WASHINGTON – The Washington Post is skeptical when it comes to recognizing the causes of obesity and American’s poor eating habits, and offered a myth-busting write-up of conventional wisdom earlier this week.
- Food deserts are prominent in poor neighborhoods: Despite recent efforts by Michelle Obama to eradicate food deserts, “the prevalence of food deserts is almost certainly overstated,” the Post wrote, with 93 percent of “desert” dwellers having access to a car – and thus produce. Additionally, it cited a study by the Archives of Internal Medicine from earlier this year that measured the impact of access to fresh food on diet. The results: a lack of convenient produce isn’t the problem for obese Americans; rather, diets are the result of pervasive food cultures.
- Advertising forces unhealthy food choices: The evils of junk food advertising are not universally accepted. The Institute of Medicine, a division of the National Academy of Sciences, has concluded “current evidence is not sufficient to arrive at any finding about a causal relationship from television advertising to adiposity [excess weight] among children and youth.”
- Healthy foods are expensive foods: This perhaps holds true 100% of the time for Whole Foods shoppers, but a survey by the USDA found that, by weight, bottled water is cheaper than soda, low-fat milk is cheaper than high-fat milk, and whole fruit is cheaper than candy. The finding is echoed by the new York Times’ Mark Bittman, who writes the idea that junk food is cheaper than whole foods is “just plain wrong.”
- Consumers need more nutritional information: Recent studies have revealed that menu labeling does not result in healthier food choices. Indeed, a 2009 New York University study found no improvement in eating habits after the introduction of mandatory menu labeling in local restaurants.
- Low-income neighborhoods have too many QSRs: The same study that found increased access to produce did not improve one’s diet also revealed that proximity to QSRs had a modest effect, mainly limited to low-income men.