Food Support Reform Needed to Fight Obesity

The food stamp pro­gram was front and cen­ter on cam­pus and on the Internet Thursday (December 22, 2011) dur­ing a ses­sion of The Forum at Harvard School of Public Health, which reg­u­larly brings experts together to dis­cuss impor­tant issues in the field. The ses­sion exam­ined reforms needed in the fed­eral government’s farm bill to improve pub­lic health. The farm bill, expected to come up for dis­cus­sion in Congress in 2012, is the fed­eral government’s major agri­cul­ture sub­sidy program.

Participants included Ludwig; Walter Willett, Fredrick John Stare Professor of Epidemiology and Nutrition and chair of the HSPH Department of Nutrition; Barry Popkin, a pro­fes­sor of nutri­tion and of eco­nom­ics at the University of North Carolina; and Gary Williams, a pro­fes­sor of agri­cul­tural eco­nom­ics at Texas A&M University. The event was mod­er­ated by for­mer Washington Post health edi­tor Abigail Trafford.

Several pan­elists blamed U.S. agri­cul­tural pol­icy over the past four decades for cre­at­ing a food sys­tem where health­ier fruits and veg­eta­bles are rel­a­tively expen­sive while high-starch, processed foods and red meats are cheap and widely avail­able. The first farm bill was passed in the 1930s as a way to help the nation’s strug­gling agri­cul­tural sec­tor, which at the time not only fed the coun­try but, in a more rural America, also pro­vided many jobs.

With ensu­ing tech­no­log­i­cal changes in the years after World War II, the United States ramped up its sub­si­dies, steer­ing pro­duc­tion toward what at the time was thought to be a healthy diet of starches and meat. Popkin said the pro­gram worked well, as illus­trated by sta­tis­tics show­ing the prices of those sta­ples came down in the ensu­ing decades, while those left alone by gov­ern­ment pol­icy — fruits and veg­eta­bles — became more expensive.

“What is cheap today is what we made cheap. What we ignored, we made more expen­sive,” Popkin said.

The prob­lem, Willett said, is that we now know that a healthy diet is not dom­i­nated by processed starches and red meat, but is just the oppo­site. A healthy diet is com­posed of whole grains, nuts, beans, fruits, and veg­eta­bles, with red meat in mod­er­a­tion and very lit­tle refined starches and added sugar. The result is that today two-thirds of Americans are over­weight or even obese, dia­betes is ris­ing across the coun­try, and in some parts of the coun­try, life expectancy is actu­ally dropping.

Click here to read the rest of this arti­cle at The Harvard Gazette.