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THE $5.00 A DAY CHALLENGE-NUTRITION AND POVERTY


I have been fortunate to have traveled several parts of the world. While on my trips, magazines aimed at tourists would indicate that most people in that country lived on less than $5.00 a day.  I saw that number many times and eventually learned that about 2.1 billion people on earth live on less than $3.10 cents a day. In the U.S. most people living on Food Stamps live on less than $5.00 per day.

For 2017 I tried to stand in solidarity with the people in the world who lived on less than $5.00 per day. For three days of each week, I would make sure that my electricity and food would not add up to more than $5.00 per day. Electricity was the only utility for which I could measure daily usage; including things like mortgage or car payment would burst that $5.00 per day goal immediately so I did not include them

The year started strongly. It turned out that to live on $5.00 or less per day, it helps to prepare your food, and preparing your food requires three things, transportation or access to food, the knowledge of nutritional value of different items as well as to how to minimize spoilage and time.

I thought that for the most part, I would live those three days in misery, but it turned out that living on $5.00 per day was a mixed bag. If I had time and transportation, those days were my healthiest days-from fresh food to not taking in empty calories; if I did not have time or transportation, those days were the worst, from eating empty calories that then led to overeating AND an excessive amount of sodium and sugar intake-which meant grumpiness, body aches and trouble sleeping.   

I live in a food desert. I have always known that, but what I didn't realize was just how crucial access to transportation is when considering healthy eating habits. I also intellectually knew that the obesity problem in the U.S. is mostly a function of malnutrition, but to feel it was an entirely different thing, I was not only eating poorly, but my moods were just bad those days.

I was lucky that I had those constraints for only three days a week. I don't know what it would be like to survive longer than that on unhealthy food. I was also grateful that my work allows me the flexibility to make time to prepare food (the weeks I failed at planning, were just that, planning failures on my part), our employment legal framework and low wages means that folks cannot organize their time in a way that provides them the healthiest life or a healthy life, but have lives (and health) completely driven by their employers' priorities.

I am thankful 2017 is over (and honestly I didn't follow this three-day rule too closely) so I no longer have to conduct this experiment, but I do see that healthy bodies depend on good wages, good nutritional information, good transportation and effective farm to consumer economic infrastructures. 

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