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Recently I’ve been involved in a couple of online discussions about the cost of a nutritious diet. The crucial issue is why poor people in rich countries seem to have such unhealthy diets. One argument is about the cost of food. Another is about everything other than cost: knowledge, equipment, time, conditions.
My own opinion is that given all those other things, the externalities, a nutritious diet is actually not that expensive. But that’s just an opinion, so I went looking for information, and found it in a paper entitled Using the Thrifty Food Plan to Assess the Cost of a Nutritious Diet, published in the Journal of Consumer Affairs in 2009. The very first sentence of that paper is:
How much does a nutritious diet cost?
Parke Wilde, author of that paper, is an agricultural economist at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University in Boston, and I really enjoyed talking to him for the podcast.
Our discussion was limited to the United States and to the peculiarities of SNAP, but it is clear that other rich countries are also grappling with the difficulties of deciding what constitutes a nutritious diet and how to ensure that poor people can afford to eat it. Parke alluded to some of the crucial policy decisions, such as not allowing people to spend their SNAP benefits on things like alcohol while at the same time giving them the freedom to buy sugar-sweetened sodas if they so choose. There are incentives to buy healthier food, but even those come up against an important fact.
Unhealthy calories are much cheaper than healthy calories.[1]
One study, which I found here, looked at exactly what you can buy for a dollar. If you’re looking for a snack, a dollar’s worth of cookies will buy you 1200 calories. The same dollar on carrots gets you only 250 calories. Thirsty? A dollar of orange juice is worth 170 calories, while a dollar of sugar-sweetened soda is 875 calories. Of course calories aren’t everything. But in the short term, if you’re hungry, calories are everything.
A different version of the same sort of story is the “healthy food is more expensive” trope, which crops up regularly. In the UK, a 2014 study claimed that on average 1000 calories of “healthy” food cost about 3 times more than 1000 calories of “unhealthy” food. This kind of study – and others like it – uses government agency definitions of healthy and unhealthy but doesn’t actually take nutrition into account. The cheapest category in that study was starchy carbohydrates – which the UK’s Food Standards Agency places just behind fruit and vegetables in terms of “healthiness”. You could eat a lot of “bread, rice, potatoes and pasta” for calories and a bit of fruit and vegetables for nutrients and end up with a pretty nutritious diet.
Would you want to, though?
That’s the crux of the matter. A nutritious diet can be had for reasonably little money (given that you know how to cook and have the facilities) but you might not enjoy it all that much.
Notes
- Using the Thrifty Food Plan to Assess the Cost of a Nutritious Diet
- If you really want to get some insight into the tricky triple balancing act of foods, nutrients and cash, Parke Wilde and his collaborators have made their model available for you to play with.
- Parke Wilde’s website. A really interesting recent piece of his looked at proposals to amend SNAP to restrict access to sugar-sweetened beverages.
- The USDA’s monthly Cost of Food reports are online
- The banner photograph is from Millie Copper who tried to buy a healthy diet based on the Thrifty Food Plan costs for a couple of weeks.
- Thanks to Christopher Gifford, a great Patreon, for inspiring this episode.
- Peel an onion, and stick five or six whole cloves in it. Put it in a saucepan with about 500 gm of brown or green lentils. Add a stock cube or a spoonful of miso paste if you have some, but if you haven’t, that’s OK. Cover with water and bring to a boil. Simmer for 30–45 minutes. [2] Serve with lots of bread and a nice green salad.
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I’ve actually written at length about this before, but cannot for the life of me find it now. ↩
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You can just boil for about 5 minutes and then swaddle the whole thing in cushions or blankets, or a ready made haybox if you have one. ↩
https://media.blubrry.com/eatthispodcast/p/mange-tout.s3.amazonaws.com/2020/whole-grains.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 23:29 — 21.6MB)Subscribe: Android | Google Podcasts | RSS | More
Timely to a fault, this episode comes out a couple of days after “farmers and meat lobbyists accuse plant-based food producers of ‘cultural hijacking’”. That’s in the EU, where this week the European Parliament will vote whether to ban the phrases “veggie burger“ and “veggie sausage,“ among others. Of course the plant-based food producers will have none of it, saying that “claims of consumer confusion are ridiculous”.
Are they, though? Maybe not for meat, but definitely for whole grain foods.
A recently published study showed that in the US consumers are indeed very easily confused by whole grain labels. In part, that’s because as long as you’re not actually lying, you can say things like “made with whole grains” without saying how much. There are industry-agreed labels, but they offer a fair amount of wiggle room too. So it isn’t really surprising that consumers often cannot decide which of two foods is “healthier”.
Look carefully. There’s actually more salt than whole wheat flour in the one made with whole grains.
