This Is Why A Record Number Of Americans Are Fat and Broke

Source

http://www.zerohedge.com

Thu, 12/12/2019

Fast food and takeout are anathema to the ‘clean eating’ lifestyle trend that has swept the US – and much of the developed world – over the past 10 years. But while spending on gym memberships and boutique fitness classes has risen significantly over the past ten years, recent studies show that over-spending on takeout was the biggest financial mistake made by younger Americans in 2018, according to a  MarketWatch report that cited data from a recent study published by Principal.

According to the data, nearly one in three Americans – 29%, up from 26% in 2018 – said dining out was this year’s top budget buster for them, followed closely by spending on groceries (which is ironic given the proliferation of low-cost grocers like Aldi that have sprouted up in recent years).

But that’s not all: In a separate study, Fidelity found that the No. 1 small financial mistake that most Americans admit to is dining out too much, something that 36% of respondents said they’d done in the past year.

Americans spent roughly $3,500 a year on dining out in 2018, according to government data. That’s a new record high, and a 2.8% improvement from the prior year. Sales are projected to hit a record high of $863 billion this year, according to the National Restaurant Association.

Since February 2010, there have been just 5 months out of 117 where the number of waiters and bartenders in the US has posted a monthly decline. November was no different.

What’s worse: The cost of getting takeout or going out to eat is rising much more quickly than the price of buying groceries, but that hasn’t had much of an impact on the spending habits of young people. And if the latest Gallup poll (a different poll than the ones cited above) shows, Americans eat out often: Six in 10 ate out at least once in the past week. And 16%

“Dining rooms and kitchens across the U.S. are getting a little less use than they used to,” said research firm Nielsen in a recent report. “That’s because Americans have embraced the experience of eating out.”

Eating out is hammering Americans’ savings, but that’s not the only impact it’s having on their general sense of well-being: It’s also probably the biggest contributor to the expanding waistlines of millions of Americans. When Americans eat out, they chow down on an extra 200 calories more than on a normal day.

Furthermore, government research has shown that “when eating out, people either eat more or eat higher calorie foods – or both – and that this tendency appears to be increasing.”

Meanwhile, a staggering 75% of Americans are either overweight or obese, according to the CBC. And over time, the costs in the form of deteriorating health associated with obesity will will continue to climb. According to the CDC, obese patients often shoulder costs that are $1,429 higher on average than patients of a normal weight.

Drugs, guns, and despair: How America is killing Americans

Source

http://www.aljazeera.com

by Larry Beinhart

Dec13, 2019

 

The free market economy has pushed the American population to the brink.

A man found unconscious after overdosing on opioids puts his hands over his head in the back of an ambulance in the Boston suburb of Malden, Massachusetts, December 2, 2017 [Brian Snyder/Reuters]

 

American life expectancy has declined.

There’s no foreign invasion. No war within its borders. No one to blame but ourselves. How then, is America killing Americans?

Most reports point to three things: drugs and alcohol, guns, and despair.

There is also fat. Statistically, it is more important, but oddly, it is not often included in discussions about the decline in life expectancy.

This last decline is from 78.7 years of life to 78.6. That does not sound terribly frightening. One-tenth of a year. One month and one week less to live. However, it has gone down for three years in a row, which has not happened in more than 100 years. The last time life expectancy went down was during World War I, when apart from deaths at the front, the US suffered an influenza epidemic that killed 675,000 people.

Is it just the US?

An article published on BMJ (previously the British Medical Journal) looked at 18 high-income countries: Japan, Switzerland, Spain, Australia, Italy, Norway, Sweden, France, Canada, Netherlands, Finland, Austria, Portugal, the UK, Belgium, Denmark, Germany and the US.

Over the last quarter of a century, the lifespans in all of those countries have gone up. People are living four to five years longer, except in the US, where it has only increased by 3.7 years. Actually, the US fell into last place in life expectancy in 2001 and the gap has been growing since. The Germans, the next lowest on the list, get to live almost two years longer than the Americans. The Japanese make it to 84 – or almost six more years.

Drug overdoses killed more than 70,000 Americans in 2017 – an increase of 95 percent over 10 years (up from 36,000 in 2007).

