Bad Food? Tax It, and Subsidize Vegetables

 By MARK BITTMAN

Published: July 23, 2011

NY Times

WHAT will it take to get Americans to change our eating habits? The need is indisputable, since heart disease, diabetes and cancer are all in large part caused by the Standard American Diet. (Yes, it’s SAD.)
Though experts increasingly recommend a diet high in plants and low in animal products and processed foods, ours is quite the opposite, and there’s little disagreement that changing it could improve our health and save tens of millions of lives.
And — not inconsequential during the current struggle over deficits and spending — a sane diet could save tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars in health care costs.
Yet the food industry appears incapable of marketing healthier foods. And whether its leaders are confused or just stalling doesn’t matter, because the fixes are not really their problem. Their mission is not public health but profit, so they’ll continue to sell the health-damaging food that’s most profitable, until the market or another force skews things otherwise. That “other force” should be the federal government, fulfilling its role as an agent of the public good and establishing a bold national fix.
Rather than subsidizing the production of unhealthful foods, we should turn the tables and tax things like soda, French fries, doughnuts and hyperprocessed snacks. The resulting income should be earmarked for a program that encourages a sound diet for Americans by making healthy food more affordable and widely available.
The average American consumes 44.7 gallons of soft drinks annually. (Although that includes diet sodas, it does not include noncarbonated sweetened beverages, which add up to at least 17 gallons a person per year.) Sweetened drinks could be taxed at 2 cents per ounce, so a six-pack of Pepsi would cost $1.44 more than it does now. An equivalent tax on fries might be 50 cents per serving; a quarter extra for a doughnut. (We have experts who can figure out how “bad” a food should be to qualify, and what the rate should be; right now they’re busy calculating ethanol subsidies. Diet sodas would not be taxed.)
Simply put: taxes would reduce consumption of unhealthful foods and generate billions of dollars annually. That money could be used to subsidize the purchase of staple foods like seasonal greens, vegetables, whole grains, dried legumes and fruit.
We could sell those staples cheap — let’s say for 50 cents a pound — and almost everywhere: drugstores, street corners, convenience stores, bodegas, supermarkets, liquor stores, even schools, libraries and other community centers.
Full Article: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/24/opinion/sunday/24bittman.html

We Want Your Feedback! Survey/Rethinking School Lunch NM

More than 40 community members and organizations attended the Rethinking School Lunch community discussion organized in February, 2011 by ACHIEVE (Action Communities for Health Innovation and EnVironmental ChangE). As a result of the community discussion, those present were energized and committed to planning and participating in a visioning process to develop a Rethinking School Lunch New Mexico initiative (RSL New Mexico). The following organizations have acted as the core committee in beginning this visioning process:

• Action Communities for Health Innovation and Environmental Change (ACHIEVE): www.achievecommunities.org
• APS Physical Activity & Nutrition Advisory Council (PANAC): www.aps.edu/schools/volunteer-at-aps/list-volunteer-opportunities
• Mid Region Council of Governments Agriculture Collaborative (MRCOG): www.localfoodnm.org
• New Mexico Collaboration to End Hunger: www.endnmhunger.org
• APS Growing Gardens Team: http://growinggardensteam.wordpress.com

The RSL New Mexico committee is planning a visioning workshop for early Fall 2011. The committee has developed a community survey to collect information that will be used to help guide the visioning workshop and the overall goals of RSL New Mexico initiative. Parents, teachers, school administration, and community members are invited to complete this survey, which will take only between 5 to 15 minutes to complete.

Please click the link to start:
https://www.research.net/s/RethinkingSchoolLunchNM2011


Contact Info
Email: SchoolLunchNM@gmail.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Rethinking-School-Lunch-NM/171676482893254 (or search "Rethinking School Lunch NM")
Rethinking School Lunch is a planning and systems approach framework developed by the Center for Ecoliteracy and is based on a positive vision: healthy children ready to learn, “food literate” graduates, invigorated local communities, sustainable agriculture, and a healthy environment. RSL New Mexico is using this framework to help guide the initiative.

Please email us if you would like to be placed on our contact list so you can be informed about the upcoming community meeting or other developments.
Thank you for taking the time to complete this survey.

