Information about the Aspen Ideas Festival is here. I am scheduled for a session, The American Wellness Paradox, currently scheduled from 11:00-11:50 a.m., at the East Lawn Tent. This will be a discussion with senior HHS policy advisor, Calley Means. Here’s the blurb on it: “Americans are spending more than ever on healthcare, supplements, wellness trends, and “clean eating,” yet rates of chronic disease and metabolic illness continue to climb. As skepticism fuels the rise of movements like MAHA, debates over what Americans should eat have become deeply cultural, political, and economic. Two influential voices with sharply different perspectives on nutrition and food science explore how food systems, farming practices, consumer culture, and the wellness industry collided to create one of the defining public health debates of our time.”
by Marion Nestle
May
19
2009
Eating well on a low budget?
Adam Drewnowski and his colleagues at the University of Washington have been doing a series of papers on the cost of food per calorie. The latest is a research brief answering the question, “Can low-income Americans afford a healthy diet?” Not really, they say. Federal food assistance assumes that low-income people spend 30% of their income on food but that assumption was based on figures from an era when housing, transportation, and health care costs were much less. As Drewnowski has shown repeatedly, healthier foods cost more, and sometimes a lot more, when you look at them on a per-calorie basis.
