Link between television and weight

In the current issue (.pdf) of the magazine Tufts Nutrition, Jacqueline Mitchell describes recent research on television viewing and weight status.

Americans spend an average of more than 150 hours a month in front of the television — that’s six days—and never mind other sedentary hours we spend with computers or mobile devices. As our screen time has exploded, so has the national waistline. Two-thirds of adults are overweight, and childhood obesity has more than doubled in the last 20 years.

One reason obesity may be on the rise is that people who watch a lot of television may eat more, particularly pizza, soda and other fast foods, according to a recent Tufts study that evaluated 30 years of research linking TV viewing with weight gain. The paper, written by four students and their adviser, Robin Kanarek, Ph.D., interim dean of the Friedman School, was published online in the June 4 edition of Physiology and Behavior....  The research by Kanarek and the students—Rebecca Boulos, N13; Emily Vikre, N08, N13; Sophie Oppenheimer, N11, MPH11; and Hannah Chang, A10—also indicated that television can shape societal views about overweight and obese people.

IOM report considers time constraints as part of assessing SNAP benefit adequacy

The Institute of Medicine, part of the National Academies, today released a consensus report on the adequacy of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.

The committee that prepared the report was led by Julie Caswell of UMASS Amherst.  Members included Mary Muth, Philip Gleason, Jim Ziliak, Barbara Laraia, Diane Schanzenbach, and others.  The committee had invited me to Washington for a workshop in spring 2012 to give a presentation (.pdf) about the economics of the SNAP benefit formula, the procedure that the federal government uses to assign a benefit amount to each participant household based on its income and other characteristics.

In one notable conclusion of today's report, the committee suggested that the federal government should account for the difficulty low-income families face in finding sufficient time to cook at home.  The implication is that the government could consider increasing SNAP benefits to provide low-income households with sufficient resources to purchase more convenient and easy-to-prepare foods:

Time—USDA-FNS should recognize the cost-time trade-offs involved in procuring and preparing a nutritious diet. The dollar value of the Thrifty Food Plan (TFP), with its strong reliance on preparation of meals from basic ingredients, does not account for time constraints faced by most households at all income levels, particularly those with a single working head of household, which necessitate purchasing value-added or prepared foods with a higher cost. USDA-FNS should examine the impact of accounting for cost-time trade-offs, for example, by:

• applying a time adjustment multiplier to the cost of the TFP or reviewing options for adjustments to the current cost of the plan, and

• adjusting the earned income deduction to reflect more accurately time pressures for participants who are working. 

One question is whether encouraging greater food spending on convenient foods would have any health or environmental consequences.  For example, convenience foods tend on average to have more sodium and more packaging than their traditional counterparts.

Clearly, an increased benefit to allow for convenience foods would be a special boon for highly time-constrained households -- think for example of the dreadfully tight time budget for a low-income working single parent.  Yet, many other low-income SNAP participants are retired, or live in households that include a non-working adult.

Some low-income households are able to -- and even want to -- cook at home.  For these households, it might be counter-productive to increase the maximum benefit to a level based on the price of expensive convenience foods, while simultaneously forbidding the households to economize on food and use the savings for non-food needs such as housing and transportation.

While you're thinking this over, I thought it would be helpful to conclude with some real data from the American Time Use Survey for 2011.  Most of the leisure time segment at all education levels is for television and other screen-time recreation. Source: American Time Use Survey. Note: the amount of work time appears smaller than you may expect, because the data include both weekdays and weekends, averaged for working and non-working persons aged 15 and older.

Bread for working people

A friend taught me how to make this oat/wheat combination bread.  While some bread recipes save time by using just a single rise, this bread has two rises, but there is a twist that makes it quite friendly for people with a day job.

The first kneading is at night.  The following morning, the steps for putting dough in pans, allowing a second rise, and baking, each take just a few seconds and seem timed just right to fit between morning tasks of waking up, showering, dressing, breakfast, and out the door.  By some measures you'd have to say home-made bread takes hours of work, but if we choose a recipe that fits our schedule, we get three loaves of fresh bread for about 45 minutes' work (in the evening, in the kitchen, with music on the radio, sometimes with kids around chatting, at a time of day when I didn't want to do other work anyway).

As I smell this bread before eating it the next evening, I think there are some things that statistics on food prices and time use will never quite measure.