Guns killed nearly 40,000 Americans in 2017, according to official statistics, which only counts cases if guns were “the principal cause” of death but not if they only “contributed” to it; that is 4.43 deaths per 100,000. By contrast, the death rate from gun violence in Japan and the United Kingdom is 0.04 and 0.06 respectively.

About two-thirds of all gun deaths in the US are suicides. This tells us there is plenty of despair. It has gone up by 33 percent in the last two decades while the global suicide rate has declined by 30 percent in roughly the same period.

Then there is fat.

The US is one of the most obese nations in the world, second only to island nations and Kuwait. It is listed as having an obesity rate of 36.2 percent. Most of the Western European countries have a rate of 20 to 25 percent.

Obesity is a relatively new problem and studies of it are even newer. The statistics are rapidly changing and becoming more dire. It started with saying that only severe obesity mattered and that it could shorten a lifespan by about 10 years. Moderate obesity was supposed to be OK, probably, but newer studies have said that it can take up to three years on average from someone’s life.

Do these four elements have anything in common?

Yes. Free market theology is at the root of it all.

America has a profit-driven health care system. Not only is it more expensive than any other system in the world, but it creates special inefficiencies and distortions. Its goal is always to sell an item, usually a drug or a service. How, then, can it address the obvious causes of the obesity epidemic – bad diet, lack of exercise, and a sedentary lifestyle? For the most part, it cannot and it does not.

The more insidious contributor to the American wideness and wallow is the food industry which uses excessive levels of sugar, fat and salt to ensure food is addictive.

The pharmaceutical industry also plays a major role in this. Its protected status allows it to spread addiction to various medications, causing more damage than the Mafia, the Colombian cartels and the Mexicans that Donald Trump accuses of bringing drugs over the border, combined.

Meanwhile, money from the gun industry and the NRA – a profit-seeking enterprise – keep Americans shooting themselves and each other.

Maps of suicide and addiction rates are maps of despair. They largely match the disappearance of American manufacturing. We can date that decline to President Ronald Reagan’s economic policies of the 1980s. They gutted the industrial midlands, destroyed the unions, leaving the traditional working-class poor and powerless. A certain portion of them turned to alcoholism, addiction and suicide.

There are other things that the American health care system cannot address, and that free market theology considers non-existent: self-esteem, supportive communities, positive expectation for the future, especially for children, which clearly affect healthy lifestyles and life expectancy.

Free market theology insists that what we pay for things is the best and only true measure of their value. The higher inequality rises, the more we have the feeling that this must be true.

Teaching was once a highly regarded, even revered profession. Teachers were doing a public service. They had college and advanced degrees. But now their pay has become closer to the poverty line than to the middle class. How valuable can they be?

As the 1 percent continue to amass wealth, we are getting to the point where they are literally sucking the life out of the 99 percent.

That is how America kills Americans.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

---

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Larry Beinhart

Larry Beinhart is a novelist, best known for Wag the Dog.

 @ LarryBeinhart

Food prices are skyrocketing, and economists are worried

Weather shocks, higher oil prices and a sharp depreciation in the US dollar could make food expensive, warn experts.

Source

http://www.aljazeera.com

by Michael S. Arnold and Anirban Nag • Bloomberg

28 Nov 2019

Pork prices have been surging in China as African swine fever ravaged supply, while India has been struggling with eye-watering onion prices due to extended monsoons [File: Dania Maxwell/Bloomberg]

Food prices are climbing fast in the world’s biggest emerging markets, posing a possible inflation threat after months of dormant pressures.

Asia’s two largest developing economies face a price surge for staple products — pork in China and onions in India — that are central to consumers’ diets. In Turkey and Nigeria, supply problems are driving up costs, while United Nations data show global food prices rose at the fastest pace in October in more than two years.

While the spike is painful for poorer consumers, it hasn’t reached a level to convince central banks to pull the brake on policy easing, as they remain focused on boosting economic growth amid a global slowdown. Average inflation across emerging markets is still at an all-time low, according to a Bloomberg gauge of consumer price indexes.

