I think your motives are noble, but your ideas are cute in a childlike way. You’re basically suggesting we bankrupt ourselves in attempt to tell people information that is already freely available. Most people here know this stuff, not because we’re rich and privy to special information, but because we care to know it. Whether you like it or not, we live in a capitalist country, and there are limits to capitalist generosity. For good reason, IMO. Should we strongarm those convenience store owners to carry the foods we think poor people should eat? Should everyone pay higher taxes so the few people who ride the bus can do so for free? Should we have government-run food and nutrition classes? People who care help themselves.
I’m a crazy bleeding heart, but I will always believe that when confronted with two choices, each and every one of us will choose the option that we think is best at the time. I don’t believe anyone, short of the insane, will ever choose the option they think is worse. Doesn’t mean we pick the right choice. But we all have some kind of rationality behind our decisions.
And being poor and/or fat isn’t enough to make me write someone off as a human being. They have their reasons and I gotta trust that. Just because I have more money than someone doesn’t mean I have any insight into their lives at all.
I grew up poor, and we ate pretty crappy food. There were a few reasons. One was that Mom just didn’t know how to cook, and hated cooking anyway. Another was that our kitchen wasn’t well stocked, so every home cooked meal was a financial hit from buying basics. Another was that expensive fresh food rotted in the fridge a few too many times because of unexpected overtime, etc. Another was that we both hated doing dishes and dishes would pile up, making one night’s dinner into a hassle for days. And ultimately it boiled down to the fact that my mom came home at six o’clock at night to a kid and a pile of problems, and dinner was one of the few problems that could be fixed easily. So she took the easy way out. Maybe not the best choice. So sue her. How many of us make the best choices every single time?
I’m guessing it’s mostly the ones who don’t wind up fat and poor.
My local grocery store does it all the time. It’s right there on the coupon page in the Sunday paper. Nice fresh bag of carrots. Serves ten. 99 cents. Cheaper than McDonald’s.
And there’s a big stack of the coupon pages at the entrance to the store, in case it was gonna be “poor people can’t afford newspapers” next.
Regards,
Shodan
Carrots are more expensive than McDonalds on a calorie per dollar basis. I can get a McDonald’s double cheeseburger for $1 and it has 490 calories - thats 2.64 lbs of carrots - and carrots are around $1 a lb.
Oh, well. By all means eat cheeseburgers. For heaven’s sake, you’re just making the wisest choice! Eat those cheeseburgers! It’s not your fault! Eat, eat, eat! Obviously as a poor person, you are capable of making wise, well reasoned choices. Eat those cheeseburgers! You are obviously wiser than us! Because, you know, you can calculate calories in cheeseburgers vs. carrots and arrive at the correct decision! Why did we doubt you poor people and your mathmatical skills?
You don’t have to be a genius to figure out why it would make more sense nutritionally to eat a burger over a carrot. One actually represents a balanced meal, if prepared well. The other doesn’t.
I’m not saying that people always make food choices strictly based on energetics and nutrition, but it’s stupid to pretend that a carrot is always a better choice than a burger simply because it’s low fat and low cal. It’s actually precisely for that reason a person of limited means tends to choose the burger. It’s a luxury for any heterotroph to put more emphasis on vitamins and minerals than on calorie content.
The problem comes in when that mentality drives all of an individual’s food choices.
Actually, there’s a good point in here. Ignoring the calorie per dollar bit, a cheeseburger is a meal–I don’t know that many people would consider carrots, no matter how many you have, to be a meal in and of themselves. Cooking from scratch often takes a little bit of several different ingredients, and rarely will you be able to buy just enough for one meal (especially if you want to use any spices). Not to mention pots, pans, and other cooking necessities that a person may or may not already have handy. While the cost per meal might be less, the initial outlay to actually be able to cook something, rather than heat up something pre-prepared, is a lot higher. When you’re looking at buying $10 worth of groceries to be able to cook one meal, that $1 cheeseburger probably looks pretty good.
According to this article 5-10% of all poor people are homeless for at least a short period of time in a given year.
According to the New York Times there are upwards of 3.5 million homeless people nationally and usually the homeless who are living in their cars are employed and spend as much as 4 or 5 months living out of their vehicles.
