Government-subsidized groceries are making Americans fat, a new study claims.
Billions of dollars are poured into the farming industry each year to lower the cost of basic foods like corn, soybeans, wheat, rice, sorghum, dairy and livestock.
But these products are often made into foods that increase obesity and risk of heart disease such as high-fat processed foods, high-calorie juices, and soft drinks with high-fructose corn syrup.
The more people eat of foods made with subsidized commodities, the more likely they are to be obese, have abnormal cholesterol and high blood sugar, according to a report in JAMA Internal Medicine.

‘We know that eating too many of these foods can lead to obesity, cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes,’ said lead author Karen R. Siegel of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
But the subsidies help keep the prices of those products down, making them more affordable.
‘Among the justifications for the 1973 U.S. Farm Bill was to assure consumers a plentiful supply of food at reasonable prices,’ Siegel told Reuters Health by email.
‘Subsidized food commodities are foods made from federally funded crops to ensure the American population has an adequate supply of food, thus they tend to be non-perishable, or storable, e.g., corn, wheat, rice, to reduce the risk of spoiling.’
The researchers used National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey responses obtained from more than 10,000 adults between 2001 and 2006. Each person reported everything they had eaten in one 24-hour period.
The researchers gave each individual a ‘subsidy score’ based on the percentage of their total calories than had come from subsidized foods.
At the same time, participants had their body mass index, abdominal fat, C-reactive protein (a marker of inflammation), blood pressure, cholesterol and blood sugar levels measured.
On average, people were getting about 56 percent of their calories from subsidized food commodities.
When the total group was divided into four smaller groups based on their subsidy score, those with the highest scores were more likely to be obese, have a larger waist circumference, more C-reactive protein, more ‘bad’ cholesterol and higher blood sugar than those in the lowest subsidy score, as reported in JAMA Internal Medicine.