MRCOG Hosting Peds/Bikes Webinar & Conducting Survey

 

Date:     Wednesday June 15, 2011

Time:     1:00pm-2:30pm

Place:  Mid Region Council of Governments

Cost:      Free, but if you plan on attending please contact Julie Luna at jluna@mrcog-nm.gov or 505-724-3639 if you have not already done so.

Webinar from the Association of Pedestrian and Bicycle Professionals

 Description: This 90-minute webinar will examine three examples of retrofitting bicycle and pedestrian facilities within a constrained right-of-way: a New York street, pedestrian safety improvements to 19^th/Park Presidio Blvd in San Francisco, and Nebraska Avenue in Hillsborough County, Florida.

On June 15^th, Mid-Region Council of Governments will host the webinar, “Bicycle and Pedestrian Facility Design within a Constrained Right-of-Way.  We are also interested in hearing from you about how we can make viewing these webinars better and if you are interested in any of the upcoming July to December webinars.

To provide input on future webinars, please click on the following link and complete a short survey: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/MRCOG_Webinars

Albuquerque’s Bus System Gets High Marks in Study

ABQ Journal

By Olivier Uyttebrouck / Journal Staff Writer on Wed, May 11, 2011

“The turning point for me was when I filled up my gas tank and it was $60,” said Shepherd, 46, minutes before she boarded a bus at the Northwest Transit Center for her daily commute to a Presbyterian Healthcare Services office at Gibson and Yale SE.
Shepherd estimates she can save $3,500 a year by leaving her BMW 325 at home and making the 40 minute-commute by bus each day.
Shepherd isn’t alone. Bus boardings in Albuquerque were 1.06 million in April, up 7.4 percent from April 2010.
With ridership growing nationally, transit systems have an opportunity to change public commuting habits if they offer riders fast, reliable transportation to jobs, according to a study released Wednesday by the Brookings Institute.
The national study gives Albuquerque’s transit system high marks for connecting people to jobs, though riders here wait longer than the typical commuter in the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas, the report found.
Riders here can reach 53 percent of metro-area jobs within 90 minutes, making Albuquerque’s transit system the seventh best in the nation for providing people access to jobs, the study found.
ABQ Ride, Albuquerque’s bus system, also provides better service coverage throughout the metro area than most cities. About 73 percent of working-age residents live within three-quarters of a mile of a transit stop, putting Albuquerque in the top third of metro areas, the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit public policy group found.
But Albuquerque ranks in the middle of the pack in service frequency — the length of time commuters must wait at a transit stop during rush hour, the report found. The typical rush-hour commuter in Albuquerque waits 14 minutes for a bus, compared to a median wait of 10 minutes for commuters nationwide.
The study found that Western cities, including Albuquerque, tend have transit systems that are more effective at connecting residents to jobs. Western cities often are confined by natural boundaries that minimize sprawl and make it easier to design effective transit systems, said Alan Berube, Senior Fellow and Research Director and a study author.
“Albuquerque is typical of a lot of Western metropolitan areas, which tend to be more hemmed in by mountains and deserts,” resulting in more compact growth, Berube said in a phone interview this week.
Albuquerque also has a high-degree of job concentration, making it easier to design transit routes that get people to jobs, Berube said. Only 14 percent of metro-area jobs are located more than 10 miles from Downtown, he said. In Philadelphia, by contrast, 64 percent of metro area jobs are located 10 miles or more from its downtown.

  Sticker shock at the gas pump on Sunday convinced Marceil Shepherd to begin commuting to work by bus this week.

