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Monday, October 17. 2022

What does the government have to do with your nutrition?


This kind of article exasperates me: Will the White House Take the American Diet Crisis Seriously?


The Executive Branch should tell me what to eat and drink as if I were an infant? Apparently people want to increase the $750/month SNAP poverty allowance for food.


Posted by Dr. Joy Bliss in Psychology, and Dr. Bliss at 12:59 | Comments (12) | Trackbacks (0)

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We have proven beyond doubt that you cannot fix poverty or hunger. The best possible way to address both of those problems would be for the government to not touch it with a 10 foot stick. Everything they touch they turn to shit. The solution is for people to experience the real world results of their bad decisions and to either learn from that and begin making good decisions or they succumb to Darwin's law. We simply cannot afford to continue to support lazy or scamming people anymore.
#1 OneGuy on 2022-10-17 13:16 (Reply)
Ah, but there are votes to buy, pharma companies to support after eating too much and with YOUR money or money created on a computer screen.
#1.1 grant1863 on 2022-10-17 13:36 (Reply)
There is little agreement on what nutrition advice is good or the best advice. Eat more of this or less of that and honestly it is all biases and not science.

I eat a modified Keto diet; i.e. all the meat I want and cookies and candy too. So far so good. I'm thinking of writing a book about it called sweet keto. I don't eat salads, not because I don't like them but because they don't have enough bacon in them. I also take supplements; primarily desserts and dairy Queen shakes. And I love healthy snacks, my favorite is to binge on a family size bag of potato chips. I love my healthy diet!!
#2 JustMe on 2022-10-17 13:54 (Reply)
They give you false information that only dullards would believe so that you ruin your health.
If we don't follow are we enemies of the state with stale lame V for Vendetta movie sets and old fossils acting like sieg howdy?
#3 Gerontocracy Destroys All on 2022-10-17 15:05 (Reply)
Is that for a family? Because that's a looot of money for food.

Wouldn't do any good to increase the amount either - it's not expensive to 'eat healthy', it just really time consuming. No matter how..itch money you through at it, the time for food prep isn't going to change a so we're going to throw the box of chicken nuggets in the microwave because that takes 5 minutes while cooking chicken would take a half an hour and require you to spend all that time cooking.
#4 Agammamon on 2022-10-17 15:22 (Reply)
As a young lad in the Great Socialist State of Massachusetts, I used to sack groceries. And in those days, welfare food benefits had a paper currency that looked a lot like monopoly money - so there was no doubt who was paying for the food, unlike today's white SNAP debit card. So it was hard to miss what food stamp customers were buying - they were eating as well or better than we were at home, and when I took their groceries out to the car (we did that, then), I would get a look at what they were driving too. Not everybody, but some of these were dyed-in-the-wool Welfare Queens, yes they did exist - driving Caddies. This was my first instances of becoming politically aware, and recognizing that I was not a Democrat - which in MA is saying something.

In my view, the food stamps program has become a debacle. There is absolutely no doubt that people are struggling to make ends meet, that the majority of people on the SNAP program need the assistance - and also no doubt that any program that hands out largesse will, over time, find itself with more customers, ho are in even worse trouble. Because that is a condition of receiving the largesse.

The program should be re-structured. Generic goods only. No junk food, no sugary drinks /foods, no premium-brand foods, no high-cost prime meats. Meal ingredients structured for good balanced nutrition, with a limited selection and cooking instructions provided for free, for meal preparation.
#5 Aggie on 2022-10-17 15:52 (Reply)
“SNAP households also spend greater shares of their food expenditures on unhealthy products compared to non-SNAP households. A widely referenced study published by the USDA in 2016 found that SNAP recipients spend nearly a quarter of their expenditures on sugary beverages, frozen prepared foods, and prepared desserts — all of which are linked to higher risk of heart disease and obesity.”
There’s a really simple solution to this.
#6 Marina on 2022-10-17 16:21 (Reply)
It's too easy to get on welfare and too hard to get off.
Immediately welfare should be replaced with workfare. That is if you are on welfare and not working 40 hours a week than you must work for the city/state for 40 hours a week to get your benefits.
Then implement a time limit to collect benefits, one year and off forever. If you need help than that year of workfare is your help and if after that you haven't straightened out your life then time is up. Maybe give those who fail this test a sleeping bag and a small tent as a going away present.
#7 Anon on 2022-10-17 17:22 (Reply)
The game with that particular idea is called 'Disability'. At one time, the number of people scoring long term or lifetime disability benefits was competing with those getting welfare for temporary unemployment or some other hard times reason. Of course, many of them were qualifying by having simple health conditions with complications that could be alleviated by losing weight, or living more healthily. People are quite crafty when it comes to scoring Free Money. What is lacking is the interest, from the governance side, to ensure that the money is being wisely and fairly spent, and honestly awarded. Of course, that kind of oversight costs money that could be spent scoring voter points rather than incurring voter displeasure. Sorry if I sound a little jaded. I've seen some of these disability cases fishing and playing golf.
#7.1 Aggie on 2022-10-17 18:13 (Reply)
There was a time when that was how the welfare system operated. There was NO federal hand involved in the system. It was funded partially by the state and partially by the local political unit. Where I lived at the time it was on the township level. Recipients had to address the local township board about what steps they would take and how long it would take to get out of the program.

Evidently that required too much accountability and it disappeared with the ever increasingly growing federal government. Now there is zero accountability by the recipient or by the government.
#7.1.1 indyjonesouthere on 2022-10-17 21:34 (Reply)
It goes back to President Johnson who admitted that the welfare state would create a dependency of Democrat voters forever. It is all about the votes, period. The worst part is not the wasted tax money or the fraudulent vote buying. The worst part is the many lives, the people who spent their years living off the dole and never had the satisfaction of achievement and accomplishment to work and support their family and save for their retirement and the pride in having done that without depending on the government and the tax payers.
#7.1.1.1 Anon on 2022-10-18 18:52 (Reply)
We saw a lot of unhealthy and sometimes outrageous purchases by Food Stamp recipients in the grocery chain I worked at in the 80's and 90's. My own Mother did the same with our benefit in the 70's.
At the same time, the WIC (Women with Infants and Children) program provided a printed out slip to Moms who could only use it to buy pretty healthy food. Whole dairy products, specific baby formulas, whole grain cereals, etc. We always wondered why the Food Stamp program could not use similar rules for recipient purchases.
#8 Mary Chambers on 2022-10-18 19:46 (Reply)

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