What's up with poverty and obesity?

Great Debates
41

Not to endorse Uncommon’s statement, but just because his explanation of events is unpopular and poorly worded doesn’t have to mean that it’s incorrect. He states that he is speaking from personal experience–I have no particular reason to doubt this.
The common argument here is that cheap equals McDonald’s equals Fat. But no one has stated, except for kunilou, why McDonald’s equals overeating. Sure they have fatty food–but if you eat a full hamburger a day and start gaining weight the only solution isn’t to exercise. You can start only eating a half of your burger or a quarter or however much it takes to keep your weight at level.

An extension of Kunilou’s would be that they eat too much because, in a situation of financial insecurity, eating more allows them a sense of security. Uncommon, however, believes that the reason for their financial insecurity is because they made the wrong decisions in life (even if he didn’t state it so nicely), the two are not mutually exclusive nor untenable.

I just attempted to a search on whether anyone has done any tests to see if there is a correlation between poor and lazy, but no results were immediately forthcoming. Thsi strikes me as rather odd, being as that it is a fairly central concern when talking about many of the various social spending issues of US policy. Does anyone know of any?

42

I’ve known a good number of poor people who moved crates for a living, and while they may have had big beer guts, they weren’t morbidly obese.

43

Why all the replies about low paying jobs ? Most of the people that I have met that were obese and poor happened to be either unemployed or on some sort of disability. I grew up in the south, and I do not care if the people were black or white, it is not a race issue, I met plenty of poor white obese people in the trailer parks, and most of them did not have jobs. Welfare, food stamps, and subsidized housing allow many people to not work and to also have enough money to buy unhealthy food.

44

I think we are missing what really is the culprit here.

It’s diet It ain’t Mcdonalds or burger king. It’s diet period.

Beans are cheap. Potatoes are cheap. Rice is cheap. Cornmeal is cheap.

It would be pretty easy to kill off a chicken, fry that rascal up in a big old skillet of lard, and serve it with a big bowl of gravy to be scarfed with half a loaf of bread or a mess of biscuits.

Pretty easy to cook up a big pot of beans seasoned with fat back and salt pork. serve it up with generous portions of corn bread and butter.

Those are fairly common meals in poorer households. Extremely high in starches and fats and also very cheap and filling.

I don’t imagine many of us skinny folks would stay that way eating those kind of meals three to four times a week!

Besides most of the jobs available to poor uneducated people require a LOT of physical activity so I think we can excuse the lazy issue from most of those folks.

45

Sure, no problem. I was just trying to avoid a flame war. People are pretty sensitive about this.

46

Convenience stores are less likely than grocery stores to have healthy, minimally processed food for sale.

And, for some of them, getting a low-paying job means they lose some welfare benefits, or have to pay for child care, so they are worse off than they were on welfare. If they try to get an education so they are qualified for a better-paying job, they have to pay for that.

47

[anecdotal evidence]I work for a company with a preponderence of very well-educated people with highly respected professional jobs, and correspondingly high salaries. There’s a bunch of fat people in this building.[/anecdotal evidence]

48

There are Supermarkets in the “ghetto”…however they tend to stock what the community desires to consume and are generally expensive to shop in, the ‘convenience’ stores are even more expensive.

In some neighbourhoods, there may be an abundance of “southern food”, hamhocks, fatback, pigs’ feet, ears and tails, chicken wings or glizzards, etc …well you get the picture, lots of food you can buy in bulk and have it last a couple of meals. This as much cultural, as it is poverty, as it is lack of excerise…but I don’t think “lazy” comes into the equation much; as noted many poor people work several low paying jobs, with long hours…I don’t think the ‘welfare queen’ enters this discussion.

You can buy 1 lb of good chopped beef or 5 lbs of the cheaper stuff, which was mostly fat. You could buy chicken breasts, or maybe a whole chicken or purchase the “family” pack of thighs or legs or wings, which will end up fried and consumed with other fatty foods.

I’m just shy of a veggieboy and it’s expensive to eat. It’s expensive to buy fresh vegetables and I live in rural setting AND have a garden. It’s expensive to soy products or even low fat meats. When I lived in the city (NY) it was like 50¢ to a buck for an navel orange, one orange and that was 4-5 years ago.

