In the past decade, it has become clearer that obesity is a rising reality in the United States. Researchers attribute it to a variety of social, economic, and environmental factors, but essentially everything we eat has to do with agriculture. Therefore farming and its governmental implications has a large impact on obesity, or the increasing levels of body mass index of citizens in the U.S. A number of characteristics associated with the nature of agriculture are inevitable, i.e. once a crop is planted, relatively little can be done to adjust production. Also farmers cannot vary influence prices because of weather and pests. Therefore they are continually seeking to reduce unit costs, hence taking advantage of government subsidies. This leads …show more content…
Mercola, agricultural policies in the U.S. are contributing to the poor health of Americans and subsidies are worsening obesity. The top four most heavily subsidized foods in the industry are corn, wheat, soybeans, and rice; four ingredients that are used to create highly processed foods like high fructose corn syrup and soybean oil. This means that farmers are more apt to grow these four crops because their costs will be lower through subsidization and their net income will increase. What the U.S. farm subsidy is doing, in essence, is contributing directly to obesity; the very reason that many experts and health conscious people are working so hard to eliminate. Since it appears that farm policy is resulting in higher production of crops and lower prices of processed foods, the opposite can also be said to be true. As inferred to in the article U.S. Agricultural Policy and its Relationship to Obesity, reducing subsidies for major crops will result in reduced crop production in the U.S. This lower production will raise prices of all foods making unprocessed foods like fruits and vegetables more price competitive. This would be a positive impact of reducing subsidies for the four major crops used in the production of unhealthy …show more content…
The U.S. consumption of these two items has significantly increased from 1970 through 2000, according to the USDA food review published in the Food for Thought article. The total of fats, oils, and sugar consumed around the early 1970’s was about 180 pounds per capita per year. That number increased to about 225 pounds in 2000. Unfortunately, this is not surprising as foods like high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated vegetable oils were nonexistent forty years ago. Anyone who watches food commercials or reads newspapers realizes that you never see an advertisement for fruits or