I confess I still don't understand why poverty is so increasingly linked with obesity. The common explanation is to blame the paucity of excellent cheap grocery stores in urban neighborhoods. But poverty is not exclusively an inner city phenomenon; poor people in more rural areas share grocery stores with the rich. Besides, while this explains the latitudinal data, it does not account for the longitudinal issue. No one thinks that New York's grocery stores, even in poor neighborhoods, have gotten worse since the 1970s; the evidence is that they've gotten better. But the obesity rate has gotten much worse.
I wonder if George Orwell didn't offer the explanation, in the Road to Wigan Pier, when he compares the actual expenditure of coal miners to the model poverty diets pushed by reformers:
Please notice that this budget contains nothing for fuel. In fact, the writer explicitly stated that he could not afford to buy fuel and ate all his food raw. Whether the letter was genuine or a hoax does not matter at the moment. What I think will be admitted is that this list represents about as wise an expenditure as could be contrived; if you had to live on three and elevenpence halfpenny a week, you could hardly extract more food-value from it than that. So perhaps it is possible to feed yourself adequately on the P.A.C. allowance if you concentrate on essential foodstuffs; but not otherwise.
Now compare this list with the unemployed miner's budget that I gave earlier. The miner's family spend only tenpence a week on green vegetables and tenpence half-penny on milk (remember that one of them is a child less than three years old), and nothing on fruit; but they spend one and nine on sugar (about eight pounds of sugar, that is) and a shilling on tea. The half-crown spent on meat might represent a small joint and the materials for a stew; probably as often as not it would represent four or five tins of bully beef. The basis of their diet, therefore, is white bread and margarine, corned beef, sugared tea, and potatoes--an appalling diet. Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going to do such a thing. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn't. Here the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit 'tasty'. There is always some cheaply pleasant thing to tempt you. Let's have three pennorth of chips! Run out and buy us a twopenny ice-cream! Put the kettle on and we'll all have a nice cup of tea! That is how your mind works when you are at the P.A.C. level. White bread-and-marg and sugared tea don't nourish you to any extent, but they are nicer (at least most people think so) than brown bread-and-dripping and cold water. Unemployment is an endless misery that has got to be constantly palliated, and especially with tea, the English-man's opium. A cup of tea or even an aspirin is much better as a temporary stimulant than a crust of brown bread.
In Orwell's time, the result was toothlessness and short, frail stature; in the days of nearly endless cheap calories, it is obesity. It is undoubtedly easier to stay thin if you have nicely cooked low-calorie prepared food at easy disposal, a shiny gym with a personal trainer to go to, some control over your schedule so that you can use it, and lovely clothes to show off a well-toned figure. The life of a welfare mother affords few pleasures beyond television, comfort food, and whatever entertainment she can get up with friends on a $0 budget.
But if a weight loss pill turns out to be relatively safe and effective? For sure, Medicaid would cover it; obesity (hell, diabetes alone) costs more than the pill possibly could. Suddenly, a major class marker would disappear. And with it, hopefully, upper middle class women will stop thinking that the ideal woman closely resembles a flagpole in form and function. I don't expect such a thing any time soon, but it is lovely to look forward to.
The phenomenon of increased obesity rates seems to correlate strongly with the advent of three significant societal and economic innovations:
1. The advent of the personal computer in the home.
2. The rise of the Internet.
3. The introduction of Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream to the marketplace.
Further, on the last point, the better the grocery store, the more likely they are to carry Ben & Jerry's. Even my local 7/11 has Haagen Daz.
The pill we need is the one that changes our preferences. If we liked broccoli better than ice cream, we'd find more and better ways to deliver it cheaply.
You posit the causation that people are fat because they are poor. This may be correct to some degree. But consider another possible causation. People are fat because they are dumb and lazy. Poeple are poor because they are dumb and lazy. Hence, we observe the correlation between poverty and obesity.
A natural experiemtn would be to look at poor people who randomly became un-poor (lottery wiiners?). Do they get thinner?
There is no mystery here. Good-tasting but fattening foods are now cheap. It used to take hours of slicing and cooking a potato to make French fries; today, you go to McDonald's and get them in 30 seconds. Poor self-control is the major cause of poverty, and it doesn't tend to keep you from going to McDonald's either. Furthermore, poor people today aren't as poor as poor people back in the day; they can afford McDonald's now.
This is not a rant about McDonald's, which I like (chicken sandwiches and good coffee), they're just the example. Ho-Ho's and Twinkies are delicious, too.
You're missing the obvious reason why the poor tend to be obese. Eating is pleasurable, and provides immediate gratification. Exercise and dieting are hard and require one to delay gratification, for months or years. Those who have the discipline to do difficult (and often boring) things and delay gratification don't stay poor. The set of habits that keep poor people poor are the same set of habits that keep them fat in this country, where we have abundant, cheap food, and a generous safety net for the poor.
"The life of a welfare mother affords few pleasures beyond television, comfort food, and whatever entertainment she can get up with friends on a $0 budget."
Welfare mothers don't have a "$0 budget". They have free cash flow thanks to transfer payments and having the necessities of life (housing, medical care, food) provided for them either heavily subsidized (housing) or free (medical care, food). And walking is a great form of exercise that's free.
It is rather remarkable to travel from my (white collar) office to my (white collar) neighborhood on the UWS of Manhattan via subway and see all the obese people on the train.
To a person I can tell you who will be getting off south of 125th St.
Does this prove Megan's contention? I've no idea; perhaps both poverty and obesity are cultural behaviors.
I think everyone's got it all ass-backwards. Obesity rates amongst the poor aren't about the poor at all, but about the rich, just as you say. It's not just skinniness, but health that's a literal status symbol- what you eat and where it comes from, how and where you work out, ect. When the poor can indulge, the rich distinguish themselves by not indulging.
Or in other words, the obesity rates of the rest of the country would be the same as that of the poor if health and the pursuit of a healthy lifestyle weren't themselves symbols of status.
My guess if that if you compared the graduate students, who work 80+ hours a week and earn about $15,000 a year, and comparable blue collar workers, you're going to find stark differences in eating habits.
Lentils cost $1 a pound.