“We think it’s likely they would look through food inflation that is concentrated on a handful of products and driven by idiosyncratic factors,” said Taimur Baig, managing director and chief economist at DBS Bank Ltd. in Singapore. “Bias toward further monetary and fiscal easing will remain in 2020, in our view.”

Price Shock

Nevertheless, the threat of a price shock is real. Nomura Holdings Inc. economists recently warned of three potential triggers of higher food costs — weather-related shocks, higher oil prices and a sharp depreciation in the dollar — saying emerging and frontier markets are most at risk since food costs make up a larger portion of their consumers’ income.

The key will be whether the increases begin to feed into consumers’ longer-term inflation expectations, which could drive up wages and core inflation in a spiral, said Sonal Varma, Nomura’s chief economist for India and Asia ex-Japan.

“This is a big policy dilemma for central banks, to have supply-side driven higher food inflation while growth is weakening,” Varma said. “The question is: Do central banks believe that this is durable or that it’s transitory?”

Here’s how the phenomenon is playing out in key emerging markets:

China

Pork prices doubled in October following massive livestock culls to protect against swine fever, pushing up consumer inflation to 3.8%, the highest level since January 2012. Though pork prices have since come off their recent highs, economists expect inflation to peak at 5% or 6% in January. Inflation at that level could impede central bank efforts to ease monetary policy and boost an economy amid an ongoing trade war and weak domestic demand.

In the meantime, swine fever is jumping borders, with neighboring Vietnam culling almost 6 million pigs to prevent the spread of the disease. It hasn’t showed up yet in Vietnam’s CPI — partly because high food prices a year ago have skewed the statistical base — but the impact likely will be reflected in coming months, said Alex Holmes, an Asia economist at Capital Economics Ltd. in Singapore. Live pig prices in November are up almost 30% from a year earlier, according to an industry group.

India

In India, where spikes in the cost of onions have sparked social unrest in years past, a 26% year-on-year rise in vegetable prices pushed October headline inflation above the Reserve Bank’s threshold of 4% for the first time in 15 months.

That runs up against a central bank intent on easing policy to spur growth. Data due Friday is likely to show India’s gross domestic product grew 4.5% in the July-September quarter, its slowest pace since early 2013, according to a Bloomberg survey of economists.

The latest Bloomberg survey shows consumer price inflation expected to peak at 4.8% in the October-December period, before tapering off.

Turkey

Food inflation hovered near 30% in the first quarter and has remained above 15% for much of the year, due to a currency crisis in August 2018 coupled with supply-chain issues and a heavy reliance on natural irrigation. The government has taken to buying produce directly from farmers and selling it in cities, with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan denouncing alleged price-gougers as traitors and terrorists. Recent droughts in grain-producing provinces raise concerns about possible supply constraints next year, with the central bank expecting food inflation at 11% by the end of 2020.

Africa

A regional drought has curbed food output in some southern African countries. Driven by increases in the cost of corn products, food-price growth has pushed Zambian inflation to a three-year high, and monthly food inflation in Zimbabwe has reached almost 50% as supplies dwindle. In Nigeria, the price of imported rice has surged 7.3% since August after President Muhammadu Buhari ordered border closures, partly to counter widespread food smuggling.

SOURCE: BLOOMBERG

Take The Adversary Down With Short, Powerful Arguments

“Dr Mark Skidmore found $21 trillion had gone missing from HUD and DOD accounts from 1998 to 2015. He has screen captures from US government websites to prove this. He told this funny story of the US Army, which had a $122 billion annual budget. The Army had so much Missing Money that the Treasury Dept sent the Generals a check for $800 billion. Would you believe that the $800 billion went missing too?”

Source

vidrebel.wordpress.com

by horse237

Nov 13, 2019

Suppose people are talking about Medicare for All which some call Single Payer and you want a short but powerful counter-argument. Try this:

If you take five annual flu shots, your chances of getting Early Onset Alzheimer’s just went up 1,000 %.

Let the Democrat candidates prove to us that Medicare for all or Single Payer or NHS will improve our health. Let them first pass a law letting students in grade schools and employees at hospitals opt out of required annual flu shots.