I’m not saying that this is the biggest cause of people buying fast food instead of fresh fruits and vegetables, but it is a part of the problem. Beyond those who physically can’t store or cook these foods due to housing issues there are those who can’t afford to have food go bad. As a single adult I know that if I buy a bunch of bananas and I eat one a day after about 3 days I have to throw out the rest because they have gone bad or use them in banana bread or something. Last month I bought 5 lbs of potatoes that went soft in 2 days and most of them had to be thrown out. I have never finished a quart of milk before it went bad because I can’t use it fast enough. I don’t mind this so much because I can afford a little waste but if I only had $100 a month to buy groceries I probably would not buy things that didn’t have a long shelf life.
Right, so these geniuses who can calculate cheeseburger vs. carrot calories on the fly are nevertheless so stupid it’s a matter of education? pbbth feels more education is required. About what? Eating more cheeseburgers or more carrots?
Okay, I concede the point. Cheeseburgers make more sense, which is why there is no link between poverty cheeseburger eating and obesity. In fact, the poor have done the work for us, and we should all subsist on cheeseburgers.
I can’t - gluten intolerant. But carrots are not, on a calorie per calorie basis, cheaper than a cheeseburger. Pound per pound, sure.
Carrots will also not sustain life - they lack fat and protein. While a diet of nothing but McD’s cheeseburgers will kill you long term, a diet of nothing but carrots would actually kill you faster.
Most animals are able to forage selectively, based on the law of allocation (i.e., you’re going to go after food items providing the biggest bang for the buck, since you’ve only got so much time and energy devoted to foraging). Present a dog with steak and a chicken wing and he’s going to go for the steak. Each and every time. Present a cow with clover and cordgrass and she’ll chow down on the clover. Each and every time.
If dogs and cows can make rational decisions, why wouldn’t a human?
Yeah, why don’t all of the fatties lose some damn weight.
What the hell kind of potatoes do you buy that only last 2 days?! Mine usually last a couple of weeks, at least!
“Usually” is the operative word, here. I’ve had an occasional bag of potatoes go bad within a week of being purchased. I assume they’d just been on the shelf too long or something.
I am not a long-time member here, so I feel really uncomfortable jumping in after two long pages, and calling out board members. But I have noticed while reading this board that it’s pretty taboo to insinuate that obesity means that one is without a doubt lazy or even unattractive. In another thread, men are lining up to point out that curvy women, many of whom would be considered medically obese, are their absolute ideals and others look like prepubescent boys. So, is it just that we can assume that those women in the pictures are not poor? That they didn’t get those curves by eating Grandma’s fried chicken? That they couldn’t possibly lose a bit of weight by eating a few more unorganic, deeply discounted self-peeled carrots?
I’m not a sociologist, social worker, or food bank volunteer. But if I had to make a guess, I would put depression at one’s circumstances at the top of the list of causes. I’m sure that many of you are virtuous people who see food as purely fuel, who don’t ever eat emotionally to make up for things you lack in other areas of life. But I do, I have to admit (and no, I’m not terribly obese either, but my life is pretty darn good for the most part). When I’ve had a terrible day, something with lots of carbs sounds really good, and I tend to gain weight when I go through longer periods of depression. True, I can kind of afford to do so (financially, not physically!) but it seems really petty of me to worry about a person who will is supporting a family on the kind of job I hated when I was 16. If I worked as a grocery store cashier all day, the last thing I’d want to look forward to would be coming home to yet another meal of beans and rice.
Ah, but if you only ate the beans and rice you would become noble and honorable and virtuous and glorious! And it would make the elite people like you, even though they’ve never met you.
There are a few people in this thread who are giving short little quips of “advice” for the overweight which seem to be more about making themselves feel better that they’re not in their bad situation anymore. Typical shit stirrers. You don’t seem to be working that side, so I’d like to respond to a couple of things.
Your comments have been supporting personal responsibility. I am all about that. Whether it is your weight, your education, your job, your relationships - you have to take care of yourself. Having said that, not everyone (for a multitude of reasons) is in the mental or physical position to do it where they stand today. It doesn’t mean they won’t be in the future, but many people need someone to try to help.
Honestly, I’d feel a lot better about government-run food and nutrition classes than a lot of stuff our taxes pay for. Still, it doesn’t have to come to that. Although there are millions of Americans who do not have health insurance, most people in the US do. Insurance companies need to start thinking proactively about ways to prevent diseases and disorders which end up costing them far more in the long run than a couple of classes about nutrition.