There are already a number of drugs that will make you thin. One in particular (hyrdocodone) can also be a lot of fun ;)
I believe there are large areas in Africa that have managed to entirely eliminate obesity among the poor.
Nonetheless, I'd rather put up with the obesity.
"how long it will be until we have a drug that can make everyone thin."
We have it now, it's called crystal meth - it is very effective. It can lead to dependency though....
In one word: television. Just about everyone I know who is overweight has the television on when they are home.
Poor households have the television on all the time; it's considered an asset -- to the point where once when I unexpectedly stopped by they immediately invited me on and then turned on the TV, as if having it on was a gesture of hospitality!
I would also say the poor have more stress (which makes people overeat), lack of opportunities to exercise, easy access to fast food, rigid work schedules which disrupt the body's natural clock, and old-fashioned values, now unhealthy ("good food" is meat-based, a lingering sense that leisure is supposed to be lazy, etc.)
Those who have the discipline to do difficult (and often boring) things and delay gratification don't stay poor. The set of habits that keep poor people poor are the same set of habits that keep them fat in this country, where we have abundant, cheap food, and a generous safety net for the poor.
Bingo.
As is often said, the only relevant factors for weight are diet and exercise.
It's somewhat cheaper, faster, and easier to either buy prepared food or eat McDonald's-type fast food. Buying vegetables and especially fruits takes up a lot of the grocery bill. When I went last week it was $2 for a tomato, $4 for a small thing of strawberries. You can get a large frozen dinner for $2.50, and it's a lot easier to spend 5 min instead of 30 min cooking when you get home.
Exercise is the other factor. Between more cubicle jobs, lots more TV options, and computers, people simply spend a lot more time sitting down doing things that don't burn calories. You don't see too many kids playing football in the street anymore when they could be playing Madden.
Wrong as usual Megan. It's not that poor people get fat while rich people stay skinny. Upper income people get skinny and toned so they can get laid. The typical workaholic college graduate gets married later in life and naturally wants a good looking earner as a mate. Poor people don't seem to be as hung up on looks and income level when looking for their mates - or to put it another way, if you want to look skinny and rich, you hang out with fat, poor people.
There's a lot of emphasis on the poor in these comments, but I really think that everyone outside the wealthy and the upper middle class in the major metropolitan areas probably tends toward obesity by the standards of those groups.
Which is, of course, a sign that it is right and proper for those groups to rule over the rest of us.
LOL, a pill to make you thin. That's rich! Even if the pill could make you thin, people would abuse it so they could eat more. That's humanity for you.
Look, fat people, and I know, I am a member of the tribe, don't have self-control. I might look at a picture of Angelina Jolie's rail-skinny arms and think, "if only I had a personal trainer and the money for a 'mommy tuck'" but reality is, she spends the time, money, and energy eating right and exercising, and I don't. I watch TV with my laptop on my lap and eat too much. And I'm a person who eats too much of healthy things, though I've been known to tear up a bag of cheese curls. If I had more money would I be more likely to exercise and show some self-restraint? I doubt it, considering I'm far richer than I was 10 years ago, but fatter as well.
Until there is a drug that makes food taste terrible, I don't see an end to obesity.
You can never be too rich or too thin.
Btw, the only effective weight-loss regime I've ever been on was pregnancy. Unfortunately the effect generally wears off past the first trimester, and food becomes increasingly attractive, so it's a very temporary condition. The secret is, when all food makes you want to puke, you tend to not eat as much.
"Suddenly, a major class marker would disappear."
No worries, a replacement would be found in short order.
, hopefully, upper middle class women will stop thinking that the ideal woman closely resembles a flagpole in form and function.
I fundamentally do not understand this pervasive belief. Women should look like, you know, women. The push for super-skinny boyish figures makes as much sense as men striving for broad, rounded hips and protruding but squishy pectorals. I mean really, WTF?
two points
1. Megan is right about fashion. It once was that extrene fatness was a sign of aristocracy -- especially that of the wife, for some reason (I suppose because she didn't have to work). That was when the undernourished commoners were thin.
2. The poor are often left to (prepared, usually canned) food rich in calories and bad fats and excessive salt, rather than a vegetable-rich meal, because the cost of the former is always lower than the cost of the latter. McDonald's fills the need and quells the hunger pangs, at a very low price. It takes more money to buy lean meats and raw vegetables sufficient to make a meal.
Random comments:
The people who are healthier, and less obese, are the better educated. That correlates with richer, but far from perfectly; and the education effect is clearly greater than the wealth effect.
The medicos preaching the evils of over-weight have recently found they need to re-calibrate their standard. People who are clearly rather over the old Ideal Body Mass Index live on average a year longer, with few health problems, than those on the "Ideal" mark.
So the educated are probably skinnier than they ought to be; something that should self-correct in a few years.
Tolerance of curves and smoothed over muscle has been growing in adverts and in entertainment shows in recent years (Source: observation). Looking ahead, do not recessions improve our opinions of more robust physique?
People who are clearly rather over the old Ideal Body Mass Index live on average a year longer, with few health problems, than those on the "Ideal" mark.
Out of curiosity, how many of those people are obsessive gym rats, like me?
Megan points to gyms as one luxury that the well-off can afford to help stay thin. But I wonder if that isn't offset by the fact that a disproportionate number of poor people work at manual labor jobs - I bet a day on a construction site burns way more calories than a 90-minute gym session.
Step back and think about it ... broadly speaking women take dangerous weight-loss pills, and men take dangerous muscle-building and strength-building pills.
Megan might be right, but have the wrong male pill in mind.
"To a person I can tell you who will be getting off south of 125th St."
Sorry Dave, but with gentrification lots of the "white collar" workers are living way past 125th street.
"perhaps both poverty and obesity are cultural behaviors."
