Food Day: All Myths are not Created Equal

All Myths are not Created Equal

By Llenda Jackson-Leslie

Lately, there’s been a contrarian movement afoot arguing that the government shouldn’t be encouraging people to eat better and live healthier lives… seems that some believe government support for better nutrition leads straight to socialism. Others argue that those suffering from poor nutrition have only themselves to blame. Five Myths about Healthy Eating by Katherine Mangu-Ward printed in Sunday’s Washington Post falls in the last category, the author insists that food deserts aren’t all that barren. She claims that 93 % of the people living in a food desert have access to a car. Read the article here . I can’t refute her claims about access to a car, so I guess the many seniors I  regularly saw walking, catching the bus or a cab, and traveling by wheelchair to the Brookland Giant must have misplaced their keys.

Now I have lived in a couple of food deserts, most recently in northeast Washington, D.C.  While there was not one sit down restaurant within miles—actually within the whole ward, you couldn’t leave the house without stumbling over a Popeye’s Chicken franchise. They were as ubiquitous as Starbucks in other neighborhoods. Is Mangu-Ward seriously suggesting that if every corner had a fruit stand instead of a Popeye’s Chicken that people in that neighborhood would still be eating fast food at the same rate.

She goes on to add that people are hard-wired to like fat, sugar and salt so that the processed food companies who advertise so heavily can’t be blamed for our predilection for unhealthy food.

Now I’m the last person to suggest that we’re all robots simply doing what television advertising tells us to do—but to suggest that people are impervious to the powerful influences of our 24/7 television internet culture seems more far-fetched than the notion of food deserts. While people are ultimately responsible for the choices we make. Sometimes the choices we’re presented with aren’t so great. And people who are raising children, caring for aging parents and working overtime may find driving 2-5 miles to a grocery store to cook from scratch too be overwhelming. Taking a daily walk or run in an unsafe neighborhood just may not be a good health choice. The point in trying to eliminate food deserts and increase opportunities for exercise isn’t that people will always make better choices, but to make better choices easier to make. It took several generations for us to become an obese nation and it may take several more to reverse the trend.

As for debunking food myths, here are some that Mangu-Ward could tackle. Why not take on the myths about drinking eight glasses of milk, ingesting massive doses of vitamins, drinking something from a can that will magically turn us slim or into a super-athlete or the idea that bottled water is better for us than tap water.

Some online resources for getting fit are here and resources for healthy eating are here.