As someone who rings up groceries for a living (well, about half my living - I do other things around the store, too) my nu-scientific observation is that the main difference between SNAP recipients and everyone else is the color of the plastic card(s) they swipe.
I’m sure Dr. Lustig means well, but there is an enormous range of people who utilize SNAP and they do not all have the same nutritional needs. We’re talking about a program that serves more than 40 million people a month. That is more than the entire population of Canada. The programs serves people from infants eating their first foods to elderly folks measuring their age in triple digits, men, women, people who are pregnant or breast-feeding, people with desk jobs or people who do manual labor, highly active people and couch potatoes, healthy people and people who are disabled.
I covered some of the issues in the thread I linked to regarding my own experiences.
I also have a problem with using a program like SNAP, some of whose recipients are struggling with a crisis or multiple problems, as a bludgeon for problems all of our society is experiencing. It feels like, yet again, the poor are being held to higher requirements than anyone else simply because they are poor.
That said - absolutely there are serious, serious problems with processed foods. The diet of the average American contains too much sugar (meaning not just the white powdery stuff but sweeteners in all their forms), too much fat, and too much salt. Yay, almost no one starves to death due to lack of calories any more in this country, that’s a good thing, but we could be doing so very much better.
First, the limitation on types of dairy is a WIC thing, not a SNAP thing. You can buy any sort of dairy you want with SNAP benefits.
I’m guessing it came during the whole “fat is evil” promotion of a generation ago, when Big Food started finding ways to take the fat out of everything (and, usually, replaced it with sugar or whipped foamy stuff or both).
Except that infants old enough to drink milk, toddlers, and otherwise young children SHOULD be drinking full fat milk because young humans have a greater need for fats than adults do. Sufficient fat intake is vital to proper nervous system development. Getting sufficient fats is a major issue with vegan diets for small children - it’s possible, but it really brings home that the nutritional needs of small children differ significantly from those of adults.
(And yes, it stands for Women, Infants, and Children)
Full fat dairy is not the problem - eating too much of it is the problem (regardless the age of a person) but that gets into all sorts of things like advertising and ballooning portion sizes that is outside the scope of this thread.
I think it also plays into the notion that all poor people are ignorant and too stupid to know how to feed themselves. I’ve got poor customers who eat an incredibly healthy diet, lots of cooking from scratch, whole grains, vegetables, fruits, moderate meat and dairy consumption, etc. I’ve got wealthy customers who eat nothing but processed crap that comes in cardboard boxes kept in the big freezers. I’ve got the reverse of those two. I have everything in between. Not all poor people have access to the sort of well equipped kitchen you need to cook healthy food from scratch. Not all rich people bother to cook.
No, SNAP does not limit sweeteners (natural or otherwise) in food or beverages.
For awhile in 2017 Cook County, Illinois imposed a tax on sweetened beverages. This was, as you might imagine, wildly unpopular. Also, for those stores just over the state line, enormously profitable.. It would have been a bad idea in any case, but given that the east border of Chicago is the actual state line, and even those who didn’t leave Illinois could still find bargains by simply going to the next county it was a stupid idea.
I think for the most part people know their situation better than a government bureaucrat and we shouldn’t make rules for the majority based on the exceptions.
I like the current “nudge” my employer is using - a 10% discount on fresh fruits and vegetables for anyone swiping a SNAP card. That’s across the board - it includes organic and exotic fruits and vegetables, too. You don’t have to buy that stuff, but if you do, your benefits will go further.
My employer has also arranged for people paying with SNAP to utilize order pick-up and on-line order and delivery. This helps folks who can’t - for whatever reason - get to the store, or get to a store frequently, to purchase fresh foods weekly instead of doing one mammoth shopping trip a month and having to buy mostly what will keep as opposed to what is healthiest.