Poverty as a cultural behavior....good try. I think what you may be calling obese, many other cultures would call "healthy." Plus in many ethnic cultures overtime people are expected to gain weight. It's considered natural (go figure.)
maybe those of you trying to defend size vs. skinny aren't old enough to remember, but as late as the 70s, almost all people were ridiculously skinny by current standards. people that were considered chubby then wouldn't really be considered anything other than average now, and megan's flagpole standard was the norm for women. i'm exagerating somewhat, but not much (it's even more apparent if you look at fotos or films from even further back in the day, people were very lean (which is why no one can wear old styles like flat front pants)). you all can argue about what's changed, but it can't just be some rich/poor divide (that divide's been around for a while), or the availability of crap food vs. good food (ditto).
i'm suspecting a decrease in the cost of calories, plus a decrease in the manual labor (and walking and tough house chores and etc.) people do. plus, an indifference to becoming fat (it doesn't happen all at once).
"I confess I still don't understand why poverty is so increasingly linked with obesity."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/oct/01/foodanddrink.oliver
My guess would be two things. The first is soda, one of the only types of calories you consume that your body doesn't realize it actually consumed. Diet soda also leads people to eat more as well. We've certainly have far more people drinking soft drinks than before. People did used to drink more milk/juice, but your body is much better at registering those calories.
The second is a lack of exercise. Americans as a whole exercise much less than they used to. Kids aren't allowed to play outside like they used to be because parents are far too overprotective. Adults are now much less likely to have manual labor type jobs.
btw, i realize this is heresy, but there seems to be a definitional issue when you identify certain "obese" people as being in "poverty." throughout much of the world, it would be nonsensical to think you could have overweight poor people because, almost by definition, access to too much food is conclusive proof that people have money to burn (on calories they don't need). yes, yes, the poor in question could be spending all their money on the excess calories and ignoring everything else, but i don't think that's the stereotypical improverished person megan is discussing (for similar reasons, complaining that the poor spend too much on sneakers or rims would likely seem silly throughout much of the world)).
"I confess I still don't understand why poverty is so increasingly linked with obesity"
Google stress, obesity
2. The poor are often left to (prepared, usually canned) food rich in calories and bad fats and excessive salt, rather than a vegetable-rich meal, because the cost of the former is always lower than the cost of the latter. McDonald's fills the need and quells the hunger pangs, at a very low price. It takes more money to buy lean meats and raw vegetables sufficient to make a meal.
Disagree. A carton of orange juice, a beef roast from the markdown bin, a 1-lb bag of peeled baby carrots, a medium-sized onion, wheat rolls, butter, and a few potatoes can make a healthy and balanced meal for about six people at $30-40 with possibly enough leftovers to support one or two lunch servings. The main course can even be cooked in the crockpot all day long starting with the roast about half frozen and using the low-heat setting.
Even accounting for the electricity used, the total per-meal outlay is still a bit below the $6/head one would typically spend at McDonalds to get a comparably-filling quantity of food with far less nutritional value. You can also increase the quantities of raw ingredients and then use the leftovers in conjunction with a few other ingredients to variously make French Dip, BBQ beef sandwiches, fried beef and potato hash, beef and vegetable soup, etc.
The deficit isn't found in money, it's having the knowledge of how to prepare the meal, and then investing in the time to do it.
Genetics is also a big factor in obesity, though I doubt a change in genetics explains the huge rise in obesity over time. (I guess we've been increasing our ratio of Central/South American Indian genes, which I think are predisposed toward obesity and Type 2 diabetes, but it's hard to see how this could explain all the rotund anglos walking down the street every day.
Is there a correlation between obesity and IQ? Between obesity and educational success? The different proposed explanations are all possible, but they're also all basically just-so stories. I'm curious whether there's data that might suggest a stronger answer.
Note that it's quite okay for there to be a correlation between poverty and obesity for one reason, and a long-term upward trend in obesity rates for a completely different reason.
People would develop tolerance to any one thinness drug, thus requiring a progression of different drugs to stay thin. But today's obesity among children especially makes me think that perhaps what their mothers ate while pregnant somehow programmed the tendency to weight gain into the progeny. Refined carbohydrates and trans-fats?
Last year I downsized into a shared house in a not-too-brilliant part of greater London. Most of my housemates (10 and counting) have been, shall we say, lower working class, and since we share a kitchen I have been able to observe their habits. They do not cook and they are perfectly capable of finding the time and energy to do so. They just don't want to.
For example, there's the young unmarried about-to-be-mother (she can't have a council flat until the baby actually arrives). She is not lazy, nor so depressed she can't manage to do anything: she spending her time cleaning like a maniac - and it isn't just nesting, apparently she's like this most of the time. She bathes her (short-haired, perfectly clean) cat once a month, for example, and covers the kitchen with horrible-smelling cleaning chemicals every fricking day. But except for toast, I've rarely seen her eat anything that eaten isn't heated from frozen or a tin, or prepared very simply from raw, like salads.
And she throws away an ENORMOUS amount of food. She will heat a big serving of frozen food for herself and throw half away. She throws out anything that is past its sell-by date, even if it is perfectly good, and also anything with the tiniest spot of mold on it, and this includes salad vegetables.
And yes, she's fat.
She's the most extreme example I've seen in this house, but I would say reluctance to actually cook, outrageous food waste and total prissiness about sell-by dates and tiny, tiny spots of mold is common here. I am only middle-class person in this house, and I am the only person who thinks her behaviour is obscenely wasteful.
"I fundamentally do not understand this pervasive belief."
Real simple: Gay men dominate fashion. Gay men prefer boyish-looking women as the next best thing to boys.
"Google stress, obesity"
There's more stress among those in the upper middle class than among the poor. When you're unemployed and living on welfare, you don't have the stress of worrying about losing your job, not getting that project in on time, studying for the LSATs, etc.
Gay men prefer boyish-looking women as the next best thing to boys.
Assuming that's true, it doesn't answer the question. Why would wealthy straight women take their appearance cues from gay men, rather than the straight men they presumably want to attract?
Straight women take their appearance cues from other straight women. I've never met a straight man who even understands the fashion thing, much less picks a partner on the basis of it.
In short, it's a self-perpetuating cult. I'm actually glad I'm too downmarket to have to deal with it.
Fred,
I somewhat agree with your comment re: stress. Many of the "poor" accept the fact that they are poor and will not climb the "class ladder" in their lifetimes. They may stress about making various payments, but in reality, almost no one starves, goes without a place to live, etc. And part of the reason they are poor is that they don't care enough about being financially stable.
