Well, those people are morons 
My store does that.
Never have any problem moving the cold rotisserie chicken, and some folks know exactly when those chickens are moved from hot to cold and snatch them up while they’re still warm but qualify for EBT. Also reduce the cost by a dollar, so they’re even more affordable.
Yes, but one should no more assume a person is poor due to those factors than one should assume someone is uneducated because they’re wearing jeans and t-shirt.
Plenty of middle and upper class people make bad decisions, but they have more of a buffer to recover from those mistakes.
But more detail later, I’m on my way out the door to work.
The problem with SNAP is that you can use it to buy any food item with the exception of a short list of certain foods. It should be the opposite, i.e. it should be more like WIC; it should be changed so that all food items are prohibited with the exception of certain food items. These should include generic poultry, beans, eggs, rice, potatoes, etc. No soda, no steak, no seafood, and no processed or frozen foods.
This seems unnecessarily cruel. No beef at all? Just hamburger? what if steak is on sale and costs less than hamburger? No frozen foods? There are a lot of low cost meals that are frozen. What about frozen orange juice?
That system is just too complicated, and mean actually.
what’s wrong with steak? Some cuts are very reasonable. Same with seafood, processed and frozen foods.
That’s a great point, Shodan.
Unfortunately, there’s no such study. A few studies I have to hand demonstrate some of the issues around cost of medication and its effects on treatment.
Hereis one study that looked at how cost-sharing affects medication adherence. The study states, “Specifically, copayments for generic drugs have increased dramatically over the past 5 years. A large body of literature documents that increases in out-of-pocket costs reduce the likelihood that patients will utilize health care services, including those considered important for management of chronic disease.”
Undertreatment and under-identification of medical problems is a problem in the US, and is one of the reasons the country is not at the top of the list for health outcomes. I would say that this is certainly a contributing factor with many obese patients.
One example is diabetes. Antidiabetic medications can be quite expensive, and thisstudy from 2008 states that 85% of patients fill their prescription for antidiabetic medications. Copays of less than $10 resulted in a first-fill rate of 89%; copays greater than $10 resulted in a 77% fill rate.
And those studies are for the insured. For the uninsured, when patients don’t have access or money to treat their medical problems, no one sees these patients until they hit the ER or are admitted to hospital.
Would obese poor people be be less obese with a better diet? Probably, but we really don’t know by how much. Maybe not. Obesity is not a simple condition for which to identify causation. Not just CICO, but researchers also look at genetics, medications being taken, gut flora, and even environmentalfactors.
looks down
wearing flip-flops, cutoff jeans, and a t-shirt
did statistics for work this morning
Just helping prove that point. 
Back to work myself. More statistics.
ETA: Broomstick: great long post above discussing poverty and food.
Agreed. Was the guy buying out-of-season avocados and kiwi at Whole Foods? Pre-cut veggies and fruit? Without a shopping list of what he bought, it’s a useless article.
She said “jeans” not “cutoff jeans”
Yes, you cant get much cheaper than beans & rice.
Nonsense. The salary range for teachers in LAUSD ranges from $53-$71K. Plus your Mom’s income. That’s more than enough to support a family of three. And it’s nowhere near poor.
Have you considered the fact that **DrDeth **may have been speaking about some time in the past, when salaries weren’t so high?
In the 1950’s? My Dad was making under $5K.yr, which translates to about $35K now. Back then teachers really were underpaid.
And $35K is well above the poverty line for a family of three, which is around $20K.
Just snipping what I think is fair to say is the typical logic in your responses, and it’s just not very strong IMO. Everyone knows some poor people work a lot of hours, etc. But if one is looking for a reason a greater proportion of poor people are obese than non-poor people, which is generally true in the US*, then we’re looking for factors which are more true of poor people in general, which perhaps might be casual. Or not, but we’re not looking for things less likely to be true of poor people to explain in general something that’s more true of poor people. A greater proportion of poor Americans are fat than better off Americans*, a lower proportion of poor Americans than better off Americans work fulltime+ hours. So no, long work hours, is not ‘part’ of the explanation for the relative phenomenon we’re trying to explain, unless long hours lead to less obesity.
And again I think the problem is counter-moralizing getting carried away, even when people doing it accuse ‘the other side’ of being blinded by moralizing against poor people. Which perhaps some are. But we’re left eventually IMO with the fact that a lot of social ill among poor people is self inflicted, of which epidemic obesity is a pretty obvious example. It’s a negative side effect of the welfare state superimposed over particular American (sub)culture(s) and history, but still a result of people’s own choices. Though as I said above the underlying idea is defensible as in saving children from physical want, and also a system which encourages obesity by some still has others at least ‘at risk’ of being actually hungry. So there’s a rough weighing of ‘Type I’ v ‘Type II’ errors based on a general consensus that hunger is worse than epidemic obesity.
But when one ‘progresses’ to actually deeming self inflicted harm to be externally inflicted, because it’s ‘more compassionate’ to make believe that’s so, that’s when things can go off the rails.
*the ifs or but would mainly depend on whether you compared say the bottom 50% with the top 50% in income. In that case it’s clear: the bottom is fatter. If you compared people right at the very bottom to people further up in the bottom half, and called the latter ‘not poor’ it might be more ambiguous.
As you note, you grew up in a different country than I did. I’d like to hear similar anecdotes from other U.S. residents.
Well, it has hydration value. Does that count?
As far as personal anecdotes, I’ve recently experienced something I think has relevance to this thread. Lately, due to health issues, my appetite has been totally non-existent. Lately, there have been days when I absolutely could not stomach anything for much of the day and evening, often times not able to choke anything down until 8 or 9pm. Well the day before yesterday was such a day and when I finally was able to fathom eating something, I tried to get easy-to-eat, high calorie foods.
I ended up eating, for the entire day, two McDonald’s cheeseburgers as well as a vanilla milkshake. Even with these items, it felt to me as if I were starving myself. I mean, compared to eating throughout the day like I normally do, eating your entire day’s calories in 10-15 min really seemed as if I was starving myself. Yet, upon a bit calculating, I realized that despite not eating for the entire day, the couple items of food I did eat at night still totaled about 1500 calories or so. Which was eye-opening for me. For those who aren’t unable to eat and indulge in fast food on a regular basis, those calories can add up in a flash. And it really doesn’t seem like you are overeating.
38 here and I had Home Ec in 6th, 7th, 8th grade in Maryland early 90s. Required part of a “rotation” period including Art, Industrial Arts (shop), Technology, Keyboarding (typing on PC), and something else. Home Ec was broken up into 2 classes: Cooking and Sewing. By age 14 I was cooking professionally, too.
Well, I disagree. That’s a terrible diet and could cause further health problems and exacerbate existing reasons for low income. The idea that beans and rice is a good diet is completely subjective at best. If poultry is allowed but steak is not I wonder if you are a lobbyist for Perdue or Tyson or something. See my above comment about prison diets and I stand by that.
Huh. This is kind of amazing to me. I’ve literally never heard of anyone I knew in RL who took such classes. Now maybe this is just because the same things were taught but just as separate classes. Because I did have art, shop, etc. Never anything about cooking or sewing or anything like that. I also went to school in the ghetto (much of the time anyways), if that matters. 