The cost of dieting

Why are Americans so obese? One factor is surely the decline in the relative price of carbohydrates. In hunter-gatherer society, you couldn’t get pasta or bread at all. But how about today?

“What’s really cheap are foods made with refined flour, added sugar and corn syrup and added fat.” People with limited income, he says, “buy foods that fill them up, and who’s to blame them? They get the most calories for their money.”

Not everyone is willing to pay for a good and tasty diet. Christine Davies speaks:

“I tried both the Atkins and South Beach diets, but pound for pound, protein is a lot more expensive than carbs,” she says. “The South Beach diet recommends fish about three times a week. I’d have to eat canned tuna three times a week to afford it, and I get tired of eating the same foods.

“Plus, you have to cook everything yourself,” she says. “Following it on a day-to-day schedule would be completely impossible because of the complexity of the recipes and the cost of the foods.”

She’ll get little argument from Phil Lempert, one of the nation’s leading experts on food prices and grocery-store shopping. Using exclusive data from AC Nielsen and menus from the best-selling diet books, Lempert calculates that strict adherence to the low-carb, meat lovers’ Atkins diet would cost about $100 a week (presuming you eat all meals at home). The salmon-rich South Beach diet priced out at almost $90 a week. That’s far more than the $35 that Davies spends at the grocery store each week to feed herself.

Many other people live in “food deserts,” where supermarkets with fresh vegetables are a long distance away. Of course all this holds only for North America. The world’s very poor find calories hard to come by, engage in hard physical labor, walk much more, or have better access to home farmed fresh foods. Only in the U.S. are carbohydrates so cheap.

Here is the full story. Here is a related article on the cost of dieting. Here is Bruce Bartlett’s excellent short piece on the economics of obesity, with links to the academic literature.

As for me, if you ignore price and delivery costs, I would gladly eat sashimi for at least half of my meals.

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