My name is Curtis Carpenter. I’m 28 years old and a father
of 2 wonderful boys, ages 3 and 4. I have a college degree and I work full-time.
I’ve never really thought about my diet too much and I’ve always felt like I
was in good shape. I can run a 5k on a whim, I’m usually witty in a jiff, and I
never seem to be too tired or lethargic.
For seven days in March, that last statement
wasn’t necessarily true. This is because I took the SNAP Challenge. SNAP is an
acronym for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. SNAP is commonly
referred to as “food stamps” and is the largest program in the domestic hunger
safety net.
The SNAP Challenge is a week long, voluntary event, in which a
person or family lives on $4 per day, per person, which is what the average
SNAP beneficiary receives. Throughout the challenge, I felt very hungry, tired,
and weak.
I lived for one week on $25.25 worth of food. I compiled a
daily menu at the beginning of the week and I only consumed the items on that
menu. While I was offered, many times, free food on a consistent basis, I
declined because I didn’t want to skew the control on my experiment. Therefore,
I kept very concise data on cost and nutritional value recorded on a blog I
created specifically for this challenge. The website is
www.curtissnapchallenge.blogspot.com.
There are obvious arguments over the abuse of the food stamp
system. While I have my own opinions on that particular topic, the conclusion
I’ve come to has nothing to do with the abuse of the SNAP Program, I’ll let
politicians argue over that.
What I’ve learned, with a firsthand account of the
diet, is that the people that live on this diet, day in and day out, are the
primary cause of a health crisis in this country. These people are eating highly
processed, high sodium, high carbohydrate foods that put them at serious risk
of heart disease, diabetes, and obesity. Much more risk than someone who takes
a balanced approach to their everyday diet.
A lot of these people are already
in a compromised economic position in which they don’t have health insurance,
they don’t get preventive health check-ups, and their primary care physician
ends up being the emergency room doctor, which is exponentially more expensive
than a standard doctor visit.
It’s not a matter of “if” these people will end
up in the emergency room for a legitimate health concern, it is absolutely a
question of “when”.
My diet over those seven days consisted of mostly canned
foods, rice, pasta, beans, and bread. Over the week, I ate over 16 grams of
sodium. I consumed almost 1,000 mg more sodium per day than recommended by the
American Heart Association, and without ever reaching 2,000 calories in a day,
I surpassed the USDA’s recommendations for Carbohydrate intake. Within three days I became hypertensive. My blood pressure over the week ranged from 144/103 to 156/85 to 158/94…this is from a guy who registers a 120/80 on a regular basis. I had a banana, an apple, and a yogurt every day and I tried to get vegetables in when I could. The contents of cheap, canned food overpowered any positive impact that the healthy foods were able to provide.
With over 47 million Americans on this diet, I can only
suggest that we educate our populous on this epidemic and ask the Department of
Food and Nutrition Services to supply a healthier option than simply handing
these recipients a few nickels and saying “good luck”.
I now believe that the
SNAP program should be run more like the Women, Infants, and Children program in which there are vouchers/coupons
for specific foods. This may not be the ultimate answer, but it surely provides
an alternative to the unhealthy lifestyle that the current program provides.
