As the U.S. Department of Agriculture today released a new pyramid icon to symbolize the nation’s food guidance system, the Food Research and Action Center (FRAC) outlined steps to make the new system more meaningful to the tens of millions of low-income Americans.

In the midst of a national epidemic of obesity which is plaguing all groups of Americans, FRAC called on the Administration to begin with three steps to connect the new food guidance system more directly to lower-income people:

• Special efforts to publicize to low-income communities and constituents the food guidance system and the science underlying it;
• Efforts to reach more eligible people with the benefits of programs (e.g., food stamps, school breakfast and lunch, WIC) that have been shown to contribute to combating obesity. This would include assuring that such benefits are not cut in the 2006 budget process.
• An intensified commitment to nutrition education for all of the nation’s children and for lower-income adult consumers.

Growing evidence shows that the phenomenon of overweight among low-income people, in significant part, has different roots from the phenomenon for the affluent – causes like: the lack of resources to purchase an adequate diet because some key elements (especially fruits and vegetables) are more expensive; the feast-and-famine cycle when families repeatedly face resource shortages; the lack of sources of good, reasonably priced fruits and vegetables in many low-income communities; and others. See www.frac.org/html/news/071403hungerandObesity.htm.

Federal programs have been shown to be part of the solution to obesity, not part of the problem. Recent studies indicate that WIC helps reduce obesity among preschoolers, and that food stamps, school lunch and school breakfast reduce obesity among low-income school-aged girls. See www.frac.org/html/news/090503obesity_reduction.htm. While the quality of school meals in many districts needs to be improved, making the pyramid real means strengthening, not weakening these programs that fight both hunger and obesity.

Particularly damaging to the effective implementation of the new food guidance system, then, would be large proposed budget cuts in these programs. The President’s proposals – and the far larger and more damaging House budget proposals – would throw hundreds of thousands of needy people off food stamps, and potentially, other effective nutrition programs. If these cuts were passed, those people would be needier and less able to purchase the elements of the new system.

The Food Research and Action Center (www.frac.org) is the leading national organization working for more effective public and private policies to eradicate domestic hunger and undernutrition.

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