Doritos is a brand name, if you go for brandless potato chips, you can have
a pretty good calories/cost ratio. Likewise, pasta is pretty inexpensive,
for $1 you can have a whole 1kg package that will feed you for several
meals.

Another problem is that even if they have a kitchen, they sometimes don't
have any real groceries in the neighbourhood but only facility stores. Yet
another problem is that if you work two jobs or more, with a lot of
commuting, you just don't have much time left to shop and cook.

My girlfriend did a study on unfit housing (the kind where kids are attacked
my rats and get diseased from eating paint with lead) as part of a training
period (she's an city planner), usually residential hotels. It was quite a
surprise to see that their rents were actually higher than ours. We have a
small flat, but I have never been attacked by rats or anything like that. ;)
The only difference is that the landlord doesn't ask you to have a job (he
doesn't care where you get the money), to pay a deposit (there is nothing
left to damage), to pay anything in advance (if you don't pay, he will make
you pay) or even to be a legal immigrant. For the people who have no other
option than living in these places, yes, being poor is indeed rather
expensive...

At the liquor store we see MANY food stamp (which are actually cards)
recipients sell their cards for quick cash to buy vodka....MANY!!!

~Carol Ann

It's food money, so the only restriction should be that you buy food with it
(or that things that are considered necessities by law).  Now these people
are suggesting that they know best as to what foods are best -- and we have
good evidence that such is not the case.  And you can't prove that certain
junk food items, when used correctly, can't be part of a healthy diet.

This is food snobbishness taken to an extreme....like CM said, let those
folks eat cake if they wanna...(teach them to be better choices, but don't
force it on them).

Gosh, perhaps you'd like to make everyone who receives assistance into
slaves: if you take this support, you must submit to our will in every way.
It's only fair.

Now, here it is

There are already restrictions -- why are more needed?

Would it be fair

Vodka is not need to live -- it is not food.  It has calories, but it
provides 0 nuriousment (sp?)

Hopefully, they won't do this......

This seems really simple to me...

---

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Or beer. There are some good beers one could live for a _long_ time on.
DoubleSpatten for one, the one with two spades on the label. I know one
person who states that it must have provided the nutrition to get her
through one period of poverty.

Come to think of it, if I had to live for a month on the beer, or
Hostess anything, I would choose the beer. Much more like food. And it  
wouldn't give me tooth decay either.

Which is why the poor are often disproportionately fat. They can afford
processed starches, bread, pasta, etc. and simple starches, corn, rice,
potatoes - all can be had very cheaply. Meat is expensive. Hence, fat city.

Venger

So why should assistance be used any more wisely than the funds that people
earn and spend on themselves?

And what is real, healthy food?

Are you saying that there are some foods that people can eat as much of as
they wish and remain healthy?  Are there no other factors that come to bear
on remaining healthy?

If someone needs food assistance, do you really think it likely that they
won't need healthcare also?

If you start taxing "junk food" and taking steps to prevent poor people from
buying it, it will become a kind of luxury. Look at what your prohibition
did to alcohol. Translate to junk food. This is different, but there is
enough similarities to expect it to produce similar effects.

That's because you're thinking about a nation of pre-diabetic getting carbs
from whiter than white flour. Traditionnal food *is* heavy on carb. But it
was mostly unprocessed carbs (wholewheat, potatoes cooked with the skin...),
because they were less expensive. It was also not low fat. If you combine
reasonnable fat content with unprocessed carbs, you have carbs with a
reasonnable glycemic index. Besides, things like potatoes or corn were not
the same kind we have today, years of bio-engineering have made them easier
to digest, just compare the glycemic index for modern American corn and the
one for traditionnal corn.
Besides, most of the people did get plenty of exercise. They walked daily,
to buy food, to go to work... They also had physical jobs. Physical activity
is one of the best way to fight insuline resistance.
If you have little insulin resistance, and if you eat meals with moderate
glycemic indexes, carbs are not a problem. Besides, even with insulin
resistance, eating carbs doesn't make you hungry all the time. It just
doesn't for me, and I'm diabetic. When I get reactive hypoglycemia, it makes
me nauseous, the last thing I want then is to eat. As long as I eat high GI
food as part of a whole meal, I don't have problems with that. If I want to
snack, I go for fruits, chocolate or nuts which seem to do fine for me.

Bread, pasta, potatoes, corn, beans...

Old timers knew that overcooked pasta made you hungry soon after eating it.
It didn't fill your belly. On the other hand, al dente pasta did fill your
belly. They did not know about GI, but they had a pretty good idea of what
felt right to their stomach. Besides, they were not trying to do a low fat
diet, so the pasta was served with enough fat (cheese, olive oil) to lower
the glycemic index some more - again, probably empirical knowledge of GI.
Pasta was also done with whole or partly whole weat, not white flour. It was
not quick to cook stuff - the ready in 2-3 minutes pasta has insanely high
GI because of the industrial process that makes it fast to cook.