Currently I’m working for an insurance company with other nurses to test the effectiveness of patient education when it comes to chronic illnesses. They started (before I was hired) with teaching newly diagnosed diabetics about their disease and how to eat, exercise, and test their sugar levels. The results were astonishing. The patients who were trained about diabetes did a far, far better job of controlling their blood sugar. Over time (it’s been about 4 years, I believe) they’ve been collecting data and have found the educated patients had to take less medication, had lost more weight, and had a far less instances of doctor visits and urgent care/ER visits. The savings to the company far exceeded the cost of the classes and printed materials given to the patients.
When I was hired I began working with “super obese” patients who were wanting weight loss surgery. They completed several months of a program with me (over the phone) & their doctors to learn more about food choices and behavior modification. I was amazed at how little many knew about nutrition. I could go on for pages about the things (big and small) I learned about their situations. To say “just eat healthy and exercise” is so purely ignorant when it comes to a certain level of obesity, it makes me question the intelligence of the people who spout it.
I’m not making excuses for anyone, no matter where you are on the scale of weight & health you can adjust your choices. I just think that educating people and helping work out plans that work for their individual circumstance is a good place to start. The smug asses who just stick with their “Eat less and exercise, that’s what I did!” stuff make themselves seem dumber with every declaration of their ignorant advice.
I think you’re going to see that obesity is going to be the new “NO SMOKING!” in this country. There are already insurance companies & employers who are charging more for premiums to those who are overweight. We’re going to see a lot, lot more of this. I think that insurance companies (who profit like MAD) have a responsibility to assist people who want to help themselves. It will be beneficial to both sides in the end.
Sorry for the TLDR response. Believe me, I wanted to go on and on. Also, I’m not attacking you, I am just using your quote about education as a starting point.
College 4th grade, the 3rd year we had lab, several of us taught some of our classmates (of both genders) how to cook pasta, how to choose a good premade tomato sauce and how to choose cookies. Their mothers belonged either to the “nobody else enters MY kitchen” school of thought or to “cooking is women’s work,” therefore those people knew how to cook TNT but not mac’n’mato.
Cooking sounded to them like some big mistery until we pointed out that “we call the lab ‘the kitchen’ because what we do there really is very similar to a cook’s job.” These were Chemical Engineering students in one of the hardest school/major combos in Spain, not what anybody would have picked as an example of “dumb folk.”
Sometimes people need someone to point out the door for them, that’s all. Many people who don’t eat well have never seen the door.
I ran a homeless center for years and I saw a lot of different kinds of poverty and food access issues. Those that were homeless, living in their cars or in motels didn’t have cooking facilities and were limited to things that don’t need refrigeration or cooking. Most of them ate at our center or at one of the religious soup kitchens. I live in an agricultural area so produce was free and every meal was served with fresh veggies, but many people still didn’t eat them. Other than produce our biggest donations every morning were boxes of leftover bread and pastry from bakeries and they disappeared in a heartbeat. They knew that veggies were healthier but it didn’t matter much to them because vegetables didn’t fill them up the way that stale donuts did or taste as good.
When people were ready to move into housing we did a lot of life skills training with them, including how to manage a food budget that incorporated all of that free produce that every food bank has in abundance. Then we’d take them to a store to practice. Nine out of 10 times they went for the mac and cheese, ramen, junk food cereal and other low cost/low nutrition foods. Even though they could have made healthy choices they didn’t, and very few went to get the supplemental veggies. It wasn’t ignorance because they had just taken a nutrition class and it wasn’t laziness because they had just worked their butts off to get a job and into housing. Many had a perception that good food is more expensive, others said that they didn’t like vegetables anyway and others felt that they didn’t have time to cook meals from scratch. In the end I decided that their reasons for eating junk weren’t all that different from other overweight Americans. We like fattening food, many of us are in denial about the health effects or unable to develop the self-restraint needed to control our eating.
Food access is very difficult for very low-income people here for all of the reasons that have already been stated about supermarket locations. In order to address it a local group has started running a free daily minibus several times a day to shuttle people back and forth to stores that are larger than the neighborhood markets. The van is loaded with nutritional information and from what I hear the parents are starting to take childhood obesity more seriously and make better choices because the access issue has been resolved, but the single adults are still loading up with cheap carbs.
Not necessarily…
Let accidentally the horse and cow get access to grain or other high density foods (molasses, silages, certain forages), and they’ll it as much as they can, with the later consequences of bloat and colic. 