Food Prices

With the relatively dramatic jump in food prices, it will be interesting to see if Americans start living like the rest of the world and dramatically reduce their intake of "entertainment" calories like chocolate bars and other snacks. A lot of obesity problems come from lack of exercise in combination with excess caloric intake, but it will be interesting to see if the trend reverses or at least slows down somewhat in five years.

Then again, some of our cheapest food is also some of the unhealthiest. The funny part is though that a diet consisting of less unhealthy food is probably better than a diet of too much healthy food from the standpoint of developing obesity. Unhealthy food isn't poisonous, just loaded with things like sugar, fat, and salt. It will give you other health problems if you eat too much perhaps like high cholesterol levels and high blood pressure, but obesity comes primarily from too many calories.