Misplaced Priorities

It looks like the deck is stacked against a healthy diet. Obama and Congress need to connect the dots between a healthy diet, lower costs for healthcare, improvements in school grades, and less violence.

First, there's this from the NYT...

Thanks to lobbying, Congress chooses to subsidize foods that we’re supposed to eat less of.

Of course, there are surely other reasons why burgers are cheaper than salads. Whatever the cause of the pricing change, there is little doubt that many healthful foods have gotten much more expensive relative to unhealthful ones.

Then this, also from the NYT...

Unhealthful foods, with the exceptions of cookies (the blue line), have gotten a lot cheaper. Relative to the price of everything else in the economy, sodas (the orange line) are 33 percent cheaper than they were in 1978. Butter (dark brown) is 29 percent cheaper. Beer (gray) is 15 percent cheaper.

Vegetables (purple) are 41 percent more expensive. Fruits (green) are 46 percent more expensive. The price of oranges, to take one extreme example (not shown in the chart), has more than doubled, relative to everything else. So if in 1978, a bag of oranges cost the same as one big bottle of soda, today that bag costs the same as three big bottles of soda.

The average 18-year-old today is 15 pounds heavier than the average 18 year-old in the late 1970s, the average woman in her 60s is 20 pounds heavier, and the average man in his 60s is 25 pounds heavier. When you look at the chart, you start to understand why.