The middle and upper-middle classes though, they spend most of their lives striving to increase their social standing. This is incredibly stressful, especially since social norms for such people put pressure on them to climb the social ladder. The middle class works more hours than the poor/proles as well.
I've never met a straight man who even understands the fashion thing, much less picks a partner on the basis of it.
No, but there are certainly at least a few men who understand the "hourglass figure" thing and the "cleavage" thing, and the "soft and feminine rather than bony and sinewy like an underfed racehorse" thing.
And actually, there are a few women who look good as size 0, because they were born that way. But that would not be the majority of women, for whom a protruding iliac crest on what by rights ought to be a size 8 or 10 rear is hardly a thing of beauty.
I think there's something to Scott Adams's Pleasure Unit Theory. If you're poor, working in a dead end job and struggling to pay the rent, that Wendy's triple cheeseburger may be the most happiness you can get all day, and denying yourself that small pleasure is much harder.
RE: Atlantic @ 6:06 PM
Uh, she sounds to me like she's got OCD (or some similar anxiety disorder) and has probably never been diagnosed or treated.
She needs help especially if she's about to try raising a kid.
If you know her well, express your concern and ask her to get herself checked out at a clinic.
If you don't know her well, express your concern to someone who does and see if they can get her to get help.
Rob,
It is a puzzler and I don't get it either. But the fact is, the models in the women's magazines don't look anything like the models in the men's magazines.
For some reason, women have convinced themselves that they should be thin, angular and breastless even though the vast majority of men prefer curves and T&A. I don't think it has anything to do with what men think looks good -- it's what women think looks good. Why they think that looks good is beyond me. Maybe men look at a woman's shape and think about having sex with it, while women look at a woman's shape and think about how high fashion would look on it?
the models in the women's magazines don't look anything like the models in the men's magazines.
That is a marvelously compact way of putting it. I will be using that line when the subject comes up.
And, given that "Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders" is mandatory viewing at my house, it will undoubtedly come up.
Mister Nomer - maybe she's OCD, and thank you for the suggestion, but then why am I the only one in the house who thinks she's wasteful? None of them can cook, either.
When McDonalds first started franchising the average size of a soft drink served was 8 oz. If any commercial establishment tried to serve portion sizes like that today they would be out of business in days. Between lack of physical activity due to fear of predators and the bombardment of advertizing expanding the "normal" calorie intake of consumers, its pretty obvious why we have an epidemic. Here's a few modest proposals Prez Obama could offer up --- 1) abolish the PepsiCo subsidy in the food stamp budget; eliminate soft drinks and snack chips from eligiblity and replace them with personal paper products. 2) A 2% tax on fast food restaurants, and an advertizing tax on commercials for deleterious products. 3) A heavy tax on any commercials aimed at children, no matter what the product.
Re: The middle class works more hours than the poor/proles as well.
By employer, not employee, choice though.
People who work salaried jobs (the middle class, generally) are often expected to work (unpaid) overtime while people in hourly jobs (poor/proles) usually have their hours strictly limited by their employers since they must actually be paid for the extra time. I've also found that when lower-income/working people are given a chance to work overtime they jump at it, often in a big way.
Stress definitely causes my weight to fluctuate. When I got divorced I dropped to 175lbs (I'm 6'4"). When I remarried, I went from a ripped 180 to a flabby 210 in a year. When I got separated I went to a decent 190 in a year and a ripped 200 in two years. When I got laid off I went from a ripped 200 to a flabby 230 in 6 months. Obesity is not a simple diet and exercise equation except in the minds of semi-autistic math geeks.
I don't work in obesity research so I'm not especially qualified to comment, but my thoughts are:
1. Obesity is an indicator, not a cause, of poor overall health. Losing weight via pharmaceutical means will not remedy the health issues associated with obesity.
2. Tesofensine is a neurotransmitter reuptake inhibitor. We've been down this road before. Long story short, antidepressants that found second life as an appetite suppressant.
3. Rimonabant was supposed to be the last lean pill, and it didn't work so well.
conclusion -- there will never be an easy "lean pill". Too many metabolic and neurologic processes involved. I like the idea of ghrelin antagonists and using leptin supplements to keep the weight off people who've lost a lot (fat tissue makes leptin and losing weight causes a leptin imbalance = lower energy output + higher hunger).
JordanT,
Diet soda also leads people to eat more as well.
I've come across this assertion before. I'm wondering how it was tested. I suppose that if you drank "normal" soda and switched to diet, you might imagine that your dieting work was all done now, and eat more extra calories than you'd just given up.
But suppose you're someone like me, who hasn't drunk a non-diet soda more than three or four times in the last decade, but chugs diet soda on the order of a liter a day. (I get the occasional forwarded e-mail from friends warning me that aspartame is some sort of systemic poison. If it is, I'm definitely toast.)
If you're used to the stuff, like the taste of it, and aren't drinking it specifically to cut calories, does it still encourage you to eat more, relative to drinking (say) water? Has anyone studied the question?
Rob & Fred,
How do we explain foot binding and corsets so tight they lead to the invention of the "fainting couch"? Men like to advertise that they are so rich and powerful their wifes are not needed to cook, clean, or raise his children - he would have servants for that.
A super thin woman can only be that way if she is not burdened with cooking, cleaning and child care. It requires vast amounts of leisure A man with a thin wife can advertise his wealth, and the thin wife can flaunt her status in front on her "fat momma" friends in their mom jeans.
It's not a wealth marker. It's a sexy marker. A kind of wealth, but still, you have to understand the difference.
This is dumb,
Americans as a whole, and across economic bounds are fatter.
Sure, it's more prevalent in the poor, but it's a problem across the states.
Here in MA ~20% of the adult population is considered Obese! That's 1 out of every 5 people you walk by on the street, and it doesn't included just your typical fatty.
The reason, cheap but unhealthy calories, a HFCS diet, and a lack of time in a busy 21st century.
Did you know 1 20oz soda contains close to 400 calories and would take 45minutes on a treadmill to run off?
