What's up with poverty and obesity?

Great Debates
101

I disagree on both.

A friend of mine’s wife is a nurse. Part of her job is to go around to inner city schools and community centers to teach people about nutrition and health. She says that, for the most part, people understand what she’s saying (it’s not rocket science), but very very few actually follow through with her recommendations. “In fact,” she says, “Just about no one does. No one seems to care." In her opinion, it’s not a matter of ignorance; she says they just don’t want to do it.

As far as access goes, I have always been impressed how so many “poor” folks figure out a way to acquire things that they really want (expensive Nike shoes, big screen TV’s, designer clothes, jewelry, etc.). Food is everywhere, even healthy food. The problem is not access; the problem is that they simply don’t want to eat it.

The bottom line is that many poor people simply choose to eat unhealthy food.

102

The wealthy are getting obese at a clip. Their obesity rates are almost the same as the poor’s rates now so as someone said earlier the wealthy are getting lazier and worse at making good decisions than any other group.

Everyone eats unhealthy foods to a degree or another and lots of people eat them as their staple. Rich, poor & middle class. But some people have biochemistries that keep their bodyfat at 14%, some have biochemistries that keep them at 43%.

103

What does productivity have to do with laziness? Do you actually think that “productivity” in economic analysis means, “They’re physically working really hard and burning calories?”

Do you think that those who are in poverty are showing up in the productivity studies? If they are working in jobs measured by those economists, then why are they living in poverty?

What jobs are being measured by the “economists” you reference?

104

It is not utter bullshit. You are now simply prevaricating. Even here, I have never seen it used to request “reasoning.” Beyond the fact that saying “Cite?” to request reasoning would be something only an idiot would do, even on these boards, it has always been used to request a reference or a link.

So stop with the “utter bullshit.” It just looks stupid at this point. You’ve gone beyond the point of any reasonability, to suggest that on these boards, the word has acquired some magical meaning that: a) is fully different than its actual meaning; and b) it doesn’t actually have on these boards even if “a” were the case.

I genuinely have no idea what you were trying to say or what point you were trying to make there, so I cannot respond. I have no idea how it logically follows the previous discussion. Could you rephrase it?

105

It was just used by Punoqllads to request reasoning in this very thread:

So it would appear to be you who is prevaricating, since you obviously read the post. And Punoqullads usage doesn’t seem unusual to me.

If in the Third World poor people are forced to work harder to survive, and hence are thinner, this says nothing about their innate laziness or lack of it. Even the laziest person will work hard when faced with starvation.

106

I’m not thrilled to type this out but I’m far from impoverished and at least 40 pounds overweight. It is laziness for some people but not nearly all. The reason I quote the above line is the following:

I’ve been to South Korea twice. The meals are fairly identical from breakfast to dinner. Lots of rice. TONS of steamed veggies and fish. I mean, tons. You could go hog-wild on veggies and spices and fish. And rice.

I ate well three meals a day when I was there and lost weight both times. It was only for a week, but my diet was solely restricted to that native diet. I was very aware of something that isn’t being mentioned here that appears to matter. ( I’m searching for cites for it). Soda consumption. In South Korea I ate a lot of starch ( that rice ) and yet drank only water for days on end. Granted I drank a ton of water, and yet still lost weight. The obesity issues in this country are rampant and not nearly the purvey only of the poor. Schools are fighting soda bottling companies trying to get machines OUT of schools ,or/and replace them with non-carbonated non-sugared drinks. Rough road. Me, I’m feeling that what we drink affects our obesity as much as what we eat.

It is true that it takes planning to make a huge bowl of rice and steamed veggies. However, it sure as heck is healthy. ( yeah, there was meat once or twice over in S.Korea but it was the exception and not the rule ).

I will admit, this thread makes me want to try cooking that diet as best as I can for a solid week and see how I am feeling…

Anyway, sorry for the hijack- but my point up there was that obesity in our country is about time management as much as mouthfeel. ( that is a real word in the food design and culinary sciences industries ).

Cartooniverse

107

So your response is, “This guy used it wrongly here, so it’s being used correctly?”

In addition, please note that he didn’t ask for reasoning. He asked for a cite. Your statement proves nothing. The fact that his post does not seem unusual to you suggests simply that you do not understand, or do not wish to admit, what the word means and how it is used.

Who said anything about innate laziness? You brought that up, not me. I still have no idea what you are talking about. Does the fact that the laziest person will work hard when faced with starvation have anything to do with why poor people in the U.S. are obese? By definition they can not be poor enough to face starvation, or else they wouldn’t be obese.

108

Having once upon a time been pretty damn poor I think I can contribute to the thread a bit. SusanS comment above for me was a massive boon to my food budgeting. I spent alot of time purchasing small quantities of bulk foods or making 2-3 meals worth of stuff at a time and freezing it. I didn’t have alot of variety but i got a full tummy and managed to get by.

