Many low-income Americans can't afford to eat healthy foods(Spinach Barf Alert)

Yahoo News ^ | 11-22-07 | Amanda Gardner

[kik5150]

In this land and season of plenty, low-income and rural Americans continue to have difficulty finding healthy foods that are affordable, a new study finds.

One study shows that low-income Americans now would have to spend up to 70 percent of their food budget on fruits and vegetables to meet new national dietary guidelines for healthy eating.

And a second study found that in rural areas, convenience stores far outnumber supermarkets and grocery stores -- even though the latter carry a much wider choice of affordable, healthy foods.

"I think it's a matter of raising awareness among health professionals -- and that could be dieticians or diabetes educators or even doctors -- that when we typically give people a recommendation to eat more fruits and vegetables, that is actually so much more complicated in a rural environment," said Angela Liese, study author of the second report and an associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the Arnold School of Public Health at the University of South Carolina in Columbia.

"There needs to be some thought given to how do you make these recommendations," Liese said.

Both studies appear in the November issue of the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, a themed issue on poverty and human development.

New dietary guidelines recommend that Americans eat nine servings of fruits and vegetables a day, up from five servings in the previous guidelines.

Despite clear evidence that eating your vegetables can ward off heart disease, diabetes and cancer, only 40 percent of Americans meet the old guidelines and less than 10 percent meet the new guidelines, according to one 2006 study.

People with more money eat more fruits and vegetables than those with less money, research shows. In turn, poorer people also assume a greater disease burden relative to their wealthier counterparts.

[kik5150]

The headline should read:

“Low income Americans make poor decisions on nutrition”

That’s the truth, but ooooh, it is so un-PC.
Every American has basically the same access to healthy food.

[ozzymandus]

I’m well aware of that, thanks anyway, Mr. Know-it-all, but canned veggies are still a lot healthier than big macs and cigarettes.

[LadyNavyVet]

Fresh fruits and vegetable are pricey, but frozen fruits and vegetables are much cheaper and often healthier as they are harvested at the peak of ripeness and flash frozen, which preserves vitamins.

You can buy one-pound bags of veggies like broccoli for about $1.00, and one-pound bags of berries for $2.50-$3.00. A pound of frozen fruits or vegetables goes a long way since it has already been washed, chopped and had the waste removed, so it’s all edible.

[ga medic]

My experience was pretty much the same thing. My mother cleaned houses 7 days a week to support 5 children. She used to offer to clean their refrigerators, so that she could bring us left overs to eat. We drank powdered milk too, and strangely enough, I still like the taste of it. We never ate at McDonalds until we were old enough to pay for it ourselves.

It wasn’t easy for her I am sure, but we all did what we could to help. She raised 5 children on a housekeepers wages, without a dime of federal assistance or child support. I think as kids were are better off having learned from her how to stretch a dollar. But it cost us all in the long term. She couldn’t afford to take time off to see a doctor, for headaches she had until it was too late. She died of brain cancer a month after I (the youngest) graduated from high school.