In Orwell's time, the result was toothlessness and short, frail stature; in the days of nearly endless cheap calories, it is obesity. It is undoubtedly easier to stay thin if you have nicely cooked low-calorie prepared food at easy disposal, a shiny gym with a personal trainer to go to, some control over your schedule so that you can use it, and lovely clothes to show off a well-toned figure. The life of a welfare mother affords few pleasures beyond television, comfort food, and whatever entertainment she can get up with friends on a $0 budget.
Amazing with all the smart things u think and write that this is your take on obesity.
I'm dumbfounded by it.
I suppose the people with the personal trainers and the precooked foods are those with 250K incomes?
Are you setting yourself up to be a leader in the new redistribution universe?
In 1900 the poor were on every stoop and in every doorway of every major city; yet the obese were few enough to be employed as circus freaks.
Goodbye self reliance.
poor people in more rural areas share grocery stores with the rich.
Are you sure? In many exurban areas there are Trader Vic's for the rich and Shop-Rites for the poor. In truly rural areas the split may be different, but then you might want to take a look at whether the rich-poor obesity disparity holds up in those areas. You're also forgetting here about disparities in pre-cooked food -- McDonald's vs. Olive Garden.
Diet sodas: Even non-sugar sweetness appears to stimulate an insulin response, which both causes fat cells to absorb nutrients from the blood, and causes low blood sugar, which makes you hungry.
In one word: television. Just about everyone I know who is overweight has the television on when they are home. Unfortunately this applies to all the non-overweight people I know too. And those where some in the house are overweight, and some underweight.
I blame a combination of ever increasing amounts of sugar in all processed foods, combined with us now being one generation further removed from people who had to cook and prepare food at home, hence these skills are being lost.
One more point, every time the average weight goes up, people's perception of what is "normal" what is "a bit Cuddly but nothing to worry about" and what is "OMZ I'm fat, that's it, nothing but salad and jogging for the next year" gets ratchetted up.
A tax on junk food is interesting. Please provide a legal definition for junk food that does not say food suitable for the lower classes.
amen to the person who pointed out (as i did previously) that truly poor people are skinny (for obvious reasons). so we're not talking about a money issue, it's something else. (funny to see people effectively assert that it's cheaper to be fat; um, no, no matter what price the calories, it's cheaper to consumer fewer.)
It is amazing how many people who have no earthly idea about the link between poverty and obesity in America are spouting off "Poor people are lazy and have no impulse control, and are therefore fat"
As a formerly impoverished construction worker who went to college on loans and now works as an information technology consultant/programmer, let me break it down for you:
Poor people eat food that is cheap and doesn't spoil. This food is found in the center aisles of your grocery store. It is high in refined carbohydrate content, which provokes an insulin response, and causes any fat/protein that is ingested to be stored as fat. Case in point: hamburger helper. There is no cheaper way to give your family a filling meal. But it has all the right ingredients to make you fat.
The healthy stuff? It's the vegetables and lean meats that go bad in 2 or 3 days time that are the ideal diet. To feel satisfied, you have to eat a relatively large quantity of meats and nuts/oily vegetables. This is 5 times as expensive as hamburger helper.
If you have never been poor, you have no idea what it is like, and no idea how many poor people are motivated and intelligent and are victims of their parents bad choices.
dj superflat:
You, along with most Americans, are under the impression that a person consuming less than 2,000 calories a day can't create and/or maintain body fat. This is not supported by evidence. The main cause of obesity are foods that cause sustained releases of insulin in the blood stream. Insulin causes fatty acids in fat cells to form into triglycerides, which are larger molecules that can't be extracted from fat cell walls to be used by the body. Even if you are on a treadmill, as long as your insulin is spiked, you willl only burn through muscle and glycogen from your liver. You will lose zero fat. Look up Gary Taubes on wikipedia. He has some excellent writings. This is why impoverished people in Mexico who have been documented as living on 1,000 calorie diets are obese. They live on corn flour based diets. The corn flour spikes their insulin, and any fats/meats they consumer are stored, and locked, in fat cells as triglycerides.
"John Tierney asks how long it will be until we have a drug that can make everyone thin"
It's called heroin.
My two cents:
High Fructose Corn Syrup.
Our farm policy is such that corn is literally in everything.
In Europe, where there is less obesity, this ingredient lacks in products from ketchup to soda pop.
Actually, it's fairly well documented that the cheap greasy stuff is, well, cheaper overall when factoring in all the associated costs, such as time spent shopping, time spent prepping, etc:
There's lots of these types of references out there; certainly it accords with my experience over the last fifty years. Basically, it boils down to this: Of the three, cheap, quick, or healthy, pick any two(an obvious variant of the engineers dictum of cheap, fast, or good - pick any two.) Most people go with the first two, cheap and quick, because the consequences of forgoing the third option are not immediately obvious. The long-term consequences, though, they're a killer. Literally. And before that, ultimately more costly than going with options one and two.
Note also that less time to cook generally correlates with less time to exercise as well, again, imho.
Foot binding I don't get. Corsets, on the other hand, enhance the hourglassiness of a woman's figure, so they make sense to me.
But on the wealth front, am I to think that Kardashian looks the way she does because of all her cooking and cleaning? I can see the appeal of a relatively flat stomach (though not prominent ribs), but I can't see what a rich man gets out of sex with a bag of bones.
Trader Vic's: isn't that a famous London restaurant? :)
kim k. is NOT obese. even obese people are grossed out by each other.
google "food insecurity"
the response to episodes of food insecurity, (end of the month with money running out) is rebound eating when the food is available (time of month when welfare check arrives)
This is spot on. It's not how much you eat but WHAT you eat. The abundant and readily available refined carbohydrates and sugar in our diet are the primary cause of obesity, with the shockingly lack of exercise to amplify the problem.
These cheap carbs send blood sugars through the roof, which simulates your body's insulin (growth hormone) to store the excess energy you are putting into your body...thereby making you fat.
Life's tough when you're poor. Food offers a temporary relief from the drudgery. It's well known that refined carbs and sugar give a sort of 'high' when consumed, which can be addictive.
Education is key to beating obesity (unless this magic pill arrives, however) but that too costs money....
razib, I believe you have completely missed my point.
I think SoV is quite right; it's a struggle for us to eat healthy, and my wife is home all day.
