Advocates Speak Out Against SNAP Acceptance for Health Reasons

• Author: Willis Goldner
• Posted: 2024-07-27

For the longest time in America, what is known today as the SNAP program (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) was known as food stamps. These food stamps were paper coupons, and the issue with giving them out was twofold. For starters, it made a lot of people feel very stigmatized.

If you were shopping with food stamps, there was no possible way to not stand out to everyone seeing you in public. It was embarrassing for millions of people. The other issue was that it promoted a lot of fraud. People would famously sell their food stamps for around 50 cents on the dollar, and go buy booze and tobacco and all the things that were prohibited by food stamps. With SNAP (EBT) cards today, it's harder to commit that type of fraud, but it's much easier to make unhealthy choices. For instance, did you know that many fast food restaurants accept EBT cards and SNAP benefits? It's estimated that over two million Americans regularly use their EBT cards to purchase fast food items, and advocates are starting to speak out against this in a big way.

Fast food is some of the unhealthiest food in America. While most medical professionals agree that an occasional indulgence is just fine, as long as it's in moderation, the over-consumption of such foods leads to inflammation, weight gain, diabetes, heart disease, and more. And if you look at the stats for all of those health issues, poor people are disproportionately affected. Could that be because poor people are eating more fast food because (a) it's cheaper and (b) they can get it easier on their EBT cards? Pro-health advocates think so, and they're trying what they can to get fast food restaurants to stop accepting EBT cards, arguing that it predates unfairly on the poorest Americans who are uneducated on proper nutrition.

Corporate mainstream news media is unlikely to carry these stories, and you likely will not find it trending on Twitter or Facebook. The current en vogue fad in America today is for people in excess of 350 pounds to claim that they're "healthy at any size" and that being in shape is just a social construction. You will have to find YouTube videos of collegiate speakers and alt-media magazines to find where these advocates have a platform. Though their main point is hard to disagree with: Companies accepting government money from poor people to feed them unhealthy food is just another way that huge corporations profit at the expense of normal people. Moreover, it's a wealth transfer from the poorest to the richest.

 

Fast Food and America's Addiction to Food

America and its addiction to fast food goes back to the 1980s. While people are a lot heavier and more unhealthy now, the 1980s is when all of these competitor chains started to pop up. For the longest time, it was McDonald's and KFC, and they actually cooked their food with natural ingredients and used beef tallow, which is a lot healthier for people than the cheaper, mass-produced seed oils used today. Once market parity took off in a big way, and hundreds of fast food chains existed, everything in America became a rat race to see who could use the cheapest garbage ingredients available, in order for their companies to profit.

In today's America, inner cities and poor rural communities are the biggest spenders on fast food in America, while also being the unhealthiest communities in the country. Are you looking at causation here, or just correlation? It's hard to say, though advocates for health believe that it's far from a coincidence. CiCi's Pizza, McDonald's, Burger King, Church's fried chicken, Blimpie, Carl's Jr., and many other fast food chains happily accept EBT cards, and for years no one has seemed to voice their concern over the fact that the poorest people in America were mass consumers of the unhealthiest food in America. Put two and two together, the health advocates claim, and you will find the reason why poor people are unhealthier and live shorter lifespans than wealthier people.



It's true that fast food is a lot cheaper and stretches longer for consumers than healthy greens and lean, organic meats at quality stores. Not to even mention that some people live in food deserts and don't have many options. But as long as the government continues to allow EBT to be used to buy fast food, advocates predict that poor people will keep gaining weight and having more health issues than everyone else.