Government Policy to Kill the Poor

A recent USDA report found that food stamp households spent about 40 cents of every dollar at the grocery store on “basic items” like meat, fruits, vegetables, milk, eggs and bread. Another 40 cents of every dollar was spent on “cereal, prepared foods, dairy products, rice and beans.” Lastly, 20 cents of each dollar was spent on a broad category of junk foods that included “sweetened beverages, desserts, salty snacks, candy and various junk food.

The findings show that the No. 1 purchases by food stamp households are soft drinks, which accounted for 5 percent of the dollars they spent on food. They spent 9.3 percent of their grocery budgets on all sweetened beverages. The federal food stamp program is a multibillion-dollar taxpayer subsidy of the soda industry and is maintained by its lobbyist army.

David Ludwig, the director of the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center at Boston Children’s Hospital, said the purpose of food stamps was to protect the health and well-being of the nation, not to ensure that poor households had ample access to sugary drinks.

The relationship between soft drink consumption and body weight is so strong that researchers calculate that for each additional soda consumed, the risk of obesity increases 1.6 times. Each daily drink added .18 points to a child's body mass index. Adolescents who consume soft drinks also display a risk of bone fractures three to four-fold higher than those who do not. Sugar and acid in soft drinks will also dissolve tooth enamel.

Sugar-free is no better. One liter of an aspartame-sweetened beverage can produce about fifty-six milligrams of methanol. When several of these beverages are consumed in a short period of time (one day, perhaps), as much as two hundred fifty milligrams of methanol are dumped into the bloodstream, or thirty-two times the EPA limit.

Sugary drinks are killing around 184,000 people each year, according to a new study. 

We now have confirmation that this massive taxpayer program is promoting all the wrong kinds of foods; we now have the data to back up the policy argument that this program needs to be massively overhauled.