Farm to School and School Garden Health Impact Assessment (HIA) Report

Upstream Public Health, an Oregon non-profit health advocacy organization, recently released the Farm to School and School Garden Health Impact Assessment (HIA) report which reflects input from many community members and Farm to School advocates. The HIA examined the potential health impacts of Oregon state legislation (House Bill 2800) which would create a program reimbursing school districts for buying Oregon food and a competitive grant program that would fund food, agriculture and nutrition based activities. This HIA can be used as a model by other states hoping to gain the same win-win benefits like increasing economic growth in the agricultural sector and addressing childhood obesity by increasing children's fruit and vegetable consumption.
Full report and the executive summary:
http://www.upstreampublichealth.org/F2SHIA?utm_source=CFSC+Policy+Updates&utm_campaign=a5e350c84c-Policy_Update_6_2_2011&utm_medium=email

Unhealthy neighbourhoods play big role in obesity, diabetes epidemic

LISA ROCHON / Globe and Mail

Cities’ neighbourhoods have long been ranked, like Hollywood stars, according to their beauty and magnetic personalities. But cities are now being increasingly divided into healthy and sick zones. If you live in downtown Vancouver or New York, where the tree canopy is lush and you can easily walk to an organic café or a yoga class, you belong to a privileged class not only because of the real estate values in your neighbourhood but because you’re likely to have a higher life expectancy.

This is the new crisis of cities: Badly designed neighbourhoods are literally sapping people of their ability to live fully.

If, as a newly arrived immigrant, poverty has driven you to the inner or outer suburbs, where you live in a basement apartment or high above the concrete ground in a residential tower, you are far more likely to suffer from type 2 diabetes and its related consequences such as blindness and amputation. Most of Canada’s growth comes from immigrants, but the troubling fact is that Hispanics, blacks and South Asians are genetically predisposed to diabetes. Because of the compounding of these forces, you and your neighbours can expect a lower life expectancy

A poor diet, high in saturated fat and low on fruits and vegetables, causes excess weight. Once obesity sets in, especially if it develops at a young age, type 2 diabetes usually follows. A sedentary lifestyle fuels the problem. That’s why some medical researchers and health offices are joining forces with urban planners to design neighbourhoods that are more conducive to activity. Healthy eating combined with increases in physical exercise – walking with the kids to school or biking to the cinema – would help to mitigate the rise in the prevalence of obesity over the last two decades. They say that Canadians need to embrace the Danish model of urban wellness, or suffer a health disaster.

There is a worldwide epidemic of obesity and type 2 diabetes. Canada’s two million cases of diabetes are expected to double over the next decade, according to a 2008 report from the Canadian Diabetes Association. Three times as many young teenagers are overweight now as there were 25 years ago, according to a 2006 Statistics Canada health report. Up to 14 per cent of the populations of Toronto and New York City live with diabetes, a rate that far exceeds World Health predictions.

It’s a cruel fate.

People who live in the northern, unwalkable fringes of low-income Toronto, or across the border in the marginalized, dehumanized neighbourhoods of New York’s East Harlem and South Bronx will live about 20 fewer years than those in downtown, vibrant neighbourhoods, according to a 2007 report by the City University of New York’s Campaign Against Diabetes and the Public Health Association of New York City.

In the past 10 years, the number of New Yorkers diagnosed with diabetes has increased by 250 per cent. Meanwhile, in the beautiful neighbourhoods of Manhattan, the rate of diabetes is six times lower.

New York and Toronto share another harsh urban reality: Both cities top the charts in North America for numbers of high-rise residential towers. Half Toronto’s population lives in vertical towers, a citywide phenomenon that touches every ward.

When a tower sits amid a variety of housing types in high-density neighbourhoods, where restaurants and retail can thrive, tower residents can engage with the street life. But in the northeast and northwest quadrants of Toronto, in neighbourhoods such as Malvern and Rexdale that have few sidewalks and no sensory enticements such as the Art Gallery of Ontario or the dramatically lit CN Tower, there’s little reason to engage in the outside world.

“Diabetes is extremely costly to manage. It places a huge burden on individuals and on the health-care system,” said Gillian Booth, a lead author of the Diabetes Atlas created by St. Michael’s Hospital’s Centre for Research on Inner City Health and the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences.

The first Canadian study of its kind, published in 2007, the Atlas investigated 140 Toronto neighbourhoods over three years to examine the role of several factors – including community design, population density, access to healthy and unhealthy food – on the diabetes epidemic. Poverty and ethnicity were found to be key in the development of type 2 diabetes. The researchers also concluded that walking and transit times to recreation facilities in the city’s outlying neighbourhoods were as long as 40 minutes and 20 minutes, respectively, each way. It takes only 30 minutes of walking or moderate exercise, combined with a healthy diet, to cut the risk of diabetes in half. But a walk through a bleak or potentially dangerous neighbourhood is hardly inspiring, especially if the only nearby landmark is a highway.

