Act Now to Protect Nutrition in the Farm Bill!

The Senate is scheduled to have a debate on the Farm Bill on Monday, May 20th. Below is a message adopted from the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics' Action Center; please send to your Senators now to help protect nutrition programs for all Americans!  If you don't know who your Congressional representatives are or their contact information, you can find it here. 

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Please protect nutrition programs (Title IV) and nutrition research (Title VII) in the Farm Bill. Your support of a Farm Bill, focused on strong nutrition programs and research, that supports healthy people as well as the health of the earth, will improve the health of Americans and stimulate local economies. 

As a constituent, I urge you to:

Protect funding for –

•             The SNAP-Nutrition Education (SNAP-Ed) Program. In order to make healthy food choices on a limited budget, people need to be empowered with knowledge. SNAP-Ed educates families and has proven to lead to healthier eating habits. SNAP-Ed is a necessary benefit of the larger Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) package. SNAP-Ed is also in every state, including yours!

•             The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). SNAP provides eligible, low-income families monthly benefits to purchase much needed food.  SNAP also stimulates the economy by increasing participants’ purchasing power.  For every $5 in new SNAP benefits, as much as $9.20 is generated in local economic activity.

•             The Commodity Supplemental Food Program (CSFP) supplies low-income families, many of which are seniors, USDA commodity foods. The CSFP food package provides good sources of the nutrients typically lacking in the diet of this population.

•             The Emergency Food Assistance Program (TEFAP) provides nutritious foods that supplement the diets of low-income needy persons. This program utilizes organizations like food banks to reach this population. 

•             A strong Research and Extension title. Evidenced-based food and agriculture research will ensure a safe and healthy food supply for years to come.  Investing in food, nutrition and agriculture research is vital to guide sound decisions. Much of this research is conducted at each state’s land grant university.

Protect the program integrity of -

•             The Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program (FFVP) provides school children access to fresh fruits and vegetables. This program has been shown, in a robust 2013 evaluation, to increase children’s fruit and vegetable consumption by 15%, without increasing their overall calorie intake. This means children are eating fresh fruits and vegetables instead of other, potentially less healthy foods. FFVP also helps creates the foundation for healthy life-long habits.

•             The Seniors Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program benefits seniors and local farmers. This well established and well received program provides seniors access to seasonal produce while supporting local farmers and economies.

These important programs: 1.Contribute to healthy life-long habits; 2. Allow recipients to maintain their health and well-being during temporary times of economic hardship; and 3. May decrease the risk of developing costly and debilitating chronic diseases which strain our healthcare system.

Please protect these extremely valuable programs as the Farm Bill is debated on the Senate floor.

Farm Bill Action Needed!

The House of Representatives Committee on Agriculture is at work on its version of the 2012 Food & Farm Bill right now. (The Senate Agriculture Committee passed its version out of committee just a few weeks back).  Now is the time to tell the House what we want to see in the Farm Bill!      

                      

The House Committee on Agriculture has set up a comment box for constituents to submit their feedback. It’s open to everyone, but comments must be in by this Sunday, May 20.

To be heard, send a message to Congress via the Comments Box at http://agriculture.house.gov/farmbill_feedback.html.  

Below you will find some background information about the Farm Bill as it pertains to health, as well as a sample letter with information about the Farm Bill's effect on nutrition, hunger, support for farmers, and the environment. Sending a message to Congress is important, and it will only take a minute! 

The Farm Bill and Our Health

What is the Farm Bill?

The Farm Bill originally was set up to help American farmers.   However, over time, most of the subsidy payments to farmers went to commodity crops instead, with hardly any money going to support the growing of a variety of fruits and vegetables. 

How can this affect our health?

The Farm Bill includes a number of different titles that influence our food system. Changes made to the Farm Bill over the past several decades have made healthy food more expensive and unhealthy food cheaper, pushing the price of fruits and vegetables up by nearly 40% over 15 years and pushing the price of soft drinks (made from processed corn) down by 23%.  In addition, there is not currently enough farmland in the US devoted to growing fruits and vegetables for everyone to meet the US Dietary Guidelines of at least 5 servings of fruits and vegetables per day.  

A Clean Bill of Health

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A growing number of policymakers and public health professionals understand the relationships among agricultural policy, our food system and the public’s health, and even succeeded in making some minor advancements in the 2008 Farm Bill that supported both the public’s health and farmers.  However, today’s budget challenges now threaten the funding levels and continuation of several of these achievements.  In particular, the 2008 Farm Bill included a Healthy Food Provisions Package which included policies and programs supporting public health.  Some of these programs, which successfully help improve access to healthy food for low-income communities, need to be expanded, not cut.  These include:

·         Senior Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program - provides low-income seniors with coupons that can be exchanged for eligible foods (fruits, vegetables, honey, and fresh-cut herbs) at farmers’ markets, roadside stands, and community supported agriculture programs

·         Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program - makes fruit and vegetable snacks available at no cost to all children in participating elementary schools

·         Farmers’ Market Electronic Benefits Transfer Program – funds wireless EBT machines at farmers markets, which enables farmers markets to accept SNAP (food stamps)

·         Healthy Urban Food Enterprise Development - provides grants to help the establishment of businesses that can increase access to healthy, affordable foods for underserved communities, while creating jobs

·         Community Food Projects - addresses food insecurity through developing community food projects that help promote the self-sufficiency of low-income communities. Examples include innovative approaches to nutrition education, and support for farm-to-school programs.