As I sit here sipping my green tea, contemplating a trip to the gym, I swear I can't come up with an answer as to why poverty and obesity is correlated.
I don't get the obsession with thin. For me it's about fitness and aesthetics. It's what a person's appearance says about them, that they are active and care. There's far more to it than thin. It's healthy.
Perhaps the obsession with being thin is merely another way the Sneetches have of putting the stars on their bellies.
Once everyone has the stars on their bellies, so to speak, the rich and the famous will have to go through the Star-Off Machine. Maybe in the distant future, being ridiculously fat again will be a sign of wealth, as it was in the Middle Ages.
Because the well-off in out society always have to have a way to put themselves apart from the rest of us, do they not? Whether it's shopping at Whole Foods, listening to NPR, obsessing over being thin, or whatever, it's all about the star on their bellies for the Sneetches. It has nothing to do with health.
What I'm getting at is that a pill generated body will only attract enough for casual sex. It'll mostly be for people who work in the sex industy, escorts, hookers, salesmen, and maybe lawyers.
It'd be nice if more people would use. Whether it's real or not, not having to look at obese people would be nice.
She bathes her (short-haired, perfectly clean) cat once a month
And she avoids being clawed to death, how?
As for the main discussion, worrying endlessly about the foods one eats obscures the main point - total calories are what counts. If you eat more calories than your body uses, your weight will increase, and if you eat fewer calories than your body uses, your weight will decline.
The advent of widespread cable television would be my guess as to why we are fatter than they were 40 years ago. Only people older than 40 can well remember life during the age of VHF/UHF-only television. If my family had cable television when I was a child, I would have spent far less time outdoors playing sports or goofing off with my friends.
The underlying assumption in most, if not all, of the comments here is that it's irrational to choose to be fat. This is a typical assumption by social engineers who think that they know better what's good for people. Fat people have chosen current pleasure (eating), and assume a long term risk (bad health, shorter life span, crummier life prospects for themselves and their offspring). To those who have made a different choice, that looks totally irrational -- so, conclusion, Obama-style, let's fix it with another social program. Never mind that there are all kinds of social policies inducing over-eating among poor people, beginning with WIC that subsidizes fat food for babies, Food Stamps that subsidizes food consumption, agricultural subsidies that lower the price of food, free health care for people who choose to be unhealthy, etc. etc.
So, if you want to change the eating habits of poor people, work on changing the price of food for poor people. You can subsidize bran but not cheese, vegetables but not meats, beans but not butter, etc. etc.
But here's the thing. Would you make poor people happier that way? Remember this: their revealed preference is eating, not investing in social mobility. The real problem is this: you don't seem to approve of their choice of life styles, it offends your sensibilities.
That's modern liberalism for you. The poor are poor because they don't know better. First off, as some people here have already noted, American poor people aren't really that poor. Their living standards are quite comfortable compared to, say, large chunks of people in the European welfare states. And, they are, like all of us, bombarded with information about the dangers of being fat. Most of them can afford better diets, and most of them have access to knowledge about better diets; still, they choose unhealthy, over-eating life styles. Their problem is less poor health than it is having to live with the social stigma that comes from being fat. That's an externality imposed on them by preferences among wealthier people, who choose not to be fat.
So, perhaps you should all get off your high horses, and accept that public policy has already contributed to inducing obesity in poor people, and that this is an unintended result of the social engineering embedded in our poverty policies.
I think we deserve all the fat people we have created through bad policies, and I don't think that these people are necessarily that unhappy with their choices.
I'm disappointed in Megan:
upper middle class women will stop thinking that the ideal woman closely resembles a flagpole in form and function. I don't expect such a thing any time soon, but it is lovely to look forward to.
Whatever the impact of obesity's end, its effect on "upper middle class women" and their thinking is pretty low on my list of concerns...
Just want to comment on this idea many people have that the poor don't have time to cook or exercise. This idea is utterly false. The average poor *family* is supported by only 16 hours of work/week.
http://www.heritage.org/Research/Welfare/bg1713.cfm
Also, on the idea of the "thinness pill", I wouldn't take it. I burn about 4000 calories/day, and if I go 6 hours without eating enough, I crash. Hard.
Fat is stored energy, and if I had some, it might let me survive more than 6 hours without eating.
I totally disagree that you can't do cheap quick an healthy.
Some of the cheapest foods are the healthiest. I know cause they are essentially what I eat even though I can afford more.
Frozen or canned vegtables are very cheap and can be heated in minutes with no prep time. Canned has too much sodium for me so I do frozen.
Canned or dried beans are extremely cheap. Dried takes a while to cook (but you can use the crock pot). These are a very cheap source of protein.
Rice, Pasta and potatoes can all be cooked in 20 minutes.
Eggs and cheese are cheap sources of protein, you can also find many cheap lean meats frozen chicken breast are very cheap in buld at Costco/Sams (I am a vegitarian so it is not part of my diet).
Frozen fruits can be a cheap (healthy) desert.
With all of this I seriously doubt that poor peoplc can't afford to eat more healthy. They just don't want to either because it is a cheap peasurable experience or because they don't have the self control.
I would say that people are not being irrational, but following perverse incentives that make sensible short-term choices morph into disastrous long-term ones. You know, like 'flipping' houses?
And of course if - as seems eminently supportable by research - the 'bad policies' turn out to be the second parent entering the workforce to make ends meet, you'll keep saying the same thing.
As for this:
And this:
Most of the people I know who exercise and eat sensibly do it for _health_ reasons. Just because you have insurance doesn't mean that you're completely blase about high blood pressure, strokes, heart attacks, etc. Personally, I run seven miles three times a week and walk to work four to five times a week because I'm deathly afraid of losing mental acuity. I used to be able hear four seven-digit numbers _once_ in the space of a few minutes and recall them without effort days, weeks, months later. These days? I write everything down. Exercise retards that sort of thing.
ma huang and Ephedra used are 2 very cheap, 100% effective 100% safe pills that were clinically proven to make people lose weight.
