getting fatter.There is of course some logic to this. No one can really doubt that soda makes people fat and it makes them sick, so should only be consumed very occassionally. Any reduction in the amount of soda drank would certainly be better for New Yorkers, and making that soda more expensive is a good way to reduce its availability. Yet arguably, the position taken is does not go far enough for two reasons. The first is that diet drinks, with chemicals such as aspartame, are exempt from this bill and secondly, oughtn't other junk foods be made ineligible for food stamps too? Artificial sweeteners may not contain the same amount of calories and sugar, but the artificial chemicals they do contain have health questions surrounding them. They may also contribute to obesity, if the body cannot process them, it may stock the chemicals in fat. Hence artificially sweetened sodas should fall under the same rule. Other junk food also brings bill health risks. How about products containing High-Fructose-Corn-Syrup? Are they good food choices? Oughn't they be banned too? Marion Nestle, a New York based nutritionist, suggests in a well argued piece that it would make more sense to make sodas relatively more expensive than fresh foods. She writes: "But if I were in charge of Food Stamps, I would much prefer incentives: make the benefit worth twice as much when spent for fresh (or single-ingredient frozen) fruits and vegetables." So this comes back to the relatively low cost of processed junk food today, that doesn't take into account the health damage costs it causes, the subsidies provided to farmers to grow the raw ingredients as they do and the environmental damage. In reality, rather than making soda expensive for the poorest, it does make sense to ensure that the cheapest choices are the healthiest ones. I suspect that Mayor Bloomberg is taking baby steps here, steps that are already controversial, but he should be applauded in at least taking these small steps. Let's hope, for New Yorkers, that this is the beginning of a long process to help people take better health choices. Images: NYC and http://www.flickr.com/photos/brwoodland/4810623697 For more insight into this topic, see these articles:
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| Last Updated on Friday, 08 October 2010 07:24 |
