Obesity: The New Hunger

The government obsession with ‘food insecurity’ obscures the real problem: Americans are too fat.

By Robert Paarlberg, writing for the WSJ.

"Each May, private charities in Boston organize a “Walk for Hunger” to help the Massachusetts households—one out of every 10, we’re told—that require “hunger relief.” A national organization of food banks named Feeding America promotes its own work by asserting that “1 in 7 Americans struggle to get enough to eat.” A 2015 ad campaign sponsored by Great Nations Eat warned that “America Can’t Be Great on an Empty Stomach.”

Empty stomachs? A well-meaning concern, but poor Americans have now joined the ranks of the overeaters. Food-assistance programs need to catch up.

When Boston’s Walk for Hunger began in 1969, poverty still meant not getting enough to eat. Investigations turned up scandalous levels of hunger in rural Appalachia. Under-nutrition often brought serious diseases such as scurvy and rickets. In response, the federal government dramatically expanded food-assistance programs, and rates of low nutrition dropped.

Today, obesity is the problem. Some 38% of Americans are obese, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported last fall, compared with about 12% in 1969. The statistics are worse among the poor. Obesity rates in America’s poorest counties are roughly 12% higher than the national median. About 42% of Hispanics are obese, as are 48% of African-Americans, according to the CDC.

As actual hunger has faded, advocacy organizations have switched their pitch from hunger to “food insecurity.” Every year, the Agriculture Department asks a sample of households 10 questions, such as if they had failed to eat or worried about running out of food for lack of money at any time in the previous 12 months. Households that answer “yes” to three of the 10 are classified as “food insecure.” A “yes” to six or more counts as “very low food security.”

Using this method, the department concluded in a 2015 report that 14% of American households were “food insecure,” and 5.6% had “very low food security.” These aren’t measures of hunger or under-nutrition, but advocacy groups and the media nonetheless depict them as such. The survey results are also referenced to suggest that many Americans face food insecurity on an average day, even though the percentages actually measure those who experienced it on any single day in the past year. On a typical day, fewer than 1% of households have very low food security, but readers of the USDA report don’t learn this until page 10.

Micronutrient deficits can be hard to detect, and they can coexist with obesity, but data have shown for some time that nutrient intake in America is roughly comparable for poor and non-poor Americans. A 1995 Agriculture Department report showed that the average intake of vitamins, minerals and protein was similar for children in poverty compared with those who were not. In most cases, both groups took in considerably more than the recommended daily allowance.

There is no serious racial divide either. Only 0.5% of blacks are deficient in Vitamin A, compared with 0.3% of whites, according to the National Report on Biochemical Indicators of Diet and Nutrition. Deficiencies of many other core nutrients, like vitamin E, B12 and folate, are comparably low.

The Agriculture Department continues to hype “food insecurity,” because this strengthens political support for the nutrition programs it administers. These programs deserve support, but in light of the obesity crisis they also need reform. The $74 billion a year Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program—also known as food stamps—still allows recipients to purchase candy and soda with their benefits. Congress should halt SNAP spending for these “foods,” and it could do so without reducing the dollar value of the benefit.

You might expect advocates for low-income and minority Americans to support this idea, since these groups suffer the most from obesity-linked medical problems. Not so. In 2010, when New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed excluding soda from SNAP purchases, advocates for the poor joined beverage companies in opposing the change. New York City’s Coalition Against Hunger rebuked the Mayor for “telling low-income Americans that they are uniquely unsuited to make decisions about what is best for their own health.” The Agriculture Department rejected the Bloomberg proposal on technical grounds.

Hope for reform remains. In January the bipartisan National Commission on Hunger recommended unanimously to Congress that sugar-sweetened beverages be removed from eligibility under SNAP. Anti-hunger groups and the minority community should endorse this consensus. Poor Americans need their incomes to rise, but very few need to consume more food. It made sense to walk for hunger in 1969, but today Americans should walk for health and to fight obesity.

Mr. Paarlberg is an adjunct professor of public policy at Harvard. This op-ed is adapted from his book “The United States of Excess: Gluttony and the Dark Side of American Exceptionalism” (Oxford University Press, 2015)."