Different Stores, Different Impact on Food Deserts

A food desert is an area with no local source of fresh fruits and vegetables (grocery stores, farmers markets, etc). This absence has been linked with increased risk of obesity and other cardio-vascular health issues.

But what about price? In some urban areas, the only grocery store is a more expensive chain, like Whole Foods (hello Washington D.C. and Providence, R.I.).

We do see price changes due to market competition. For example, this interesting article. Adding a Wal-mart may decrease grocery store prices, but adding a Costco increases them.

In tricking our sweet tooth, we are only cheating ourselves

Frontal Cortex (FC) has an excellent posting on the dynamics of artificial sweetners and the human body. It seems that while our tastebuds may be tricked by diet soda and the sweetness in blue, yellow, and pink packets, this trickery changes how the way we manage our dietary intake.

As FC writes, "Rats fed artificial sweeteners gained more weight than rats fed actual sugar...Animals may use sweet taste to predict the caloric contents of food. Eating sweet noncaloric substances may degrade this predictive relationship."

So in summary, the article cited by FC suggest that:

1. Our brain uses how sweet a food is to estimate the number calories and relatedly, how much we can eat.

2. Artificial sweetners screw up this mechanism so we end up thinking we can get away with eating a lot more sweets.

This reminds me of what a family member once (half jokingly) said to me, "I don't understand why I don't lose any weight, I eat diet crackers all day." The labels "diet","light", or the even more annoying "lite" gives us that comforting feeling that we can get away with eating more of the wrong thing. It makes it so much easier to convince ourselves that drinking that soda is acceptable because we are tired, had a long day, and deserve it.

Read more about this study at Frontal Cortex and Diet Soda