Why do American taxpayers donate billions of dollars to support industries like sugar and meat?
The increase in caloric surplus is sufficient to explain The obesity epidemic was less a change in the quantity of food than in its quality. Access to cheap, high-calorie, low-quality convenience foods explodedand the federal government a lot juice American taxpayers spend billions of dollars in subsidies to support the sugar industry, the corn and its high-fructose corn syrup industry, and soybean production, about half of which is processed into vegetable oil and half used as cheap feed to help produce dollar-priced meat. see Below is a table of the subsidy recipients and at minute 0:49 of my video. The role of tax subsidies in the obesity epidemicWhy taxpayers? give Nearly $250 million a year for the sorghum industry? When was the last time you sat down to eat sorghum? Almost everyone knows that. fed to cattle and other farm animals. “We have created a food price structure that relatively favours foods of animal origin, sweets and fats” (animal products, sugars and oils).
The agricultural law began It was launched as an emergency measure during the Great Depression of the 1930s to protect small farmers, but was used as a weapon by large agricultural companies to generate revenue with clientelist policies, including beef and pork producers. From 1970 to 1994, world beef prices abandonment by more than 60 percent. And, if it weren’t for the taxpayers, “sweetening If it were a “jackpot” worth billions of dollars a year, high fructose corn syrup would cost the soft drink industry about 12 percent more. hand Big Soda’s Billions further through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), formerly known as the Food Stamp Program, to give sugary drinks to low-income people. Why is chicken so cheap? After a farm bill, corn and soybeans were subsidized Below the cost of producing cheap animal feed. In effect, we give the poultry and pork industries about $10 billion each. That’s not chicken feed…or rather, it is!
This is Changing what we eat.
As you can see below and at 2:03 in my video, thanks in part to subsidies, dairy, meat, candy, eggs, oils, and soft drinks became… get relatively cheaper compared to the overall consumer food price index as the obesity epidemic raged, while the relative cost of fresh fruits and vegetables doubled. This may help explain Why, over roughly the same period, did the percentage of Americans eating five servings of fruits and vegetables a day drop from 42 percent to 26 percent? Why not just subsidize produce? Because that’s not where the money is.
“To understand what it is training In today’s food landscape, it’s important to understand the importance of differential profit.” Whole or minimally processed foods, like canned beans or tomato paste, are what the food industry calls “commodities.” They have such slim profit margins that “some are typically sold at or below cost, as ‘bargain items,’ to entice customers into the store” in the hopes that they will also buy the “value-added” products. Some of the most profitable products for both producers and sellers are ultra-processed, fatty, sugary, and salty concoctions of artificially cheap ingredients and artificial flavors, artificial colors, and more—thanks to taxpayer subsidies.
Different foods generate different returns. Measured in terms of “profit per square foot of selling space” in the supermarket, sweets such as chocolate bars are consistently among the most lucrative. Profit margins are the only healthy thing about them. Fried snacks such as potato chips and corn chips are also highly profitable. Frito-Lay, a subsidiary of PepsiCo, boasts that while its products account for only about 1 percent of total supermarket sales, they can account for more than 10 percent of supermarket operating profits and 40 percent of profit growth.
It is no surprise, then, that the entire system is geared toward junk. The increase in calorie supply was not just due to more food, but a different kind of food. There is a silly dichotomy about the drivers of the obesity epidemic: sugar or fat? Both are highly subsidized and both took off. As you can see below and at 4:29 and 4:35 in my video, videoAlong with a significant increase in refined grain products that is difficult to quantify, the rise in obesity was accompanied with an increase of approximately 20 percent in pounds per capita of added sugars and a 38 percent increase in added fats.
More than half of all calories accomplished Most adults in the United States were found to be eating subsidized food and were apparently worse off. Those who ate more had significantly higher levels of chronic disease risk factors, such as high cholesterol, inflammation and higher body weight.
If it were truly a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, we would subsidize healthy foods, if anything, so that fruits and vegetables would be cheap or even free. Instead, our tax dollars go to the sugar industry or to feed livestock to produce cheap, fast-food meat.
Speaking of sorghum, I had never tried it before and it is delicious. In fact, I wish I had discovered it before. How not to diet I now add sorghum and finger millet to my BROL dish, which used to include only purple barley grains, rye grains, oat grains, and black lentils, so the acronym has become an unpronounceable BROLMS. Anyway, sorghum is a great substitute for rice for those who saw my Video series on rice and arsenic and we are as convinced as I am that we need to diversify our grains.
Now we’ll focus on marketing. After all the excess taxpayer-subsidized calories on the market, the food industry had to find a way to get them into people’s mouths. So, next: The role of marketing in the obesity epidemic.
We’re halfway through this series on the obesity epidemic. If you missed any so far, check out the related videos below.
