Getting fat on food insecurity

-- Pedaling insecurity for fatter research budgets

Cyclists know a thing or two about hunger.

At some stage we’ve all suffered the dreaded hunger knock and had to improvise sports training survival tactics.

But it turns out we’re not the only ones worried about sustenance.

A Canterbury Community and Public Health report says 10 per cent of New Zealand households have "low food security" and that one in 10 of us are hungry, malnourished or nervous about where our next meal is coming from.

Terrible stuff, and not just for the desperately hungry faces in our midst, but also the cruel irony of their expanding girths. The report says limited access to culturally acceptable foods encourages the consumption of high-sugar, cheap and filling foods.

Turns out the fear of not being able to eat makes us eat more of the wrong stuff.

Otago University Health Economist Des O'Dea is on to this and has already floated his cure - the Food Insecurity Card, making the right foods cheaper and, so the theory goes, reducing our anxiety and propensity for fattening foods.

But, like the hungry cyclist, the one in 10 New Zealanders gripped by food insecurity won’t be reassured knowing that carrots and cauliflower are now on permanent special.

Anyone steering down the barrel of sugar low is seduced by the closest convenience food wrapper.

Forget about health foods.

No one, least of all the anxiously hungry, is interested.

They’d rather eat burgers and get scurvy than entertain archaic practices of vegetable-based food preparation.

"Low food security" is the concoction of a cardigan wearing researcher punting for new funding.

Food has never been as abundantly available, which is why New Zealanders are so fat.

Try researching ways to get people off their arses.