"money" news and stories

If you're trying to eat healthy, put down that debit card.

New research shows that customers are less likely to buy unhealthy foods if they use cash than if they pay with credit or debit cards for groceries, according to a report from Bloomberg BusinessWeek.

Over the course of six months, researchers from Cornell University and the State University of New York in Binghamton and Buffalo followed 1,000 households, analyzing their shopping behavior. Their study found that when the shoppers paid with credit or debit cards instead of cash, they put more junk food in their shopping carts, the study showed.

Why does health go out the window when paying with plastic?

MSN money asks use to to take a moment and imagine if no one in the US were overweight. I lose. I can't do it! I know so few people, myself included, who aren't overweight (they consider overweight to be 20 or more pounds too heavy). However, I'll humor them by suspending disbelief, and attempting to imagine.

MSN says, "add the savings up on health, food, clothing and efficiencies, and you could buy a professional home gym for every U.S. household -- or hand each $4,270 in cash." There would be a total of $487 billion dollars in national savings. Read the article for details on how they came up with that number.

What would you do with your extra $4,270 dollars? I'd definitely go out for lots of fancy dinners with no skimping on the dessert course. Hmm.. that would defeat the point though, wouldn't it?

Writing in Slate, Sara Dickerman complains about how, despite the looming recession and sky-high food price inflation, food writers continue to rhapsodize over black truffles and $24 a pound Papillon Roquefort, without even a nod towards the fact that these ingredients cost more than many people's weekly food budgets. Any cookbook that mentions cost tends to be the kind of retro, housewifely home ec treatise that recommends things like sloppy joes and cabbage stew. Why not combine price-consciousness with foodie flair, Dickerman wonders?

Over at Salon, the always-hilarious Heather Havrilesky writes about the recession and the comforts of coupon clipping and worrying over the price of a $1 bag of dried navy beans. In hard times, people will need to get back to basics, quit obsessing about the origin of their organic lambs lettuce, return to crock pot cooking and making do. Maybe Dickerman can combine her food savvy with Havrilesky's thrift and write a cookbook?

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In old movies and cartoons, it was common to see someone use a cake to smuggle a file, which they could use to break themselves out, into an inmate at the local prison. At the cartoon end, the file could be replaced with anything from dynamite to a jackhammer, as the characters didn't have to be particularly subtle to get themselves out of the slammer. Things have to be done more subtle for those who want to smuggle things into prisons in real life, but food can still play a roll. A prison guard at Leflore County jail in Mississippi was arrested after he was caught smuggling in money and marijuana in a large pile of mashed potatoes (That green stuff? Those are just chives...) in at lunch time, when an unidentified woman dropped them off for him. His undoing was a food preference issue, not being careless with the contraband itself. The thing that made investigators suspicious was that the officer said that he didn't eat potatoes and couldn't explain why he was getting such a large portion of them delivered to him at work.

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Obesity in Britain, as it is in the US, is often referred to as an epidemic due to the quickly expanding waistlines of so many in the country. The Department of Health puts the number of overweight or obese people in Britain at 24.6 million, or around 40% of the total population, and they expect to see numbers increase over the next decade. People in the US are slightly healthier than they were lest year, in part because of trends towards healthier eating (even though we are still seeing a tremendous amount of very unhealthy food out there), but this same trend is not noticeable in the UK, according to a new study.

This study, which surveyed more than 12 million consumers about their shopping habits over the past four years, found that only 8% of Britons made an effort to buy healthier, more nutritious foods, such as organic products and "food with labels such as fresh, lite or low fat." 44% of British shoppers had made no effort to buy healthier foods, sticking with "value or extra-value lines" of products." Interestingly, there wasn't much difference in price between the baskets of the healthy shoppers and those who opted for cheaper, less nutritious foods. The healthy baskets cost an "average of £71.78compared with £71.18 for an unhealthy one," which means that most shoppers were buying what they perceived as value at a cost to their health and without saving anything in their wallets.

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