So most of the food the poor eat is fatty, most of that food is overseasoned and fried…and I don’t care how moviated you think you are, eat a steady diet of salted and fried pork, mac & cheese, soda pop, rice, spuds and fast food and you WILL gain weight. It’s a little hard to excerise, working from 8-4 in the mill, then 6-12am in Walmart, grabing a few hours sleep and starting over again…god forbid you have a couple of kids in the mix.

In the ‘old’ days poor people ate vegetables, because meat was a luxury, today that’s changed. We have a steady diet of fatty meat, of sugars and starches and that’s the reason why we has a nation are so obese; it’s just as usual, those on the lower rungs bear the bulk of the problem.

49

Why not? The imagery that that phrase incites is eerily similar to some of the images we’ve been seeing on the tube lately.

50

Because “welfare queen” is a myth contured up to anger our brethern into believing that most of the people on welfare were cheats, driving caddies, eating steak and lobster and living the life of Riley.

I don’t know what images you’ve decided to focus on or why, but the ones I’ve seen hardly fit the imagery you suggest.

Nice filter you got there.

Oh sorry, you did say ‘some’.

51

Eating is both necessary and enjoyable. For poor people, eating can be one of the few sources of pleasure in their lives. And junk food simply tastes better than most healthy food.

52

I don’t understand what this means.

“Welfare queen” is not a myth. There are people that exploit the system.

The myth, to the extent it exists, would be in how prevalent the “welfare queen” is… are such people vanishingly small outliers or do they represent a significant number of welfare clients.

At one time – pre 1990s – I would have argued that the welfare cheats existed in significant enough numbers that such a characterization was fair, and useful. But since most welfare programs today are not open-ended – that is, they all have some requirement that the recipient ultimately get back to work – I think that the “welfare queen” today exists in tiny numbers, not nearly enough to justify using her as an example to form public policy.

53

Actually, no it doesn’t. Seriously…most junk food is pretty nasty tasting, if you’re accustomed to eating well-prepared healthy food. As a child, I was raised on a pretty steady diet of junk/fried/processed food, including regular consumption of soda and sweetened/hydrogenized products, and virtually no vegetables that didn’t come out of a can. As an adult, fortunately exposed to prepared fresh food, I’ve lost virtually any desire to eat junk food. Soda, especially cola, just tastes syruppy. Sweetened foods taste overly sugared. Fried foods just taste…greasy. Ribs dripping in fat, burned and coated with sugared vinegar are stomach turning. On the other hand, fresh vegetables and fruits, lightly grilled lean meat and fish, and toasted nuts and fresh herbs are delicious, especially if prepared with properly selected spices and lightly applied olive or nut oil.

You tend to like what you know, and if all you know are Hot Pockets and Coca-Cola, that’s what you’re going to buy and eat. Eating is a pleasure, and a natural comfort–a full belly gives at least a temporary comfort against the instinctive fear of starvation–and you’ll tend to eat what you’ve grown up eating. It doesn’t help that fresh produce is increasingly expensive, compared to processed food, and so if you’re on a tight budget and don’t know how to prepare it (and don’t have time and energy to learn) you’re not going to risk your budget on it.

Stranger

54

With respect, I disagree strongly, at least in the cases of the SF Bay Area and in Boston.

This links to a school project on correlation between resident income and retail businesses in select neighborhoods in the SF Bay Area.

You can go to Safeway.com and input a ZIP code to see stores in your neighborhood. For my neighborhood (Oakland), it found 10 stores, zero of which were located in West Berkeley, West Oakland, or East Oakland. The stores are clustered by the hills and by the lake – the most affluent parts of town.

55

As a counterexample to the healthy meals are expensive and time-consuming logic, buying a giant stalk of celery costs about a dollar and provides snacks over several days. A bag of carrots costs me a buck and a half and is high in vitamins and nutrition. The only preparation needed is to open the bag and rinse them off.

56

Sure, but carrots and celery are not a meal, not in terms of long-term diet anyway. The fresh fruits, lean meats, healthy dairy products, whole grains, legumes, leafy greens, etc., that you need to supplement your carrots and celery do tend to be expensive, time-consuming, or both.