Parke Wilde, professor of US Food Policy at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University in Boston, told me about their research. We also talked about labels more generally.
Opponents of the EU proposals would prefer terms like “veggie disc” and “veggie tube”. I’m almost willing to bet real money that will never happen. But then there’s a whole ‘nother level of confusion, on which I do side with the farmers and the meat industry. Whatever you call them, plant-based discs and tubes are often touted as healthier alternatives, but given how much processing goes into their manufacture, and that — just like products “made with whole grains” — they may contain large quantities of things like salt, sugar and fat, are they really healthier than the red meat they might replace?
Notes
Parke Wilde’s paper is Consumer confusion about wholegrain content and healthfulness in product labels: a discrete choice experiment and comprehension assessment, in the journal Public Health Nutrition.
The episode transcript is here, thanks to supporters of the podcast.
The Whole Grain Council’s page on Government Guidance is a good place to start exploring, if you want to learn more. That’s where I got the banner photo.
Quotes about the looming EU battle from The Guardian.
An earlier episode with Parke Wilde was How much does a nutritious diet cost?
Huffduff it
📖 Read chapter one of Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O’Neil
I don’t think she’s used the specific words in the book yet, but O’Neil is fundamentally writing about social justice and transparency. To a great extent both governments and increasingly large corporations are using these Weapons of Math Destruction inappropriately. Often it may be the case that the algorithms are so opaque as to be incomprehensible by their creators/users, but, as I suspect in many cases, they’re being used to actively create social injustice by benefiting some classes and decimating others. The evolving case of Facebook’s involvement in potentially shifting the outcome of the 2016 Presidential election especially via “dark posts” is an interesting case in point with regard to these examples.
In some sense these algorithms are like viruses running rampant in a large population without the availability of antibiotics to tamp down or modify their effects. Without feedback mechanisms and the ability to see what is going on as it happens the scale issue she touches on can quickly cause even greater harm over short periods of time.
I like that one of the first examples she uses for modeling is that of preparing food for a family. It’s simple, accessible, and generic enough that the majority of people can relate directly to it. It has lots of transparency (even more than her sabermetrics example from baseball). Sadly, however, there is a large swath of the American population that is poor, uneducated, and living in horrific food deserts that they may not grasp the subtleties of even this simple model. As I was reading, it occurred to me that there is a reasonable political football that gets pushed around from time to time in many countries that relates to food and food subsidies. In the United States it’s known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (aka SNAP) and it’s regularly changing, though fortunately for many it has some nutritionists who help to provide a feedback mechanism for it. I suspect it would make a great example of the type of Weapon of Mass Destruction she’s discussing in this book. Those who are interested in a quick overview of it and some of the consequences can find a short audio introduction to it via the Eat This Podcast episode How much does a nutritious diet cost? Depends what you mean by “nutritious” or Crime and nourishment Some costs and consequences of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program which discusses an interesting crime related sub-consequence of something as simple as when SNAP benefits are distributed.
I suspect that O’Neil won’t go as far as to bring religion into her thesis, so I’ll do it for her, but I’ll do so from a more general moral philosophical standpoint which underpins much of the Judeo-Christian heritage so prevalent in our society. One of my pet peeves of moralizing (often Republican) conservatives (who often both wear their religion on their sleeves as well as beat others with it–here’s a good recent case in point) is that they never seem to follow the Golden Rule which is stated in multiple ways in the Bible including:
Matthew 25:45
In a country that (says it) values meritocracy, much of the establishment doesn’t seem to put much, if any value, into these basic principles as they would like to indicate that they do.
I’ve previously highlighted the application of mathematical game theory before briefly in relation to the Golden Rule, but from a meritocracy perspective, why can’t it operate at all levels? By this I’ll make tangential reference to Cesar Hidalgo‘s thesis in his book Why Information Grows in which he looks not at just individuals (person-bytes), but larger structures like firms/companies (firmbytes), governments, and even nations. Why can’t these larger structures have their own meritocracy? When America “competes” against other countries, why shouldn’t it be doing so in a meritocracy of nations? To do this requires that we as individuals (as well as corporations, city, state, and even national governments) need to help each other out to do what we can’t do alone. One often hears the aphorism that “a chain is only as strong as it’s weakest link”, why then would we actively go out of our way to create weak links within our own society, particularly as many in government decry the cultures and actions of other nations which we view as trying to defeat us? To me the statistical mechanics of the situation require that we help each other to advance the status quo of humanity. Evolution and the Red Queeen Hypothesis dictates that humanity won’t regress back to the mean, it may be regressing itself toward extinction otherwise.