·         SNAP Nutrition Education Program (SNAP-Ed) – supports nutrition education for people eligible for SNAP, but was recently expanded to include individuals who reside in a community with a significant low-income population. Allowable nutrition education was recently expanded to include broader community and public health approaches to improve nutrition.

In addition, the WIC Farmer’s Market Nutrition Program – which provides women, infants and children enrolled in WIC with vouchers to use at farmer’s markets – has traditionally been funded through the Child Nutrition Reauthorization Act, but should be put under the Farm Bill to protect it from cuts in the future. 

And now, for a sample letter that you can send to Congress via the Comments Box at http://agriculture.house.gov/farmbill_feedback.html: 

As the Committee considers the 2012 Food and Farm Bill, I urge you to: 

Preserve and expand funding for the Healthy Food Provisions Package which includes policies and programs supporting public health.  These programs, which successfully help improve access to healthy food for low-income communities, include: 
•Senior Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program 
•Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program 
•Farmers’ Market Electronic Benefits Transfer Program 
•Healthy Urban Food Enterprise Development  
•Community Food Projects 
•SNAP Nutrition Education Program (SNAP-Ed)  

Place the WIC Farmer’s Market Nutrition Program under the Farm Bill instead of under Child Nutrition Reauthorization.  This program promotes the consumption of produce by women, infants, and children enrolled in the WIC program while successfully creating a base of customers at farmer’s markets in low-income neighborhoods; 

Support our fight against hunger by maintaining and strengthening critical nutrition programs in this time of unprecedented need. We must not solve our budget problems on the backs of those experiencing food insecurity, including our most vulnerable – our children, the elderly, and the disabled;

Provide an even "plowing" field by fully funding programs supporting beginning and socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers, organic farming, regional farming and food economies, and rural development. We need more farmers and ranchers, more sustainable food production, and more economic opportunity in our food system;

End direct payments and counter-cyclical commodity programs, replacing them with loophole-free agriculture risk coverage and implement a cap on crop insurance premium subsidies. We must support farmers that really need the help, not the biggest farms that don’t.

Eliminate the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) livestock set-aside to limit funds granted to concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) for waste management infrastructure and protect the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP) from disproportionate cuts and improve it by ranking applications solely on their conservation benefits. We must ensure that limited conservation funding maximizes lasting environmental benefits.

Thank you! 


Information compiled from the NYC Food and Farm Bill Working Group and the Center for a Livable Future's Growing Healthy Food & Farm Policy report in collaboration with NY Faith & Justice Farm Bill / food justice working groups

Re-evaluating Obesity

I saw an open heart surgery a few weeks ago. And I never want to see another one in my life.

What the food industry has done to us is very disturbing. It's messed with people's minds and mouths. It's made our country and much of the world obese. And we can't stand for it any more.

CBS gets this message: they aired Where Americans Stand on Obesity yesterday and pointed out that the American Dietetic Association is sponsored by companies such as Coca Cola, PepsiCo, and Mars.

But luckily, the Hunger & Environmental Nutrition (HEN) Dietetic Practice Group of the American Dietetic Association also gets this message. We have an ADA Corporate Relations Sponsors Review Task Force and are developing a survey that will go out to HEN members (and other registered dietitians eventually) to obtain data we can present to ADA so that this organization can start to change its practices.

This is one of the things that has to happen if we are ever to solve the obesity crisis in this country. Another thing we have to do is reexamine our practices, see if they're aligned with our morals, and most importantly rethink the questions we're asking so that we can learn from our mistakes (as Jim Wallis argues in his new book Rediscovering Values on Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street: A Moral Compass for the New Economy). And don't ever forget, everything's related: the rise in obesity and chronic disease is related to the economy - it has drastically increased the amount of money being spent in our sickcare system...billions of dollars are being spent treating chronic diseases. What did centenarians do centuries ago?? Not spend billions of dollars on a sickcare system, that's for sure.

Let's start with a few new questions, then. First off: What guidelines should we be using to determine the food we put into our bodies? In Michael Pollan's new book Food Rules, he lays out 64 simply put guidelines for what foods to eat, such as "don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food," "avoid foods you see advertised on television," and "don't eat breakfast cereals that change the color of the milk." For the reader who wants a bit more detail, check out Marion Nestle's book What to Eat.

Here's another question: What's the root cause of the obesity epidemic? My answer: agricultural policy. Corn and soy subsidies and a Farm Bill limitation on growing fruits and vegetables, supported by no other than the specialty crop growers who don't want the prices of fruits and vegetables to go down because then they will lose money. That's why I wrote an independent study paper for Marion Nestle last semester on the corn and soy subsidies. (Which, by the way, I'm going to revise and revise until it's good enough to be taken seriously by people with power. So if you want to contribute to the conversation, by all means share your thoughts with me.)

