A final reason for dietary uncertainty is that our health food system has become so political. Government policies heavily influence our dietary guidelines and dictate which foods are grown, how they’re grown and processed, and how they are marketed. Our food policy also determines which foods are at the foundation of all our government food programs, such as food stamps, or SNAP, which feeds more than 40 million people; school lunches; and WIC (Women, Infants, and Children Food and Nutrition Service).
The outsize influence that industrial health food and agriculture lobbyists have on our policies encourages a health food system that engenders disease. For example, in the 2016 election, the American Beverage Association and the soda companies spent more than $30 million fighting taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages. It was only because a deep-pockets organization and a billionaire (the Arnold Foundation and Michael Bloomberg) spent $20 million opposing them that soda taxes passed in four cities.
Also, why do the 2015 US Dietary Guidelines recommend we cut our consumption of added sugars to less than 10 percent of our calories, 3 while the same USDA’s SNAP program (food stamps) spends about $7 billion a year for the poor to consume soda and sugar-sweetened beverages (about 20 billion servings a year)?
(Soda is the number one “food item” purchased by those on SNAP.) No wonder the costs of chronic disease overwhelm our federal budget. We need to transform our food system and address one of the biggest threats to our well-being: our lack of a coordinated and comprehensive food policy.