Highlights, Quotes, & Marginalia
Chapter One – Bomb Parts: What is a Model
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You have to love the obligatory parental aphorism about making your own rules when you have your own house.Yet the US SNAP program does just this. It could be an interesting example of this type of WMD.Highlight (yellow) page 28 | Location 497-499Added on Friday, October 13, 2017 6:06:04 PM
namely: baseball, food, recidivismHighlight (yellow) page 27 | Location 489-489Added on Friday, October 13, 2017 6:08:26 PM
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Think about this for a bit. Are there other potential characteristics?Highlight (yellow) page 31 | Location 540-542Added on Friday, October 13, 2017 6:18:52 PM
This is similar to anti-class action laws and arbitration clauses that prevent classes from realizing they’re being discriminated against in the workplace or within healthcare. On behalf of insurance companies primarily, many lawmakers work to cap awards from litigation as well as to prevent class action suits which show much larger inequities that corporations would prefer to keep quiet. Some of the recent incidences like the cases of Ellen Pao, Susan J. Fowler, or even Harvey Weinstein are helping to remedy these types of things despite individuals being pressured to stay quiet so as not to bring others to the forefront and show a broader pattern of bad actions on the part of companies or individuals. (This topic could be an extended article or even book of its own.)Highlight (yellow) page 31 | Location 542-544Added on Friday, October 13, 2017 6:20:59 PM
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Guide to highlight colors
Yellow–general highlights and highlights which don’t fit under another category belowOrange–Vocabulary word; interesting and/or rare wordGreen–Reference to readBlue–Interesting QuoteGray–Typography ProblemRed–Example to work through
I’m reading this as part of Bryan Alexander’s online book club.
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Author: Chris Aldrich
I’m a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, theoretical mathematics, and big history.
I’m also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.
View all posts by Chris Aldrich
Listened to How much does a nutritious diet cost? by Jeremy Cherfas from Eat This Podcast
If possible, click to play, otherwise your browser may be unable to play this audio file.
I love that Jeremy raises the question of preparation time in discussing the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). It’s something that doesn’t seem most people would consider, but which in the modern world has become a major consideration. To some extent a lot of the growth of obesity in the U.S. is as a result of people going to restaurants and eating less healthy food out, but justifying it for the savings in time and the general convenience.
Some of this discussion reminds me of a talk I saw back in August by Sam Polk, co-founder and CEO of Everytable, a for-profit social enterprise that sells fresh, healthy ready-to-eat meals affordable for all, and founder and Executive Director of Groceryships, a Los Angeles non-profit working at the intersection of poverty and obesity. He was also the author of the book For the Love of Money: A Memoir of Family, Addiction, and a Wall Street Trader’s Journey to Redefine Success.
As I’m listening, I’m curious what these types of programs look like in other countries? How does the U.S. compare? Do those countries leverage the same types of research and come up with similar plans or are they drastically different? I’m thrilled that in the very last line of the episode, Jeremy indicates that he may explore this in the future.
I’ll also guiltily admit that while listening to this episode, I was snacking on M&M chocolate candies while drinking a sugary supplemented beverage. Perhaps I’ll pay my penance later by baking a fresh loaf of bread.
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How much does a nutritious diet cost? Depends what you mean by “nutritious” by Jeremy Cherfas from Eat This Podcast
If possible, click to play, otherwise your browser may be unable to play this audio file.
I love that Jeremy raises the question of preparation time in discussing the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). It’s something that doesn’t seem most people would consider, but which in the modern world has become a major consideration. To some extent a lot of the growth of obesity in the U.S. is as a result of people going to restaurants and eating less healthy food out, but justifying it for the savings in time and the general convenience.
Some of this discussion reminds me of a talk I saw back in August by Sam Polk, co-founder and CEO of Everytable, a for-profit social enterprise that sells fresh, healthy ready-to-eat meals affordable for all, and founder and Executive Director of Groceryships, a Los Angeles non-profit working at the intersection of poverty and obesity. He was also the author of the book For the Love of Money: A Memoir of Family, Addiction, and a Wall Street Trader’s Journey to Redefine Success.
As I’m listening, I’m curious what these types of programs look like in other countries? How does the U.S. compare? Do those countries leverage the same types of research and come up with similar plans or are they drastically different? I’m thrilled that in the very last line of the episode, Jeremy indicates that he may explore this in the future.
I’ll also guiltily admit that while listening to this episode, I was snacking on M&M chocolate candies while drinking a sugary supplemented beverage. Perhaps I’ll pay my penance later by baking a fresh loaf of bread.
Syndicated copies to:
Author: Chris Aldrich
I’m a biomedical and electrical engineer with interests in information theory, complexity, evolution, genetics, signal processing, theoretical mathematics, and big history.