MSG in ten different foods a day tricks us into believing we did not get enough to eat. Why not pass a law requiring MSG  food labeling? Reducing weight will lower the cost of healthcare no matter what system of payment we use. And how about passing a law to take Bisphenol out of the lining in canned food? It is known to cause cancer? Passing a law to save millions of Americans from getting cancer will reduce healthcare costs.

But politicians could care less about your health.

Recently a 13 year-old New York actress died from what I believe to be vaccine induced asthma. RIP Laurel Griggs.

Or suppose people have been talking about runaway government spending threatening to bankrupt us all destroying the value of our wages and pensions. Point out that we are currently spending $12 billion a week in interest on government debt. But, if we still had President Lincoln’s Greenbacks, we would not have a $23 trillion national debt. Why won’t any candidate for any public office mention the $12 billion a week we throw out the window just to subsidize Billionaire Bankers?

When the Rothschilds, Rockefefllers, Warburgs and J P Morgan friends got together to create the Federal Reserve,  Bankers gave themselves the right to charge us interest on money they create out of nothing. This transfers wealth from those of us who work and gives it to parasites who create money by expanding checking accounts every time we take out a loan.

Since November of 2009, we added $11 trillion to the national debt. That is a growth of  91.6%. If our national debt grew at that rate for the next 10 years, our debt would be $44.6 trillion. A $4 trillion interest rate bill would require that we cancel Food Stamps, national parks, healthcare, Social Security, federal pensions, education, eliminate national defense and release all federal prisoners. Put simply: we will soon hit a brick wall at 120 mph.

Why not change our banking system now before the coming crash?

Suppose people are taking sides on the issue of Fake News.

Tell them that Dr Mark Skidmore found $21 trillion had gone missing from HUD and DOD accounts from 1998 to 2015. He has screen captures from US government websites to prove this. He told this funny story of the US Army, which had a $122 billion annual budget. The Army had so much Missing Money that the Treasury Dept sent the Generals a check for $800 billion. Would you believe that the $800 billion went missing too?

Now let’s discuss Fake News. Choose. Will you believe the Corporate Media who covered up the theft of tens of trillions of dollars , covered up the Epstein pedophile case and lied to you about every major event since 911 or the people unafraid to speak the truth?

Or suppose people have been talking about foreign wars.

911 is used to justify $6 trillion in war spending and the deaths of thousands of young Americans in foreign lands. You could ask them how World Trade Center Tower 7,  a 47 story building,  fell down in 6.5 seconds. It was never hit by a plane. There were no active fires. So the question is: was it taken down by explosives planted inside the Tower?

You might want to glance at the second article below if you want to look again at 911.

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911: Short And Powerful Questions

https://vidrebel.wordpress.com/2011/08/04/911-short-and-powerful-questions/

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African Swine Fever Outbreaks in China Causing Hikes in European Meat Prices – Company

© AP Photo / Andy Wong

Source

sputniknews.com

Nov 4, 2019

TALLINN (Sputnik) – The spread of the African swine fever (ASF) in China is having a substantial impact on the European meat market, with Estonia fearing further hikes in prices, according to the HKScan meat product manufacturing company.

“We are talking about a 40% increase of the purchasing price … In order to compensate for the pork deficit and not leave its citizens without their favorite dishes, China has started to actively buy pork in Europe. This has affected the rise in prices in European countries”, Anne Mere, HKScan Executive Vice President of Market Area Baltics, told the Estonian ERR public broadcaster on Sunday.

African swine fever (ASF) is caused by a virus of the same name, which is not dangerous to humans but leads to the death of domestic pigs, as well as other pig family species, within days of being infected.

In October, China reported one new outbreak of ASF, in Guangxi Province, while South Korea reported 12 new outbreaks, according to the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE). The majority of new outbreaks in October were reported in Europe, where over 250 ASF cases in both swine and wild boar were registered.

There are currently over 9,400 ongoing African swine fever outbreaks in the world, according to OIE. No vaccine has been developed for the disease.

Bloomberg analysts suggested that by fattening up animals to enormous proportions, producers hope to eliminate the consequences of an outbreak of ASF.

Millions Hungry and Food Insecure in the US

Source

Poverty, unemployment, underemployment, hunger, food insecurity, and overall deprivation affect million of households in the world’s richest country USA.

