Proj 2025 Dietary Rollbks Would Curb Fight Against Ultra-Process Food; Adults 42% Obese,12% Diabetes

Last edited Tue Oct 15, 2024, 01:46 PM - Edit history (1)

Project 2025 dietary rollbacks would limit fight against ultra-processed foods, The Guardian, Oct. 15, 2024. Ed. - Conservative ‘wishlist’ of policies for a future Trump administration goes so far as transforming food and farming 🍔 🍟
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When Project 2025 began making headlines this summer, it was largely for the ways the conservative “wish list” of policies for a future Trump administration would restructure the entire federal bureaucracy, deepen abortion restrictions and eliminate the Department of Education.

But the document – a proposed mandate for the next Republican president authored by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank – also outlines steps that would radically transform food and farming, curtailing recent progress to address the excess of ultra-processed foods in the U.S. Among those: weakening the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap), ending policies that consider the effects of climate change – and eliminating the US dietary guidelines.

“This is a deregulatory agenda,” said Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition and food policy at New York University. “And what we know historically from deregulation is that it’s really bad for consumers, it’s bad for workers, it’s bad for the environment.” Project 2025 proposes changes to the country’s food assistance programs, like Snap and the Women, Infants and Children supplemental nutrition program (Wic), that Nestle believes are intended to dismantle such programs. It also calls for ending support for school meals.

But one of the most notable of its proposals is calling on the next Republican president to eliminate or reform the dietary guidelines.

Those guidelines form the basis for all federal food policies, from school meals to Snap, Wic and other programs. There is no shortage of private-sector dietary advice for the public, and nutrition and dietary choices are best left to individuals to address their personal needs,” the document reads. The food industry has long pushed the idea that chronic, diet-related health conditions, like diabetes and obesity, are the result of individual choices - like not exercising enough. Today, nearly 42% of adults in the US are obese and about 12% have diabetes. But nutritionists emphasize that those conditions are not the result of a moral failing, but rather conditions caused by the ingredients and policies (like aggressively advertising to children) pushed by food companies...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/15/project-2025-food-farming-policies