The Messy Relationship Between Food Stamps and Health

“The debate about food stamps largely centers on whether the program promotes dependency. In defending the proposal to The New York Times, White House budget director Mick Mulvaney said, ‘What we have done is not try to remove the social safety net for the folks who need it, but to try to figure out if there are folks who don’t need it and that need to be back in the work force.’ But there’s one thing about SNAP that even its liberal supporters would acknowledge is a weakness: There’s a lot of evidence that the program doesn’t help its recipients achieve or maintain a healthy weight.”