Why? It’s because both right wings of its war party devote most of the nation’s discretionary income for militarism, maintaining the Pentagon’s global empire of bases, and endless aggression in multiple theaters — along with bailouts for and handouts to corporate America.

In the new millennium alone, countless trillions of dollars went for the above interests, combined with tax cuts for the rich, while food stamps and other social justice programs are fast eroding to help pay for them as the national debt soars by over $1 trillion annually.

Most US households with one or more working members have little or no savings — leaving them vulnerable to hunger and homelessness from one or more missed paychecks.

According to Feeding America, 79% of US households the organization aids rely on “inexpensive unhealthy food to feed their families,” 84% of households with children functioning this way.

The vast majority of Feeding America (FA) client households face unacceptable choices — 69% forced at times to choose between food and utilities, 66% between food and medical care, 31% between food and education.

Force-fed neoliberal harshness by Republicans and undemocratic Dems contributed to 58% of FA’s client households having one or more members with high blood pressure, 33% affected by diabetes — these numbers much higher among households with seniors, 77% and 47% respectively.

Nearly half of FA client households have one or members in “fair or poor health.”

Because of unemployment or poverty wages, one in six FA client households “experienced a foreclosure or eviction in the past five years.”

The vast majority of FA client households are food insecure (84%) — without access to sufficient, affordable, nutritious food, at times going hungry.

Hunger in America

According to the US Department of Agriculture in 2018, food insecurity affects 37 million Americans, including over 11 million children — the numbers likely way understated.

Feeding America explained that impoverished households and others above the poverty line experience food insecurity for inadequate ability to buy what’s needed, adding:

“Food insecurity does not exist in isolation, as low-income families are affected by multiple, overlapping issues like lack of affordable housing, social isolation, chronic or acute health problems, high medical costs, and low wages.”

“Taken together, these issues are important social determinants of health” and well-being — fast deteriorating in the United States of I Don’t Care, the world’s richest country with the greatest wealth disparity among developed nations.

The state of the nation is shameful, serving its privileged class exclusively, exploiting most others to benefit its well-off members.

Food insecurity and hunger impact virtually “every community in the United States,” said FA.

Do Something.org discussed “11 facts about hunger in the US,” saying the following:

Around 40 million Americans experience hunger annually.

At least 15 million US households endure food insecurity.

Hunger is caused by poverty and inadequate financial resources, a nationwide problem.

Around 45 million Americans rely on food stamps, an eroding program providing inadequate help.

“1 in 6 American children may not know where their next meal is coming from.”

“22 million children in America rely on the free or reduced-price lunch they receive at school, but as many as 3 million children still aren’t getting the breakfast they need.”

Food insecure children are at greater risk to develop physical and emotional health issues. They perform poorly academically and in physical activities.

Food insecurity affects both urban and rural areas nationwide.

People of color (Blacks and Latinos) are disproportionately affected by hunger and food insecurity.

The states with the highest rates of food insecurity are Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, New Mexico, Arkansas, Kentucky, Maine, and Oklahoma.

“(H)ouseholds with children ha(ve) a substantially higher rate of food insecurity” and hunger, said Do Something.org.

US Census data show around half of US households are impoverished or bordering it — a permanent underclass in the world’s richest country, young children and the elderly most affected.

Poverty, homelessness, hunger, food insecurity, unaffordable healthcare, and overall deprivation affect countless millions of Americans.

It’s the shame of the nation — a let ‘em eat cake society, uncaring about the vast majority of its citizens.

*

Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.

Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)

His new book as editor and contributor is titled “Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III.”

http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html

Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com.

The original source of this article is Global Research

Copyright © Stephen Lendman, Global Research, 2019

40 Million Americans Already Don’t Have Enough Food To Eat – And Here Is Why It Will Soon Get A Lot Worse

Source

theeconomiccollapseblog.com

by Michael Snyder

Oct 14, 2019

 

The things that I am going to share with you in this article are definitely very alarming.  But if you live in a wealthy neighborhood and are always surrounded by other wealthy individuals that never have to worry about missing a meal, then some of the numbers in this article may not ring true to you.  Today, the gap between the wealthy and the poor in the United States is larger than ever, and many wealthy Americans don’t have too much sympathy for the struggles that other people are going through.  But the truth is that most Americans are currently living paycheck to paycheck.  And when you are living right on the edge financially, there are times when it can be really tough to even afford the basic necessities.  If you have never had to miss a meal involuntarily, good for you.  Unfortunately, there are millions upon millions of Americans for which hunger is a very real problem.