They were folk remedies that cut into the sales of the Drug Companies . After the Drug Industry sponsored a two year campaign of lies, the FDA made sale of these harmless home remedies illegal because "although people lose weight, they gain it back when they stop taking ma huang/ephedra".
Today people lose weight reliably using crack or cocaine. However, doing coke, crack, ma huang, or ephedra is illegal and I strongly oppose any violation of the law because we must obey the law even if the laws are harmful to our health and safety.
Uh... Fred? Cheap food is poor food, high in corn syrup (intensely fattening, not good for your heart) and full of fats to try to make it more palatable.
And walking is a luxury dependent on neighborhood. I live on a college campus; I walk on the college campus. It's fine and fun.
But if I were to go walk around three blocks away, downtown, I would be doing an intensely stupid thing. No sane woman would take a stroll there. In some places, going up and down the stairs of an apartment building is unpleasant and nobody's doing it more often than they have to.
eccdogg - I was going to make exactly your point but you got there first. I think the choice between cheap, fast and healthy is largely a false one.
I my house, if I don't completely prep (and ideally cook) dinner, 3 times out of 4 I would come home to discover that everyone had pizza. And I work a good 10 hours a day and am effectively "on call" pretty much 24/7, so that was a lot of pizza. (Talk about expensive!)
After some trial and error and some frustration, we hit on a system: we buy in meat in (smallish) bulk (sorry Megan), divide up meal-sized portions bags, throw in some spices or sauce or whatever and slam it all in the freezer. Every day before I go to work I pull out a (largely random) bag to thaw. That, plus a vegetable or two (frozen or fresh), or potatos or pasta, or a can of beans (the rule is "one green thing") can then be cooked in 20 minutes by anyone who can turn on a stove and boil water. Kids have a hot meal, the husband can't really screw it up too badly or have an excuse to order in, and, by God, even if I'm not home they sit down together at a table for a meal together like civilized people! Total cost for a family of 4 (well, 3 and 1/2) is less than $20, unless we go wild and have nice steak or something. Dessert (for the kids at least) is fruit - currently melons are very popular. Every week or so we do "leftover pasta" and chop up all of the leftover meat and veg into little pieces and toss it with curly tri-color pasta and some basalmic salad dressing, which is basically dinner for 4 for $1.99. Not hard, not expensive, pretty healthy. Helluva lot better than the weekly tuna noodle casserole I grew up on. Sometimes we get bored, and then I'll make some effort to do something new, like "saussage cooked in a pumpkin" or "curry and salsa coq au vin", which serves mostly to remind everyone that too much variety isn't always good.
That said, if I didn't have access to a supermarket with decent fresh meat, veg and fruit (or, given my schedule, FreshDirect to bring all those things to my door once a week - I looove you, FreshDirect), I'd be pretty out of luck. And a literal lack of access to fresh food is a real problem in a lot of neighborhoods in NYC, where the only food store within a realistic distance (and nobody say "they could take a bus and the subway 40 minutes to Gristedes," you know that's just silly) is the corner bodega with CoCo Puffs and Kraft Mac & Cheese. But, if the question is just one of ease, rather than access, the barrier to relatively fresh home cooking seems to me a minor logistical problem rather than an economic or social one.
obese poor people in MX living on 1000 calorie/day diets likely have little to do with obese poor people in the US (i don't think anyone's claiming they're not getting their calories, the discussion is about why they're choosing the "wrong" ones, and too many of them as well).
How to feed healthy food to a family of 4 for $45/week. From "The Hillbilly Housewife"
http://www.hillbillyhousewife.com/40dollarmenu.htm
That is 50 cents per person per meal. (prices are from 2006 so it is probably more now) Way cheaper than fast/junk/pre-prepared food.
Granted this menu takes some work, but you can definitely use the same concepts and have a quicker meal for just a little more money.
Also, obesity is mainly about calories (and genetics). People who weigh too much simply eat too many calories for thier metabolism. Regardless of whether those calories come from whole grain rice or Big Macs. Granted for heart health (and other forms) you would rather get your calories from low fat foods and have vegetables for your vitamin needs, but for pure BMI you just need to cut the calories.
The ideal woman may not resemble a flagpole in form, but in function, by God she should!
The ideal woman could hold a flag up all day long, in any weather.
Now that's a woman!
sharky: "cheap food is poor food"?
Odd. Vegetables are cheap, as are many cuts of meat. Grains, likewise, in many forms, are so cheap as to be nearly free.
People make "poor" ("bad") food choices because they're lazy or don't know how to cook it (evidently a huge problem among the British underclass), not because cheap food is inherently fatty, sugary evil.
People like fat and sugar and seek them out, rather than having them forced upon them because they cannot afford food that lacks either.
I used to be able hear four seven-digit numbers _once_ in the space of a few minutes and recall them without effort days, weeks, months later.
Quite the ladies' man, were we?
I confess I still don't understand why poverty is so increasingly linked with obesity.
Here's an un-PC explanation:
Poverty is frequently the result of laziness, poor judgement, and lack of self-control.
So is obesity.
It's social. If you live in a wealthy professional community and work a professional job, being fat is a HUGE social handicap. It is completely class based - just read all the sanctimonious comments above, for crying out loud. People love to feel superior. Puritans did it with hard work and sourness, and now we do it with the attitude: if I am thin it proves I have self discipline and self control and that I am one of the wealthy like you, and I belong here, and in Nieman Marcus, and in first class, and everywhere thin rich people can go. If you live and work in a community where you have accepted you aren't really making it, where you aren't constantly striving, and where you need to accept other failures in your life, it seems like it stands to reason you may also be willing to accept that your body (or your kid's, or your friends' bodies) don't reach societal ideals either.
I thought I should point out the fallacy in thinking that eating fewer calories will result in lower weight. If you eat too few calories, your body will want to store fat.
The people surviving off 1000 calories diets likely had their bodies primed to store energy from eating too few calories. You need a minimum number of calories per day to avoid becoming obese.
Eating sensibly means having a diet with proper nutrition, with enough protein, fewer simple carbohydrates, healthier fats/oils (olive oil, etc.).
It's not all carbs; it's the simple carbs that are dangerous.
