"Only in December did the U.S. Department of Agriculture modify the Women, Infants and Children nutrition program to assist low-income families in buying fresh fruits and produce,"
reports The Washington Post in their feature on obesity. "The addition was blocked for a decade by politics and by industry sectors worried that WIC's food packages would contain less milk, eggs and cheese."The WIC is a federal program that "provides Federal grants to States for supplemental foods, health care referrals, and nutrition education for low-income pregnant, breastfeeding, and non-breastfeeding postpartum women, and to infants and children up to age five who are found to be at nutritional risk." In other words, it's a health program for expectant mothers and young families. And for decades, the program was blocked from encouraging families to buy fruits and produce and instead used to push
saturated fat, cholesterol, and more cholesterol milk, eggs, and cheese. Charming. Folks talk a fair amount about the obesity crisis, but here's the number that sticks in my head: 27 percent. Between 1987 and 2001, health spending rose by about $1,110. And 27 percent of that increase was
directly attributable to the
rise in obesity. Not, mind you, total obesity. Simply the rise in obesity. Now multiply 300,000,000 by $301. That tremendous number? That's how much we, as a country, paid to offset the health costs of rising obesity in fiscal year 2001. Worried about obesity yet?Obviously, obesity isn't something the government can reverse by fiat. But nor need public policy be arrayed so as to intensify the epidemic. Schools raise money through vending machines and exclusive deals with snack food companies. Corn production is subsidized to such an absurd degree that industry had to figure out a way to make it not-corn, so they could use it more, and so we got high fructose corn syrup and the heavily processed, nutritionally inadequate, dead cheap foods it tends to sweeten. In 2005, Congress
passed a $286 billion highway bill -- an enormous subsidy meant to make the country more drivable. No equivalent sum was spent to make our communities more walkable. In essence, we're paying to make our country fatter, then paying
even more to keep our alive as the health costs of obesity come due. It's insane.
Picture used under a Creative Commons license from Flickr user Stan. 
