Tuesday, February 2, 2010
When our parents were in college, the sight of an obese person was a rarity. Today, those who are excessively overweight are no longer considered a minority.
The National Institute of Health found that 64.5 percent of Americans are overweight and nearly a third of the population is clinically obese.
Although these numbers are already staggering, the country is only getting fatter. By 2015, 75 percent of Americans are expected to be overweight and 41 percent obese according to the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
With numbers like these, the argument that individual irresponsibility or lack of self-control is the sole cause of the obesity epidemic would be irrational. Although there is certainly some individual fault, America’s eating problem can be seen in the center aisles of the everyday grocery store and the absurdly low prices of fast food items.
This connection is no coincidence. As author Michael Pollan frankly put in an interview with Christian Science Monitor, “We are subsidizing obesity.”
U.S. crop subsidies were initially used to ensure the financial survival of farmers and thwart off famine during the great depression. Now, though, crop subsidies serve a different purpose.
Today, the most highly subsidized crop is corn. Corn subsidies jumped from around $2.5 in 2004 to more than $9 billion dollars in the past two years. As a result, junk food products containing subsidized-corn ingredients are extremely cheap. This skews the food market for costumers to purchase unhealthy foods.
Anyone gulping a Coke, biting into a KFC drumstick, munching on a Twinkie or partaking in all three, is ingesting some form of processed corn. Among the most lethal—and popular—of the corn concoctions is high-fructose corn syrup. This serves as a fatty sweetener found in soft drinks, yogurts, cookies, salad dressing and countless other products.
Meanwhile, vegetables and other healthy selections in the grocery store are either imported from foreign countries or their producers receive little to no aid from the government.
The prices tell the story. For low-income families, the rational choice among the grocery aisles would be the cheap, less-healthy foods instead of expensive vegetables. Not surprisingly, poverty is one of the most prominent indicators for higher obesity rates.
Food production companies catering to the fast food industry use subsidized corn to feed their animals because it’s cheap. In turn, fast food companies use subsidized ingredients to create food-like items on the dollar menu.
Although many of these junk-food items may seem cheap at first, we are all paying the price. With cancers, diabetes, heart disease, and countless other health problems that arise from an unhealthy diet, it is estimated that we are paying more than $75 billion a year because of our poor eating habits.
Taxpayers are paying corporations to cook for us. Consequently, companies have created a system that provides extremely cheap items containing three ingredients that our bodies are hardwired to love: salt, sugar and fat. We are all getting sick because of it.
— Katz is a junior from Overland Park in creative writing and political science.
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