We — the U.S. taxpayers — help subsidize farmers by paying part of the premiums on their crop insurance. This helps ensure that farmers don't go belly up, and it also protects against food shortages.
But are there unintended consequences? For instance, do subsidies encourage the production — and perhaps overconsumption — of things that we're told to eat less of? Think high fructose corn syrup or perhaps meat produced from livestock raised on subsidized grains.
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He says the findings from this study and prior research suggest that subsidies increase production and consumption of products made from these seven foods. "And [consumption] of those foods is associated with cardiometabolic risk factors."
Narayan acknowledges the study has shortcomings. For instance, the methodology — known as a cross-sectional study — captures the association at just one point, a snapshot in time. It's possible if people had been interviewed about their diets on a different day — or over a series of years — a different picture would emerge.
It's also possible that farm subsidies have less influence on what we ultimately choose to eat than this study suggests. (More on that below.) So, this paper doesn't prove a cause and effect. However, this is certainly not the first time that U.S. farm policy has been implicated in the obesity epidemic.
