Week 5 – BALT 4361- Food Policy and Public Health

What really stuck with me from Chapter 6 was the overarching idea that food policy shapes the health of our nation. I always thought of health from an individual perspective; you are only as healthy as the decisions you make. Do you read nutrition labels? How often do you eat fast food? How often do you exercise? What you may not realize is that policies are being made at the federal, state, and local level that determine what food is available to your community, how much it costs, and how it is being marketed. When you think about policies such as SNAP or school meal regulations, it is a direct reflection of how our society wants to address health disparities. Until reading this chapter, I never fully thought about health past the individual level.

The first topic that I found interesting was how farm subsidies impact our food system. I had no idea that subsidies were given to certain crops and not others. When specific crops like corn and soy are subsidized, it lowers the cost of ingredients used to produce processed foods. Though this may be an indirect connection, federal decisions about what crops to subsidize trickles down to what food is affordable at your local grocery store and fast-food restaurant. I thought this was fascinating because you do not always think about how policies made in Washington can directly affect your diet.

My second favorite topic from this chapter was about policy addressing chronic diseases. Obesity and diabetes are some of the leading diseases that policy today addresses. There are policies like taxing sugary beverages, better food labeling, and school nutrition policy that attempt to change behavior on a population level. The reason I found this section so interesting is that you can really see how some of these policies fail because they do not take into consideration how it may affect people’s jobs or politics. After reading this chapter, it made me question if we will ever see effective policies that can help improve the health of our nation.