I’m also a talent manager-producer-publisher in the entertainment industry with expertise in representation, distribution, finance, production, content delivery, and new media.
View all posts by Chris Aldrich
Following up on the cost of a nutritious diet, a couple of studies: obese people have different spending patterns, and whether subsidised community supported agriculture improves quality of diet.
I think it was Professor David Zilberman of UC Berkeley and his colleagues who first coined the phrase Fat taxes, thin subsidies in a 2004 paper that calculated the potential health benefits of subsidies on certain classes of fruits and vegetables. Those calculations showed that “[e]stimates of the cost per statistical life saved through such subsidies compare favorably with existing U.S. government programs.” The phrase now crops up on both sides of the debate.
The latest meta-analysis, for example, says thin subsidies and fat taxes both do what they’re intended to do, increase the consumption of healthy foods and decrease the consumption of unhealthy foods.
Nevertheless, some say that fat taxes and thin subsidies remain a bad idea because they favour wealthier consumers. Rich people already buy healthier food, so thin subsidies just reduce their food bill. Furthermore, rich people wouldn’t contribute much to the fat tax. Poorer people are buying unhealthy food, so increasing their costs with fat taxes does them no good unless they also change their purchasing habits. One way to do that, of course, is to provide education about nutrition, and there’s a prevalent view that some of the fat tax revenue could be used to provide that education. It seems a bit rum, though, to expect the poor to finance their own education through the fat tax.
Anyway, most of the research to date has looked at how poorer and richer people would respond to these various economic incentives. What if the differences in how people buy food depend more on whether they are obese or normal weight than whether they are poor or rich?
Rich fat Russians
In Russia, at least, it does. Matthias Staudigel, of the Institute of Agricultural Policy and Market Research at the University of Giessen in Germany asked How do obese people afford to be obese? Consumption strategies of Russian households in a paper published in 2012. Russia is a good place to ask the question for a couple of reaons. First, the economy fluctuated fairly wildly during the transition and through the rouble crisis of 1998. Secondly, the Russian Longitudinal Monitoring Survey combines detailed economic data with measures of height and weight for household members. So there are good measures of what household members weigh and how they spend on food under varying economic conditions.
In principle, consumers could respond to higher prices (or lower incomes) in three broad ways. They could allocate a different part of their spending to food, they could buy different amounts of specific foods and they could buy foods of different quality.
Faced with higher prices, obese households (but not those who are merely overweight or normal) tend to buy the same amount of food, but of lower quality. Differences in the amount they spend and in the amount they buy are lower or non existent. Faced with a fat tax, obese consumers (in Russia) would probably just shift to cheaper versions of the same foods. As Staudigel concludes, “policies aiming to reduce obesity should consider deviations in consumption behavior of normal and obese consumers in terms of quality”.
Poor obese Americans
In Russia, obese households are richer than overweight and normal households. They spend more in total and on food. In the US, the reverse is true. Obesity and overweight is associated more with poverty.
In the US, households headed by an obese person have a different spending pattern than those headed by an overweight or normal weight person. They spend more, percentage wise, on cheese, processed meat and meat, poultry and seafood and less on fruit, vegetables, juice, milk and yogurt and cereal and snacks. Obese shoppers allocate most of their additional spending to processed meals, processed meat and sweets. To compensate, they allocate less to fruits and vegetables.
Shoppers also differ in how they respond to price changes. In general, obese shoppers are less responsive to price changes than overweight and normal shoppers. So fat taxes, at least on the things obese shoppers buy, are not going to change their behaviour as much as might be expected.
Get real
Against the theoretical models of the economists, it’s nice to come across news of a study that plans to look at how people will respond IRL to at least one thin subsidy. The study is called Community Supported Agriculture Cost-offset Intervention to Prevent Childhood Obesity and Strengthen Local Agricultural Economies, which despite being a giant mouthful says exactly what they plan to do.
Community supported agriculture (CSA) takes many forms, but essentially participants pay a farmer upfront for a season’s worth of vegetables and fruit. The farmers get a financial guarantee and some stability, and the community gets fruit and vegetables at significantly lower cost. For a variety of reasons – such as the upfront cost of a share, inconvenient pick-up points and not knowing what to do with some of the produce – poorer communities are less likely to take part in CSA schemes, even though they probably have most to gain.
Subsidised CSA schemes could offer several benefits: better quality diets for poor people, reduced obesity, especially for children, and support for thriving local agriculture. All of that is yet to come; the article describes the initial research to design the study and how exactly they are going to encourage poorer families to participate and make use of the produce they find in their CSA boxes. It is worth bookmarking now as a repository of evidence on the many linkages among CSAs, fruits and vegetables, economics and health.