Rice was my big staple, you can buy a 25lb bag of rice for less than $10, bulk price at Winco down the street from me right now is like $0.39 a pound. I made a simple fried rice that i would sometimes live on for days even working multiple jobs. A couple pounds of cooked rice 3-4 strips of bacon, about 1/4 of a bag of frozen mixed veggies, 2 eggs, some soy sauce, and a little sugar (for a touch of teryaki effect). All told the raw materials for this cost around $20 and easily made several batches. If all i wanted to eat for a week was this I could work on around 30 a week in groceries. For an extra few I could throw in some chicken or mushrooms now and then.

If you really are in dire financial straits you can come up with something like this you like. Do it for a couple weeks and start combing the grocery ads like crazy. Hunt for the best sales, especially on stuff that will keep for a while. You will start seeing patterns emerge like chicken being on sale every other week. When it does, buy a jumbo pack and a box of decent freezer bags.

Also non preferential cuts are always a big bonus. Chicken leg quarters for $0.29 a pound, 10 pound bag for $2.90. Home put 2 each in 5 bags and you have a good size serving of chicken for 5 dinners @ $0.50 a meal.

So with relevance to the thread, I was working multiple minimum wage jobs, barely making my bills, no car, 2 mile walk to the grocery store each way, and still managed to eat very good on home cooked food. I couldn’t bear the thought of blowing $5-$8 on one meal for myself for several years. Cooking in bulk is not hard and simple tupperware for carrying food to work can easily come from otherwise discarded plastic food tubs. Ask nice at the service deli and look a little pathetic they will give you a couple of the plastic tubs they put stuff in for customers buying potato salad and such. So alot of it in my experience is discipline and desire. You can make some pretty sad jobs go a long way towards feeding a couple people. Unfortunately the minute you pick up a box of pop tarts or just about any other highly processed convenience food realize it costs about 30% of that price to make that product yourself. Worried about food failures, be careful, go to the library and check out a good “how to” type cooking book. Forget anything fancy, lean how to braise properly, learn basic frying and saute, you will be making yummy basic stuff in no time. The books will also teach you things that will accellerate the process. Time constraints is bullshit, you can make your own convenience foods. You just have to be organized and observant, if you’re not, you’re screwed.

109

Time management, sedentary lifestyle (whether it be work or leisure…or both), etc.

I started watching my calories at the beginning of the summer. I haven’t had a non-diet soda since then (except a couple Jack and Cokes at bars…if I make them at home, I use diet). I’ve been using Splenda (or other sweetener, if Splenda is not available) in my coffee and tea. I’ve watched my food intake as well, of course, but I believe the calories I’ve not consumed in beverages have made the biggest difference. I’ve cut nearly 1000 calories per day out of my diet, lost 20 pounds since the beginning of June, and I would estimate that at least half of that comes from beverage savings.

Made according to the package directions (with one cup of sugar), one pitcher of kool-aid has 720 calories. A single can of Pepsi has 100 calories. I could drink a pitcher of Kool-aid a day, or two or three BOTTLES (~250 cal/each) of Pepsi a day. At least. I wager I’m not unique.

110

[hijack]

:smack: Thanks for slapping me into the real world. I’ve been in a spiral of unemployment, depression and weight gain, and never even thought about how much soda I was drinking.

[/hijack]

111

I’m fat and I’ve been really poor depending on how often the work comes in (my SO and I are painters…this is more about the time before SO was here).
There were weeks when I had to feed two on 25 dollars a week. We ate a lot of rice, instant taters, homemade biscuits with packets of gravy to give us the illusion that we had meat. We had cheap version cereal for breakfast, ramen for lunch, and maybe biscuits and rice for dinner. If we had money left over I bought bologna and cheese for the biscuits or peanut butter (but DD doesn’t like pb so it was a rare treat for me). All this stuff fills you up, and if eaten in moderation I suppose with a variety of other foods wouldn’t make one fat. But we didn’t have those other foods, and while you’re full you don’t stay full for long.
So there’s that.

Also, when I finally found work we’d go hogwild after starving our bodies on pure starch for so long.

Another thing. A lot of times food brings me comfort. I know this is a bad thing, but there is an instant pleasure from splurging on a dollar box of honey buns. I do believe there were times I would eat a whole box in one weekend. That’s a lot of instant pleasure for a buck, ya know? And it gave me something to do when I couldn’t afford to do much of anything else.
I know what you’re thinking. I could have gone to the park and walked for fun! Not around here. I could have gotten up and danced or just run in place. But that’s not likely. It’s not because I was lazy when I was out of work. I just felt like I had no freakin energy. Maybe because I was malnourished? Maybe because I couldn’t sleep at night worrying about how I was going to pay the bills? That box of honey buns and parking in front of the tv took me away from my problems for a bit.