Let's do this. Growing our own food is so much better than open heart surgeries.

"How We Can Progress" by Senator Tom Harkin

I just read this excellent letter by Senator Tom Harkin in my On The Pulse. I'm glad we have him in the Senate.

How We Can Progress

By Sen. Tom Harkin

Public health professionals understand that making progress in the fight against obesity and diet-and-lifestyle-related chronic disease requires comprehensive, multi-sectoral change. We need concerted efforts in our homes and family life, at school, in the workplace, in the design of our communities, and in our health care system if we are going to reverse high rates of cancer, heart disease, obesity, type-2 diabetes, and other conditions associated with poor diet and lack of physical activity. Policymakers need to be creative in helping support these changes, including looking beyond healthcare legislation per se, in order to identify less obvious avenues. On virtually every bill under consideration, Congress should ask whether it can be modified to encourage the adoption of healthier lifestyles.

As chair of the Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry, I led the effort to reauthorize and update federal food and agricultural policy in the recently passed Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008 (better known as “the farm bill”). The term “farm bill” is something of a misnomer, since a majority of the funding authorized by that legislation goes to federal food assistance programs, both at home and abroad. It was a priority of mine to ensure that this omnibus legislation included significant health-promotion provisions. In my view, anyone who eats has a stake in the farm bill. I am hopeful that, over time, the many health-promoting initiatives included in the new bill will have a significant impact on the health of our citizens, especially our children.

For example, the new farm bill includes significant reforms to the Food Stamp Program, which is renamed as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), to reflect the fact that paper stamps have long since been replaced by electronic benefit cards. Most significantly, the bill ends the erosion of purchasing power of SNAP benefits that has occurred since the mid 1990s, and even increases benefits modestly. This increase in the value of SNAP benefits will enable families to purchase more healthful foods such as fruits, vegetables, and whole grains that, unfortunately, often cost more than mass-produced foods loaded with fat, sugar, salt, and calories.

I am also enthusiastic about a new provision, which I included in the bill, to test whether food-assistance recipients will purchase healthier foods if given economic incentives to do so. The bill includes funding for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which administers the SNAP Program, to oversee and evaluate a pilot program in which recipients will receive bonus payments for the portion of their benefits they use to purchase healthful foods. For example, when a program participant spends $100 in SNAP benefits at the local grocery, $50 of which is used to purchase healthful foods such as fruits and vegetables, he or she will receive some amount bonus credits for the $50 in healthful food purchases. This will be a difficult pilot to design, implement, and analyze, but it holds great potential to help us understand the ways in which existing federal food assistance programs can encourage better nutritional choices. I am hopeful that this pilot project will be a success, and that we will be able to use the SNAP program to encourage and incentivize healthful choices on a national scale.

The farm bill also includes an historic expansion of the Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Snack Program, which provides free fresh fruits and vegetables to children at schools. I initiated this program in the 2002 farm bill on a pilot basis. Over the years, many have argued to me that children won’t choose to make the healthful choice when they are at school. I disagreed. When our schools are overrun with junk food and sugary beverages, how can we really say that we are giving them an opportunity to make such a choice? I initiated the Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program out of a desire to get healthier foods into our schools so that the healthy choice is an easy one to make.

Since its start five years ago, the Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Snack Program has been an extraordinary success – popular not just with students, but also with teachers, school administrators, and parents. As a result of strong interest, the new farm bill extends the program from just a handful of states to all 50 states. Within five years, the program will have an annual budget of $150 million and will serve as many as three million elementary school children each year. Just as important, the farm bill includes strong new language requiring that first priority be given to schools with significant proportions of low-income children.

I am a strong believer in broad, community-wide changes aimed at promoting better nutrition. This is especially urgent in low-income communities, which often lack access to affordable fresh fruits and vegetables. After all, how can we expect families to make healthful food choices when their neighborhood offers them only expensive convenience stores and cheap fast-food outlets?

I am proud that the farm bill significantly expands funding for the promotion of farmers markets in the United States, which play an important role in providing consumers with opportunities to obtain fresh, local, and healthy foods. As part of this effort, the bill also dedicated funding to establish an infrastructure for SNAP program participants to use their electronic benefit cards at farmers markets. The new legislation also increases funding for the Senior Farmers Market Nutrition Program, which awards grants to provide low-income seniors with coupons that can be exchanged for eligible foods at farmers markets, roadside stands, and community supported agriculture programs.

ADA members will want to know that I worked with Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) to establish and fund the Healthy Urban Food Enterprise Development Center, which will identify best practices and provide technical assistance for groups that bring healthy, local foods into underserved communities.

I am proud that this law both initiates and sustains a wide range of programs designed to improve the health of the American people, especially children. At a time when heightened attention is being focused on the rapidly rising cost of food staples, we also need to keep our attention focused on encouraging healthful food choices, and on increasing the affordability and availability of foods essential to good health.