Expensive to Eat Healthy?

A reporter called me today to interview me about the cost of doing low carb. She told me she wanted to talk about the fact that it costs more money to follow South Beach or Atkins than it does to eat macaroni and cheese.

I told her I'd be happy to talk to her about that, but that the discussion wasn't really a nutrition issue, it was an issue of politics and economics.

She said she wasn't really interested in politics or economics, she just wanted to talk about why it cost more to go on Atkins.

I found that amusing. Kind of like saying, "I'd like to interview you on the subject of the conflicts in the Middle East, but I'm not really interested in discussing fundamentalist Islam."

The fact is that we live in a country that subsidizes wheat and corn. The products that are made from them – high fructose corn syrup, Sugar Pops, sliced bread- are cheap and plentiful. We also happen to live, more for better than for worse, in an economic system called capitalism that allows companies to market their products — including their junk — aggressively, and price it accordingly. This goes for "Grand Theft Auto" and "Die Hard 2" as well as the Happy Meal. There's no farm subsidy for broccoli and there's no multi-million dollar PR budget for apples.

I'm not saying I'd rather live under a different system, I'm just saying that it's pretty stupid to ignore these facts when you're talking about why it's more expensive to eat healthy food than it is to fill up at Taco Bell. Healthier food doesn't stay on the shelf as long. Healthier food is more expensive to produce. Organic food spoils. Apples that haven’t been on steroids aren't huge and red and uniform and shiny — people look at them and go "ugh." It costs a lot more to raise cattle that roam around grazing on their natural diet of grass and not eating growth hormone and antibiotics than it does to stick them in cages on a factory farm and feed them grain and steroids till they're fat enough to go to market. Sorry. That's just the way it is.

So is it a national disgrace that you can't get vegetables in certain parts of big urban areas (like the ghetto or the barrio)? You bet. Or that the school system has to depend on the "donations" of companies like Pepsi who pay for "pouring rights" in the school cafeteria? You bet. Am I unhappy about the fact that the average kid sees 10,000 commercials a year mostly for fast junk food? Sure am. And would I vote for any politician who promised to get junk food out of the school cafeteria? Yup. Is that gonna happen? Don’t bet on it. They have far more important things to do, like protecting me from the dangers of a Howard Stern fart joke.

Meanwhile, the system we have is the system we have. And I'm still not convinced that people eat crap just because it’s cheap. There are powerful lifestyle issues at play here, as well as social, economic and commercial ones.

By the way, in case you haven’t noticed, many of those same people who say it costs too much to eat healthy think nothing of dropping $4.50 for a daily mocca frappacino.

So I'm not 100 percent convinced that if we somehow could wave a magic wand and make healthier food cheaper, everyone would eat it, any more than I'm convinced that if you made crap more expensive, people would stop buying it. We made cigarettes twenty times more expensive than they were when I was a kid, and last time I noticed, people still smoke.

I would have been happy to discuss all this with the reporter, but she wasn't particularly interested. Who can blame her? Discussing the complex social, psychological, economic and marketing influences on our eating behavior is hard stuff. Plus you actually have to think. Better to just file a story on how we'd all be lean and healthy if only good food were cheaper.