“Among all the people being admitted for heart attack or stroke, one-third have diabetes. Two-thirds of all amputations that are caused not from trauma occur in people with diabetes,” Dr. Booth said. “Clearly, we need to start thinking about prevention.”

We used to call them ugly, but now social geographers and medical practitioners label the disconnected sections of the city “obesogenic,” meaning environments that promote obesity.

Given the crisis of deadening urbanity, medical health officers such as Peel Region’s David Mowat are not only dealing with water fluoridation and smoke-free zones, but also the crucial need to design better-connected, more walkable neighbourhoods with access to healthy food at grocery stores and restaurants.

Double alleys of trees, dedicated bike lanes and wider sidewalks promise in the future to be written into zoning bylaws for communities such as Brampton, Ont., the population of which has an acute incidence of diabetes.

Given that health care absorbs 40 per cent of Ontario’s budget, it seems only economically savvy for the provincial Ministry of Health to start funding the radical redesign of inner and outer suburbs. It’s cheaper to plant a row of trees, after all, than to put somebody on dialysis for life.

Psychologically and physically, the impact of isolation is brutal. Not long ago, I met a woman newly emigrated from Russia standing in line at the Hockey Hall of Fame with her two elementary-school-age boys. She told me that when they first arrived in Toronto, they lived in an apartment downtown but, hearing of a large Russian community north of the city at Bathurst Street and Steeles Avenue, she and her husband decided to move. She described how unhappy they were, said that people were unfriendly, that conversation in the towers and on the street was rare, and that there was nothing to do. The ward she lives in is defined by its 72 high-rise towers and proximity to highways.

What was especially distressing was to hear that her boys wanted desperately to play hockey, but the rinks were simply too far. Public transit was impossible and they were without a car. As we shuffled along in the line, I was struck by the harsh reality of the new urban order: My friends and I live in a healthy neighbourhood of affluence while, about eight kilometres north, other parts of the population are being increasingly doomed by urban wastelands.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/time-to-lead/unhealthy-neighbourhoods-play-big-role-in-obesity-diabetes-epidemic/article2024476/page1/

South Valley Public Meetings: Pedestrian and Bicyclist Safety Action Plan

For the last several years the Federal Highways Administration (FHWA) has recommended communities prepare and adopt Pedestrian Safety Action Plans.  This is in response to the continuing number of pedestrian crashes both nationally and here in New Mexico, which has one of the highest pedestrian fatality rates.  FWHA has prepared a guidebook, “How to Develop a Pedestrian Safety Action Plan” local communities can follow.

Pedestrian and bicyclist facilities are an integral part of the Bernalillo County transportation system.  They include sidewalks in the more urban areas, soft-pavement trails in the rural areas, bike lanes along major roads, and bike trails and equestrian trails off the road network.  When planning for pedestrian and bicyclist facilities, the primary goal is to ensure safety for all travelers along county roadways, especially children on routes to school and access for disabled persons to transit stops.  Other goals include:

·         Provide a choice in transportation to work, school, and shopping for all ages and abilities,

·         Promote healthy lifestyles and recreational opportunities for all ages and abilities by encouraging residents to exercise daily,

·         Reduce energy use and improvement air quality.

This study will identify the pedestrian and bicyclist issues in the County and help to prioritize those projects.

Public meetings for the South Valley area have been scheduled over the next couple of weeks.  You are encouraged to attend any of these meetings and share your views:

·         Far South Valley Area

Monday, May 2

6:00pm – 7:00pm

Los Padillas Community Center

2117 Los Padillas Rd. SW

·         Mid South Valley Area

Thursday, May 12

5:30pm – 6:30pm

South Area Command (Sheriff’s sub-station)

2039 Isleta Blvd

·         Mountain View Area

Wednesday, May 18

5:30pm – 6:15pm

Mountain View Community Center

201 Prosperity SE

Comments can also be shared via email to the Bernalillo County Public Works Division, Richard Meadows, Transportation Planner at RMeadows@bernco.gov.