Apparently Newt Gingrich thinks WIC is a leading cause of childhood obesity. More on the merits of that claim later, but it did remind me of the following anecdote:

The grocery store closest to my neighborhood serves a wide variety of people, including a fairly large population using WIC. One day I was in line behind a woman who was buying, among other things, Kraft singles and Jif chunky peanut butter. The cashier scanned the peanut butter, the register beeped, and she told the customer “Sorry, WIC only covers the creamy kind. Want to go switch?” The customer went to grab some approved peanut butter, as the cashier scanned and bagged the “processed food product” that was next on the conveyor belt. So apparently on WIC you can’t buy chunky peanut butter, but you can buy nasty “cheese” that can’t even be labeled as such without a disclaimer about processing.

Anyway, I’m pretty sure Gingrich is confusing correlation with causation. Children on WIC probably do have higher obesity rates than average, but that’s because they’re poor, and poor people tend to be obese because of a whole bunch of things like not having access to supermarkets for fresh produce, choosing food with high caloric density, and a culture that doesn’t encourage cooking.

Along those lines, I learned something very interesting in physiology today. Quote from our course book, following a discussion of factors contributing to obesity: “Junk food is cheap because it is made of grains, corn, and/or processed meat and the production of all of these is highly subsidized by the federal government.”

I’m not sure I ever looked at it that way before (though I did know that the prevalence of high fructose corn syrup is due to sugar tariffs and corn subsidies). There’s something the federal government could do about the obesity epidemic!

Posted by Amanda in Health Policy, Politics |