Memo to Michelle Obama: Americans Still Aren’t Eating Their Greens

Memo to Michelle Obama: Americans Still Aren’t Eating Their Greens

Jack Puccio/iStockphoto
By Millie Dent

Maybe First Lady Michelle Obama should refocus her healthy eating campaign more on adults than children. Fewer than 20 percent of American adults are eating enough fruits and vegetables, newly released data from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention survey.

The United States Department of Agriculture’s nutrition guidelines recommend that Americans have two to three cups of vegetables every day, along with 1.5 to two cups of fruit. Based on those criteria, only 13 percent of adults in the survey ate enough fruit and a meager 9 percent of individuals ate enough vegetables. These numbers are worse than in years past. Between 2007 and 2010, 76 percent of Americans didn’t consume the recommended amount of fruit and 87 percent failed to eat enough vegetables.  

Related Link: The 11 Worst Fast Food Restaurants in America

What’s more, while consumption of fruits and vegetables varies substantially from place to place, the residents of each and every state in the union fell short of the USDA recommendations. In Tennessee, 7.5 percent of residents consume enough fruit, while in Mississippi, a mere 5.5 percent of individuals eat enough vegetables. California ranked highest for eating both fruits and vegetables, but even there, just about 18 percent eat enough fruit and 13 percent eat enough veggies.

“Substantial new efforts are needed to build consumer demand for fruits and vegetables through competitive pricing, placement, and promotion in child care, schools, grocery stores, communities, and worksites,” the CDC report says.

The report comes out after a study published in last month’s JAMA Internal Medicine found that fewer than one-third of Americans are currently at a healthy weight. The majority of individuals are either overweight or obese. 

Coming Soon: Deductible Relief Day!

By The Fiscal Times Staff

You may be familiar with the concept of Tax Freedom Day – the date on which you have earned enough to pay all of your taxes for the year. Focusing on a different kind of financial burden, analysts at the Kaiser Family Foundation have created Deductible Relief Day – the date on which people in employer-sponsored insurance plans have spent enough on health care to meet the average annual deductible.

Average deductibles have more than tripled over the last decade, forcing people to spend more out of pocket each year. As a result, Deductible Relief Day is “getting later and later in the year,” Kaiser’s Larry Levitt said in a tweet Thursday.

Chart of the Day: Families Still Struggling

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By The Fiscal Times Staff

Ten years into what will soon be the longest economic expansion in U.S. history, 40% of families say they are still struggling, according to a new report from the Urban Institute. “Nearly 4 in 10 nonelderly adults reported that in 2018, their families experienced material hardship—defined as trouble paying or being unable to pay for housing, utilities, food, or medical care at some point during the year—which was not significantly different from the share reporting these difficulties for the previous year,” the report says. “Among adults in families with incomes below twice the federal poverty level (FPL), over 60 percent reported at least one type of material hardship in 2018.”

Chart of the Day: Pragmatism on a Public Option

Democratic U.S. presidential candidate U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) speaks at a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington
AARON P. BERNSTEIN
By The Fiscal Times Staff

A recent Morning Consult poll 3,073 U.S. adults who say they support Medicare for All shows that they are just as likely to back a public option that would allow Americans to buy into Medicare or Medicaid without eliminating private health insurance. “The data suggests that, in spite of the fervor for expanding health coverage, a majority of Medicare for All supporters, like all Americans, are leaning into their pragmatism in response to the current political climate — one which has left many skeptical that Capitol Hill can jolt into action on an ambitious proposal like Medicare for All quickly enough to wrangle the soaring costs of health care,” Morning Consult said.

Chart of the Day: The Explosive Growth of the EITC

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By The Fiscal Times Staff

The Earned Income Tax Credit, a refundable tax credit for low- to moderate-income workers, was established in 1975, with nominal claims of about $1.2 billion ($5.6 billion in 2016 dollars) in its first year. According to the Tax Policy Center, by 2016 “the total was $66.7 billion, almost 12 times larger in real terms.”

Chart of the Day: The Big Picture on Health Care Costs

iStockphoto
By The Fiscal Times Staff

“The health care services that rack up the highest out-of-pocket costs for patients aren't the same ones that cost the most to the health care system overall,” says Axios’s Caitlin Owens. That may distort our view of how the system works and how best to fix it. For example, Americans spend more out-of-pocket on dental services ($53 billion) than they do on hospital care ($34 billion), but the latter is a much larger part of national health care spending as a whole.