First what does Fairway Foods look like as you enter the produce aisle. Keep inm mind this is one of the biggest grocery stores in America, right in the middle of Moocheleles “food desert”. Someone must not get out much in the real world.
Desert Huh? Where have you seen a desert that looks like this. I think someone has been messing with the truth, again.
Buried in the ‘Research’ section of the New York Times:
Studies Question the Pairing of Food Deserts and Obesity
It has become an article of faith among some policy makers and advocates, including Michelle Obama, that poor urban neighborhoods are food deserts, bereft of fresh fruits and vegetables.
But two new studies have found something unexpected. Such neighborhoods not only have more fast food restaurants and convenience stores than more affluent ones, but more grocery stores, supermarkets and full-service restaurants, too. And there is no relationship between the type of food being sold in a neighborhood and obesity among its children and adolescents.
Within a couple of miles of almost any urban neighborhood, “you can get basically any type of food,” said Roland Sturm of the RAND Corporation, lead author of one of the studies. “Maybe we should call it a food swamp rather than a desert,” he said.
Mind you, this is being reported by the New York Times. (It’s almost as if one of their reporters took at trip up to Harlem and noticed that it has one of the best and cheapest grocery stores in the country — Fairway.)
Some experts say these new findings raise questions about the effectiveness of efforts to combat the obesity epidemic simply by improving access to healthy foods. Despite campaigns to get Americans to exercise more and eat healthier foods, obesity rates have not budged over the past decade, according to recently released federal data…
You do not speak against the Queen! Especially one who knows everything. But like Reagan used to say about liberals … “Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they are ignorant, but that they know so much that isn’t so.” hmmm, you think?
Mrs. Obama has made elimination of food deserts an element of her broader campaign against childhood obesity, Let’s Move, winning praise from Democrats and even some Republicans, and denunciations from conservative commentators and bloggers who have cited it as yet another example of the nanny state.
Speaking in October on the South Side of Chicago, she said that in too many neighborhoods “if people want to buy a head of lettuce or salad or some fruit for their kid’s lunch, they have to take two or three buses, maybe pay for a taxicab, in order to do it.” Mrs. Obama has also advocated getting schools to serve healthier lunches and communities to build more playgrounds…
[But] Helen Lee of the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization, [has found differently]. For data on where children lived and went to school and how much they weighed, she used a federal study of 8,000 children. For data on the location of food establishments, she used a data set that compiled all the businesses in the nation and included their sizes and locations…
She used census tracts to define neighborhoods because they tend to have economically homogeneous populations. Poor neighborhoods, Dr. Lee found, had nearly twice as many fast food restaurants and convenience stores as wealthier ones, and they had more than three times as many corner stores per square mile. But they also had nearly twice as many supermarkets and large-scale grocers per square mile. Her study, financed by the institute, was published in the March issue of Social Science and Medicine…
But Wait. There’s more!
Dr. Sturm’s study, published in February in The American Journal of Preventive Medicine, had a different design. With financing from the National Institutes of Health, he used data on the self-reported heights, weights, and diets of more than 13,000 California children and teenagers in the California Health Interview Survey. The survey included the students’ addresses and the addresses of their schools. He used a different data set to see what food outlets were nearby. Dr. Sturm found no relationship between what type of food students said they ate, what they weighed, and the type of food within a mile and a half of their homes.
He has also completed a national study of middle school students, with the same result — no consistent relationship between what the students ate and the type of food nearby. Living close to supermarkets or grocers did not make students thin and living close to fast food outlets did not make them fat. The study will be published soon in Public Health…
So who hacked the New York Times? And have they been reported to Obama’s Attack Watch yet?
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