Can You Extreme Coupon Your Way to Health?

Recently during a night of insomnia I stumbled upon episodes of Extreme Couponing on Youtube. Now I’m familiar with the inserts that come in just about everything that I’ve always tossed in the trash and we all experience the deluge of emails trying to get us to buy things “tailored to our interests”. But the idea of spending hours of my life planning a shopping trip like it’s taking the SATs or winning the Scripps spelling bee is more than I can comprehend.

One particular episode really goes right to the heart of my dilemma with coupons … a young man in high school being thrilled that he has been able to “stockpile” four years’ worth of feminine products for whomever will be his wife and daughters in the future. I’m sure this would be a great asset in any woman’s eyes when looking for a potential mate. In other words, I can’t understand doing all of this work, setting aside storage space, spending even $1.00 for things I will never use and would never eat. This is why I have always thrown coupons away and this is why I feel we are not just a society focused on consumption, we are a society that encourages stockpiling, especially if it’s cheap or free. Why buy one when you can buy five for the price you would normally pay for one? Now if this sentence appeals to you, then the idea of value has become confused with the idea of valuable.

I say this because the important point about coupons is that they may save you money, they may even get you items for free, but they encourage our society to consume food and products that are not just unhealthy, they promote illness, disease and degeneration. Boxed foods, canned foods, personal care products filled with preservatives and chemicals are all a recipe for diabetes, neurological diseases, infertility and cancer. In other words, they are a recipe for disaster. More and more clinical studies confirm this and I see it in my office every day.

Now some may justify stockpiling these products because they can donate items, but they are donating foodstuffs that cause weight gain, that disrupt our hormones and have been shown to contribute to serious illness. Statistics show that coupons are used primarily by those with lower incomes, larger families and less access to whole foods. It certainly may be sustaining a struggling family, but at what cost? What kind of a country do we live in where we think it’s acceptable to encourage a family to eat food that will kill them over time because it’s the only way they can afford to eat? And now it’s even been made into a competitive game. In one episode a woman described it as “the highest high” while another equated it to a military operation. There was even an episode where a family was thrilled to have over 100,000 coupons that had been handed down through two generations promoting foods like Trix cereal which contains corn, sugar, rice flour, corn syrup, canola oil, salt, trisodium phosphate, natural and artificial flavor, Red 40, Yellow 6, Blue 1, citric acid, malic acid and added vitamins and minerals which somehow makes all the other ingredients acceptable? Is this what we want our children to eat?

Now it was clear in many episodes that these couponers used coupons to buy things like 457 body washes because it would allow them to keep their money to spend on meats and vegetables, but as the groceries were bagged up there wasn’t a single healthy thing to be seen. Creating a stockpile of foods and products that are full of chemicals, preservatives and additives should not be the point of hours of someone’s life. Especially when it is making that life even shorter.

Out of curiosity I looked at the website for our local food bank because so many struggling families rely on their weekly distributions of food to survive. They did offer fresh vegetables, meat and dairy but only in limited amounts while boxed and canned foods were the staple of what they provide. They specifically listed macaroni and cheese, pasta, cereal, rice, snack foods and non-perishable juices and canned meats. Again, we are providing an unhealthy lifestyle to those in need, reserving what most of us consider to be healthy diets for those with higher incomes.

Is it any wonder that the population with the highest incidence of diabetes makes less than $30,000 per year, roughly 9% of the total population? Yet of those with incomes between $30,000 and $80,000 only 4% had diabetes, while less than 3% of the population that made over $80,000 per year developed diabetes.

The message that saving money at the expense of our health is not just evident in the episodes of Extreme Couponing, it’s evident in our healthcare system, in the pharmaceutical industry, in our politics and in every level of our society. What is it going to take for us to smarten up, as my grandfather would have said??