I still think that the problem is mainly psychological and sociological. We
are in a society where more is better. At the restaurant, an XL menue is
considered a good deal, even if it's way more than you should eat. Same
thing with healthy food and vitamins, the inflation is insane. People
compare vitamin supplement to see which one will provide best bang for your
bucks - is 500% of daily needs enough, or should you need 1000%? I wonder
when we will start seeing the first cases of severe vitamin overdoses.
When the official diet split the food groups into Good and Evil, a society
like ours thought it could - and should - eat as much of the Good Stuff (low
fat) as long as the Evil Stuff was avoided (fats). It became okay to make an
orgy of "diet" products, actually, it was probably a good way to lose
weight, these products were "healthy" after all, as long as you banned the
Evil stuff. If you gained weight, it was not because of the ten pounds of
Diet and Healthy food you had eaten, it was because of the craving that had
caused you to eat a single mouthful of Evil chocolate.
Now that the trend is towards low carb, I expect the same to happen with all
these special low carb diet goods. Mainstream people will just make their
stomach explode on low carb candy bars, and think that it's all fine as long
as they eat no carbs (and no veggies, you can count on mainstream making
every false and dumb choices).
That's why banning junk food is awfully wrong. It goes the same way as
before. Junk food in any quantity = Evil. Healthy food in unlimited quantity
= Good. That's a recipe for a catastrophe.

If you're eating too much of *any* kind of food. That's exactly what people
do *not* want to here. You're fat because you eat too much food. Point. If
you want to lose weight, you have to eat less. Point.

BG swings apply only to certain kinds of junk food. You're not getting much
BG swings from eating all kind of junk food. We didn't get the low fat
revolution to the same level you did here, so we have plenty of very high
fat junk food. People manage to get obese on this just as well as the rest.
People also get obese on gastronomic food - no need for any junk food there.
I doubt the chocolate cake that came after the foie gras and the royal king
size sauerkraut with meat is causing much of a BG swing.
Many people have trained themselves to eat until their stomach is full. When
their stomach is empty, it's "hunger" to them, and they try to fill it to
the max again. These people can do that on any kind of food, BG swings or
not.

Yet, people did not get obese on this kind of diet before. Most of Europe
has been on a high carb (bread) diet for centuries, and it did without major
obesity. Actually, back then, the obese people were the rich ones who could
afford meat. Moreover, unless you're eating only diet food (and I'm not
denying that it's exactly what many obese do eat), you're not going to eat
"mostly" carbs. You're going to eat a lot of carbs, with a lot of (trans)
fat and little proteins.

Some people stay slim, if unhealthy, all their life with this kind of diet.
They don't even need exercise. They just need to eat a reasonnable amount.
You don't *have* to eat an XXXL portion just because you're at a fast food.
Hell, I did lose 30 pounds while eating at McDonald once a day, and I wasn't
even hungry.

They were not fat, they were overweight. Big difference. Being overweight is
not unhealthy, it's just not fashionable. They also had a decent amount of
muscles along with the fat. Back then, being slightly overweight was a sign
of good health and well being. If you could afford to eat enough to sport
that fashionable fat, you certainly did so. Some people were obese, but it
was a small minority, not 30% of the population.
And yes, they were not frantic about cutting a food group from their diet.
So they had their carbs (poorly processed, which meant cheaper and more
feeling) along with some fat and whatever meat they could afford.
Depending on how much you eat, fast food might make you fat, or it might
not. If you think that a normal meal is a Big Mac or two with XXL French
Fries, coke and sunday, you will indeed grow fat, unless you exercise a
*lot*. If you think a normal meal is a hamburger or two, a salad with sauce
and a diet coke, you won't. I did lose weight eating the later.

I mean, they do cook them al dente - I hope I didn't mess with the double
negative. In Italy, that's the only "right" way to cook pasta! The origin is
that it was more filling that way. Since pasta is traditionnal folk cuisine,
al dente became the norm. As a result, real Italian restaurants will serve
them that way.
If you check a glycemic index table, the difference between well cooked and
al dente is rather huge. For instance, on my table (glucose at index 100),
white flour pasta is 55 when well cooked (which is actually rather low when
you compare it to potatoes, white bread...). Al dente spaghetti are at 35,
same as true wholewheat bread, quinoa, apples... Then you can compare that
to "instant" stuff (rice, pasta...) that cooks in 3 minutes and are at index
90. If you eat GI 35 real spaghetti with a gorgonzola or even plain olive
oil sauce, you're not going to get hungry for a while.