If you had to guess, what would you say if someone asked you how many Americans struggle with food insecurity each year?

According to a CBS News article that was published a few months ago, “roughly 4o million people” struggle with not having enough food to eat…

The U.S. economy is enjoying nearly a decade of expansion since the Great Recession. Yet food insecurity — a lack of money or resources to secure enough to eat — still grips almost one in eight Americans. That’s roughly 40 million people. While slowly improving, that figure remains stubbornly higher than before the recession, when more than one in 10 U.S. residents had difficulty knowing when and how they might eat next, according to data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Hungry people live in every county in America, according to the latest annual research from nonprofit relief organization Feeding America. It compiled federal and other data for 2017, its ninth year examining the issue, for a report called Map the Meal Gap. Feeding America serves 4 billion meals each year for one in eight Americans through 200 food banks and 60,000 meal programs and pantries.

We should be incredibly thankful for Feeding America and their vast network of food banks and pantries, but what happens when the need for food dramatically escalates and the food banks start running empty?

Just a few days ago I heard from a good friend in the middle of the country, and she told me that her local food bank is really pressing hard for donations right now because things are starting to get really, really right.

And we haven’t even officially entered the next recession yet.

Normally there wouldn’t be too much reason for concern, but this has definitely not been a normal year.  Crops have been failing across the globe, and African swine fever is killing millions upon millions of pigs all over the planet.

In fact, thanks to the horrific outbreak of African swine fever in China, pork prices over there are 69.3 percent higher than they were a year ago…

Pork prices in China jumped 69.3% in September from a year ago as the country continued to battle a shortage of the meat that followed an outbreak of African swine fever.

Last month’s surge in pork prices was higher compared to the 46.7% increase seen in August, according to data from China’s National Bureau of Statistics. That pushed up food prices in China by 11.2% in September, accelerating from the previous month’s 10% gain.

If that sounds really bad to you, that is because it is really bad.

And what we have witnessed so far is just the beginning.

One of the big reasons why the Chinese just agreed to buy billions of dollars worth of our agricultural products is because they have a desperate need for them.

Here in the United States, food prices have also been rising steadily and we were already going to be facing one of the worst years for Midwest farmers ever, and now an unprecedented October blizzard is going to cause widespread crop failures.

An absolutely massive storm just dumped very deep snow from Colorado to Minnesota, and it hit just as farmers were getting ready to harvest their corn and soybeans.

As I noted in a different article that I just posted, one lawmaker in North Dakota is telling the press that we should expect “massive crop losses – as devastating as we’ve ever seen”.

Millions of acres of corn and soybeans are going to be “a total loss”, and that means that all of us will soon be facing higher food prices at the supermarket.

If you are independently wealthy and food prices don’t really matter to you, then you are in good shape.

But for the rest of us, these higher prices are going to be quite painful.  I would encourage you to stock up ahead of time while you still can.

Earlier this year, I extensively documented the major problems that farmers in the Midwest were having with rain and flooding, and I warned that we were potentially facing a disastrous harvest season.

Well, now that this historic blizzard has wiped out millions of acres of crops, we are potentially facing a scenario that is far worse than anything that I originally warned about.

That means that soon far more than 40 million Americans will be dealing with food insecurity.  Much higher prices at the grocery store will make it much more difficult for most of us to afford the basic necessities, and those on the bottom rungs of the economic pyramid will suffer more than anyone else.

About the author: Michael Snyder is a nationally-syndicated writer, media personality and political activist. He is the author of four books including Get Prepared Now, The Beginning Of The End and Living A Life That Really Matters. His articles are originally published on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News. From there, his articles are republished on dozens of other prominent websites. If you would like to republish his articles, please feel free to do so. The more people that see this information the better, and we need to wake more people up while there is still time.