Now that my situation isn’t quite as bad I do eat better but those habits are really hard to break, ya know?

I know there are plenty fat lazy poor people. I’ve met plenty fat lazy people with money too though, so it has to be something more.

112

It can be a cycle. You lose your job, you get depressed, you eat for comfort, you gain weight, you get more depressed, you eat more… I’ve never known anyone who called celery a comfort food.

113

Great post by drachillix.

The idea that the poor are being duped into obesity by meretricious McDonald’s calories is conspiracy-minded BS. Others have pointed out that good, nutricious foods can be cheap. Ergo, the poor have another option. But the truly killer argument is simply pointing out, as many here have, that cheap calories are a resource to the poor and that, with the desire and discipline to do so, they could simply eat less of those foods and even save themselves some money in the process.

Look, this is all about culture, self-image, education, and self-discipline: all of these rolled into one. The obese poor for various reasons either don’t get it or don’t care to implement what they get. No one is forced in this country to be fat.

Like most Dopers, I consider myself to be pretty educated and resourceful. During those times I have been poor and/or busy (and in grad school I didn’t even have my own kitchen), I have consumed the following for cheap, healthy, convenient meals:

[ul][li]Oatmeal eaten with just some water poured on it. It’s whole-grain, cheap as hell, filling, fast (instant in fact), and nutritious. Even if you take the time to use hot water (I don’t like my oatmeal hot and gooey), you still have an ultra-fast, ultra-convenient, and highly nutritious food.[/li]
I don’t care if you don’t have access to a grocery store. Oatmeal is a food that anyone can buy and make.
[li]Vegetable juice.[/li][li]Canned fish: mostly sardines but sometimes tuna[/li][li]Popcorn. I would buy cheap popcorn and pop it in plain paper bags in the dorm’s microwave.[/li][li]Bananas–a cheap fruit you can buy almost anywhere.[/ul][/li]
What prevents a poor person, even one without a kitchen or refrigerator, from eating the above? Nothing except the lack of the idea or will to do so.

I am a socialist and fully realize that our system screws the poor in many ways, but a lack of cheap, nutritious food is not one of them. If you want to sum it up in a word, the poor’s obesity is caused, ultimately, by a lack of self-actualization.

114

So what causes rich and middle class people to be obese?

115

Calling people lazy because they’re fat is mathematically absurd. The excess amount of calories you need to have consumed over your lifetime to become fat is utterly trivial and basically unmeasurable on a day by day basis.

Same goes for any deficit in physical work done. You couldn’t measure it if you tried.

116

Oh, and IMHO this is how you should do it:

You don’t buy someone’s hypothesis —> Ask for evidence.
You don’t buy someone’s evidence —> Ask for cite.

117

False.

One pound equals 3500 calories. If someone is, say, 50 pounds overweight, they have consumed 175,000 more calories than they need. If that person is, say, 30 years old, they have consumed 5833.33 calories per year more than they expended. This is about 16 calories more per day than they needed to consume, equal to about one teaspoon of sugar.

Perfectly measurable. Note that I did the calculations for all 30 years, though people’s calorie intake and requirements vary greatly over the course of about the first 20 of those. If we assume that the person became 50 pounds overweight from age 18-30, in 12 years, that’s 14,583.33 extra calories per year, or about 40 extra calories per day. Easily measured.

118

Only “bulk sections” I’ve ever seen in a mainstream supermarket have been for candies (you bag your own candy, then pay by the pound).

119

The same thing. There is–perhaps we can agree–less self-actualization overall among the poor. The real question becomes, then, why the poor are less self-actualized. And I think there are many reasons for that, and I think it is a two-way street: Less self-actualization leads to poverty, while poverty by definition includes the idea of a lack of resources, and the less resources one has the harder it is to self-actualize.

120

So a man overweight by 50 lbs is eating about 16 calories more a day than he burns…which is about 2500 calories on average. Do you realize you’re talking about an error of 0.6% !!!

And you think that’s measurable. Well, let’s see. The error on U.S. product labels’ calorie counts are legally +/- 20%. And when the FDA bothers to check only 93% of products fall even within that broad range. And that doesn’t include the error in the government’s calorie testing apparatus (harder to come by but was quoted somewhere as +/- 10%). So there’s* no way * you could *practically * measure that kind of difference. I suppose if you brought all your food to a Big Science lab they could give it a shot. But the FDA’s error would probably be 15 times that difference, and your average calorie counter’s error would be at least 30 times that (probably more).

And that doesn’t include the fact that the absolute calorie content of foods is different from the calorie absorption in the gut and varies among foods - producing a whole new set of errors.

Fat people just aren’t eating measurably more than they’re burning, I’m sorry. (Let alone *noticably * more).