57
      • As a matter of fact, Mississippi ranks very near last in average income, and very-near first in obesity. Race has got not much to do with it. Over the years I have seen a few rankings that hat it as first in both. The last one I remember was a little chart that appeared in FHM magazine, which had it ranked first in both. The states with the lowest levels of obesity were also the states with the highest average incomes.
  • I have also read that one theory explaining this is that (in the US) poor people eat fattier foods that taste better. It’s one of the few luxuries they can afford, so they do it.
    ~
58

I’m sure to a degree it is a self fulfilling prophecy. Obesity is largely genetic and a child’s income is to a large degree tied into their parents income (I don’t have a cite right now, I just remember that if you parents were in the highest income quintile your average income was 60k, if they were in the lowest quintile it was closer to 16k). If your parents made a good income chances you will too, if they were poor chances you will be too. At the very least you are prone to poverty or affluence based on what your parents had, even if you aren’t fated to end up that way. Since obesity is genetic its probably safe to assume that alot of fat people are just poor because their fat parents were poor.

There is also the fact that racial groups like blacks are more prone to obesity, and they are also more likely to be poor.

Then again it could all be untrue

http://www.hon.ch/News/HSN/525455.html

Researchers found that 26.8 percent of Americans whose families made $60,000 annually in 2001 and 2002 were obese, nearly a threefold increase since the early 1970s.

In contrast, the percentage of obese individuals in lower-income families making $25,000 or less only rose from 22.5 percent to 32.5 percent during the same time period.

59

Time has a lot to do with it. Between work, unpaid lunches, bus commutes, second and third jobs, school and job interviews, there isn’t a lot of time or energy to cook in the evenings. More cripplingly, there isn’t enough time to shop. If you only had a few hours to yourself every day, would you want to spend one of them shopping? Now factor in the fact that the grocery stores arn’t in your neighborhood, and you’ve got to haul your groceries on a bus.

Then there is food spoilage. The poor don’t have the luxery of planning most of us do. A kid’s fever means an eight hour wait at the ER, not a phone call to the doctor in the morning. An electric bill means a trip up to the electric company, not a few clicks online. Many retail and service jobs don’t offer any sort of set schedule, and rarely tell you more than a few days (and sometimes hours) in advance when you need to work. If something does come up, and you end up needing to stop by 7-11 for an egg salad sandwich and some chips at midnight instead of cooking the meal you planned and shopped for, that is a meal you are paying for twice. Most of us expect some wilted lettuce and modly bread as the week wears on. But when your daily budget is five bucks, you have to wonder what day you sacrificed your budget for that wilted lettuce and moldy bread. There is also a strong urge to eat all the food you have before it can go bad.

So in other words, cooking is this long, arduous process that has a good chance of causing you to spend twice as much on a meal as you would if you had just stopped by Taco Bell in the first place.

There are other factors. One is that food (and quantity is as much a factor in obesity as actual food content) is pretty satisfying in a life of little comfort. Another is that it gets fucking cold, and it’s pretty easy to eat a whole pot of beans when your trying to save on the heating bill. It’s also pretty expensive to start cooking- to build up a small pantry with the bare essentials is a big initial outlay. And if you don’t have a pantry, every time you cook you end up having to buy a bottle of oil and a lb of flour and a bottle of spices, you learn pretty quickly that cooking isn’t efficient. Restraunts are also an efficent way of fulfilling your “entertainment” needs. If you go to a seven buck movie, you’re still going to go home and eat four bucks worth of food. If you spend eight bucks on a moderately priced restraunt, you’ve had a night of entertainment and still come out ahead. It’s a lot easiser to feel good about “wasting” money on going out to eat than other persuits.

Soda is caffinated. It can stave off feelings of hunger. Ever notice the poor tend to drink more heavily caffeinated soda? A one-buck 2-liter of soda can substitute for several meals.

Then there is exersise. We’ve seen a great decline in public spaces in our lifetime…there simply isn’t anyplace to go in many neighborhoods. And even if there were places besides places to spend money to walk to, crime and even adequate clothing for the weather is a factor. Bicycles cost money. Gyms cost money. The poor don’t have lawns to mow or money for dance clubs and yoga classes and whatever else.

60

This doesn’t make sense to me. Neither flour, cooking oil, nor most dry spices spoil if they are kept unrefrigerated. Why on earth would you need to buy them every time you cook?

The rest of the post made it sound like most US poor people are hovering on the edge of starvation. I would respond, but if anything would send this thread to GD or the Pit, it would be that.

Regards,
Shodan