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Hi, Dr. Zorba Pastry here with a rapid update, and this actually has to do with the things
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that are going on in Washington with the Maha Make America Healthy Program again, a particular
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article that was recently in the Journal of the AMA really interested me.
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So first of all, good food.
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We know that good nutritious food is important for all of us.
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And we can all agree that sugary drinks, Coca-Cola, Mountain Dew, they're basically liquid
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A typical 12 ounce bottle of any soft drink has 12 teaspoons of sugar or 12 sugar cubes.
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And this, the basically drinking all the soft drinks in America has led to obesity.
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And I think it's important to talk about that.
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Now if you look at the SNAP program, that is the supplemental nutrition assistance program
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also called food stamps.
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It turns out that SNAP recipients can buy soda, soft drinks, candy, and energy drinks.
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Now the particular opinion piece in JAMA was really gave me pause to think.
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So SNAP households spend roughly 23% more than non-SNAP households on packaged foods
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In other words, they tend to spend more on sugary drinks and candy.
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This is a question I think that we have to look at.
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If we look at the amount of spending that goes in a SNAP, which is roughly from last year,
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$336 billion of spending, sweet beverages, co-locke, Mountain Dew, and everything, actually
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correspond to 9.3% of the SNAP expenditures.
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That means $31 billion of SNAP is going to the soft drink industry, okay?
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This turns out to be 20 to 25% of U.S. revenues for Coke and Pepsi.
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In other words, 25% of what Coke and Pepsi make in America actually comes out of SNAP benefits.
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Now I kind of found this astounding in some ways.
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Now if we remove these drinks from SNAP, the idea is that we shouldn't do it because it
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imposes a stigma on people who want to buy these drinks.
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They can't buy them and they would like to buy them and like to have them.
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So it turns out that 18 states have asked for a federal waiver to actually remove these
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soft drinks, energy drinks, and so on from SNAP.
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I think this is a good idea.
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I think all of us should drink fewer soft drinks, fewer twinkies, fewer prepackaged foods
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that have high calories and don't have very much nutrition in them.
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And I'm going to talk about for just a second this whole moral issue.
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But let me state for a minute, the states that are actually removing this from their
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Arkansas, Florida, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma,
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South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, Hawaii, and Colorado.
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So those are the states that asked for an exemption from the federal government to remove
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these empty calories from their SNAP benefits.
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So there's an argument here.
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The argument here has something called healthism, which is a term that was coined in the 1980s
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that if you don't take care of your health, it's a moral failure.
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So it's really a spurious argument.
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A lot of people don't take care of their health for a whole bunch of reasons.
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And I don't think we should use morality as a reason not to actually encourage good eating.
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I think it's a good idea to take the empty calories out of the SNAP program because I think
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then people will be encouraged, maybe forced, to actually spend the SNAP money on good eating.
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This is Dr. Zorba Pastor.