Americans Just Don't Like Healthy Food

Here in the U.S., we've never really grown up: Just like when we were five, many of us still prefer to feed our vegetables to the dog when no one's looking instead of eating them ourselves. Our scientists and public policy makers have come to recognize how important fruits and vegetables are for our diets — as evidenced by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) new food pyramid that puts fruits and vegetables second only to whole grains — but average Americans still aren't upping their intake of these foods.

According to a report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), only about one-third of American adults ate two servings of fruit or fruit juice a day last year, which is a drop from the rate of fruit consumption a decade earlier. We consume about the same amount of vegetables we did a decade ago, which is to say, not enough: Just 26 percent of American adults report eating vegetables the recommended three or more times per day, the Washington Post reports.

It seems strange that we would continue to eat an insufficient amount of fruits and veggies during a time period when our diet-related health problems are rapidly gaining public attention. The phrase "obesity epidemic" has become commonplace, and the idea that our country is too fat is so widely accepted it's become a stereotype. You'd think that this growing awareness would have translated into better eating habits, but it hasn't.

Perhaps it's because eating fruits and vegetables is simply too expensive. That's a popular explanation, but according to a study by the USDA's Economic Research Service (PDF), pointed out by the ever-skeptical James McWilliams in the Atlantic, the cost of eating healthy food and unhealthy food fell at the same rate between 1980 and 2006. "The price of a healthy diet has not changed relative to an unhealthy diet," the study's authors conclude.

So could the fact be that Americans simply don't want to eat healthy food, regardless of what it costs or how it impacts their health?

"Evidently," writes McWilliams, "consumers have chosen to take advantage of the declining prices for the cookies rather than the apples, thereby undermining the claim that we choose cheap, unhealthy food because it's cheap."

And according to a prior CDC study cited in the Post article, even those who report eating fruits and vegetables might not exactly be munching on apples and spinach: "Orange juice is the top source of fruit among U.S. adults and adolescents, and potatoes are the favorite vegetable," writes the Post. So according to the study's judgment, a kid eating a plate of French fries and washing it down with a glass of O.J. could claim to be embracing a healthy diet.

This type of data points us to some important conclusions. It seems the reason we eat poorly has little to do with our pocketbooks and more to do with our inability to restrict our desires for unhealthy foods. Our choices also reflect our lack of understanding of what makes a healthy diet in the first place, the easy availability of the wrong things, and perhaps our lack of knowledge about how to prepare food that's better for us.

Policy makers, then, would do well to focus many resources on education — aimed both at schoolchilden and adults — regarding nutrition, healthy eating, cooking basics, and the consequences of poor diet. Incentives to increase the availability of healthy food options and disincentives to discourage unhealthy food in neighborhoods would also help.

A lot of these types of policies must be implemented at the state and local levels. National projects like Michelle Obama's Let's Move anti-obesity initiative are fabulous, but to really make a difference, we need our communities and the leaders that represent them to start working together in practical ways.

Photo: ischerer via stock.xchng