USDA awards MTSU professor $120,000 grant to study food stamp use and obesity.
MURFREESBORO — Charles Baum III, an economics professor at Middle Tennessee State University, says people living in poverty in America have undergone a definite physical change over the last 200 years.
Being poor once meant having a thin, frail body type as a result of lack of food. Now, these individuals are more likely to be not just overweight, but obese, he says.
The Old Media reminds us constantly that millions of kids go to bed hungry every night in America. The reality is that the poor in America have it miles better than those in third-world style poverty. This is reflected in the grotesque obesity that is rampant in the AFDC set. But when did our poor go from stick people to marshmallow men?
Baum traces the change to sometime in the 1960s, when obesity rates began to rise. It was around this time that the Food Stamp Act came into being, which provided food to those living below the poverty level. The idea of a connection between food stamps and obesity has caught the interest of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the agency recently awarded Baum a $120,000 grant to study the relationship of the Food Stamp Program to the rise of obesity.
”It’s a two-year study,” Baum said. ”The analysis will try to look at two people that are the same in every way except one is on food stamps and one is not. They may both be living in poverty.”
The study will examine whether those using food stamps are more likely to suffer from obesity than those who do not use food stamps.
At the risk of sounding like a big-government lunatic, when someone uses food stamps, they’re actually spending my money (and the money of all of us who actually pay taxes). Therefore, when Larry Lardass goes and buys 96 cans of Coke and 18 industrial-sized bags of Doritos with food stamps/vouchers, the rest of us are funding their bodily expansion, and ultimately their long-term hospitalizations and multiple operations. If I was using someone else’s money to buy my groceries, I’d damn sure be more conscientious than that. That, however, is expecting far too much from the handout classes.
Could this study lead to the restriction of what can be purchased with food stamps?
Richard Dobbs, director of food-stamp policy for Tennessee, said food-stamp recipients aren’t prevented from purchasing items high in fat.
”The only restriction on food stamps is that they must be used for food items,” he said. ”The USDA is the agency that determines what is an eligible food item. It’s almost anything that can be consumed. There’s been attempts in the past to limit what individuals can buy with food stamps, but they’ve really never gone anywhere.”
Baum said he will provide his results to the federal government, but he has no say in setting policy.
He speculated that if a link is shown between issuing food stamps and obesity, the USDA might become stricter in its definition of food items, eliminating unhealthy choices such as sodas.
Sounds like the results of this study will fall on the usual deaf ears.
