Nutrition

The other NRA—the National Restaurant Association—responds to a new study from the Center for the Science in the Public Interest showing that nearly all kids' meals at fast food restaurants are too high in calories and sodium:

The National Restaurant Association, a business group of about 945,000 restaurants and food outlets, said the trend in the industry was to provide "more detailed nutritional information and choice in menu options for consumers."

But the group stressed that "exercising parental responsibility is key to childhood nutrition." The report, it said, "fails to acknowledge the essential role of nutrition education, physical activity and parental responsibility in childhood nutrition — good eating habits and healthy living must be established in the home."

In fact, CSPI does an excellent job of acknowledging the importance of nutritional education and exercise. The NRA, on the other hand, fails to acknowledge the central importance of updating basic health, safety, and employment standards in order to keep up with the times. Their opposition to sensible bans on the use of harmful trans-fats is one example.

This is a great idea:

Green Carts are mobile food carts that offer fresh produce in certain New York City areas. Local Law 9, signed by Mayor Bloomberg on March 13, 2008, establishes 1,000 permits for Green Carts.

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A total of 500 full-term permits will be available in 2008: 175 permits for Brooklyn, 175 for the Bronx, 75 for Manhattan, 50 for Queens, and 25 for Staten Island. Beginning in July, 2008, these permits will be issued to individuals who have applied to be on the Green Cart waiting lists. In 2009, 500 more Green Cart permits will be available.

With the Food Stamp program up for reauthorization this year, I won't be surprised if Doug Besharov, a conservative advocate at AEI, repeats his claim that food stamps and other nutrition programs contribute to growing obesity in the United States. There's little evidence to support this claim, of course, but who needs facts?

The most recent evidence that counters Besharov's claim comes from a just-released NBER working paper by Columbia economist Neeraj Kaushal:

I use changes in immigrant eligibility for food stamps under the 1996 federal law and heterogeneous state responses to set up a natural experiment research design to study the effect of food stamps on Body Mass Index (BMI) of adults in immigrant families. I find that in the post-1996 period food stamps use by foreign-born unmarried mothers with a high school or lower education was 10 percentage points higher in states with substitute programs than in states that implemented the federal ban. However, this increase in FSP participation was not associated with any statistically significant difference in BMI. I find that FSP participation was associated a statistically insignificant 0.3 percent increase in BMI among low-educated unmarried mothers.

That Besharov's claim is unfounded isn't all that surprising given most non-elderly people who receive food stamps receive them for relatively short periods of time. For example, HHS data shows that about half of adult food stamp "spells" over a four-year period last four months or less.