It's also better to space out the day's calories in more meals because the body can only process so many calories in one sitting, and because it's less likely to spike one's blood sugar levels. Though if you're going to gorge, breakfast is the best time do so, as your body will be using those calories throughout the day.
I would add that rich people in this country are often the product of several generations of breeding among couples who could afford to be very picky about partners. We've all seen people so gorgeous that we thought "mommy was a trophy wife" the minute we laid eyes on them. After a few generations, that sort of thing makes a difference.
Those of us whose families haven't been off the farm that long don't have the genes that the truly upscale do. You see the difference in bone structure as well as overall physique. But plenty of us are happy to be mutts rather than purebreds, so we don't even try to compete with the thinness-obsessed. Not that we don't work out, but we don't get crazy over it.
Steve, the Mayo Clinic Disagrees
http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/metabolism/WT00006
"Instead, weight is dependent on the balance of total calories consumed versus total calories burned. Take in more calories than your body needs, and you gain weight. Take in less and you lose weight. Metabolism, then, is the engine that burns these calories."
Sharky: "But if I were to go walk around three blocks away, downtown, I would be doing an intensely stupid thing. No sane woman would take a stroll there. In some places, going up and down the stairs of an apartment building is unpleasant and nobody's doing it more often than they have to."
In that case, perhaps the problem is neither food quality nor poverty, but poor policing. If your theory is right, I think the solution is obvious: divert money from welfare, food stamps and similar programs, and spend it on more policing.
However, I don't think this actually is the issue (for most areas). I live in Harlem, which is extremely safe, and we have plenty of poor fatties.
It's social. If you live in a wealthy professional community and work a professional job, being fat is a HUGE social handicap. It is completely class based - just read all the sanctimonious comments above, for crying out loud. People love to feel superior. Puritans did it with hard work and sourness, and now we do it with the attitude: if I am thin it proves I have self discipline and self control and that I am one of the wealthy like you, and I belong here, and in Nieman Marcus, and in first class, and everywhere thin rich people can go. If you live and work in a community where you have accepted you aren't really making it, where you aren't constantly striving, and where you need to accept other failures in your life, it seems like it stands to reason you may also be willing to accept that your body (or your kid's, or your friends' bodies) don't reach societal ideals either.
This might be true, but it leaves no grounds for separating cause from effect. It might be, as the un-PC wags have it, that the behaviors that lead to social success also lead to better disciplined lifestyle -- leading to the exact same outcome. In short, smug feelings of superiority may be unnecessary and grating, but they may also be a reaction to the outcome rather than the principle motivation for it.
Sigivald?
Pretend you've got 20$ for the week. Pretend you've got a job--be my roommate, have two part-time jobs and college classes!--and next to no time. Cooking is going to happen only once a day, so microwave cooking is a necessity. If you don't eat it, it'll go bad. Plus, you've got limited pantry space and fridge space because you live with four other people.
What's that leave you with? It leaves you with the flat packaged things and the cheap boxed noodles and the white bread and the bulk frozen crap.
I'm not going to argue that they could change some lifestyle choices, and I'm sure it's fun to think of the poor making a lovely nutritious dinner of peeled carrots and shelled edamame, but overworked people trying to make up an energy deficit do not want to sit down to steamed veggies. They want some frickin' pasta. Carbs appeal to people who burn a lot of energy, even if it just aggravates the way they're tired from extra weight.
Okay, I'm guilty of trying to oversimplify and using bad terminology as I believe in body fat percentage as a better measure and not weight or BMI.
Though with a minor amendment, what I meant is that your metabolic rate decreases when you take in too few calories (BELOW your daily requirement as per the mayo clinic article), as your body is more inclined to turn ingested calories into fat.
Your body then starts cannibalising muscle mass for energy instead of fat, all of which leads to a lowered metabolic rate.
Better?
There's more, but I'm leaving work and will check in later.
People need to eat a certain number of calories a day for a reason after all. Weight watchers advocates this, and even the mayo clinic article does not say otherwise.
Ninja Zombie, I live in what happens to have made the "top ten most dangerous cities" list. It's a depressed little backwater that's dangerous because people are a. poor and b. desperate. More police would only add, well, a few more police; it wouldn't actually solve anything. (More jobs here would.)
Steve's basically explaining the mechanism behind why crash diets are bad. A simple version is here, described as the "yo-yo effect:"
http://www.epigee.org/fitness/crash_diets.html
Basically, our bodies are geared towards not starving to death, and some people have metabolisms programmed to aim for a heavier weight. If they lived on islands or in desert climates (fat is mostly water, hence why the camel strategy works,) they survive longer than the rest of us during bad periods or sea travel. So it used to be a useful thing, and now it isn't, so much.
Our bodies are very, very good at not starving to death. Add a slow metabolism and a sensitive trigger, and you have a weight problem.
...argh. I said that poorly; it's not that fat is mostly water, it's that breaking down fat creates water.
I thought I heard my bio prof hitting his head on his desk.
Sharky: "Pretend you've got a job--be my roommate, have two part-time jobs and college classes!--and next to no time. "
Pretend you are a highly atypical poor person.
"but overworked people trying to make up an energy deficit do not want to sit down to steamed veggies."
Nice theory, but the typical poor person's work week is 16 hours. So the poor aren't overworked.
http://www.heritage.org/Research/Welfare/bg1713.cfm
Incidentally, I lived the lifestyle you describe in grad school. I cooked good food, got plenty of exercise, and knew plenty of other overworked grad students who also managed to avoid becoming overweight.
what's funny is all the people trying to make this an issue of aesthetics, when all recent studies confirm this is a serious health issue. if you're obese, you've got heart, brain, everything problems. the comparisons to smoking are apt. it may make sense that people w/o much to look forward to other than a smoke smoke, but that doesn't mean it isn't largely a matter of choice (at least initially). the fact that smoking costs money, that becoming obese isn't hard to observe and doesn't happen quickly, pretty much confirms as much. put another way, all these obese folk are creating an enormous strain on the health system at the expense of more healthy folk. so, again, it's not class disdain alone, if at all, that motivates the criticism.
I lived the lifestyle you describe in grad school
The issue here with "time" is less the long workday and more small children. Keeping a crawling baby and a preschooler from killing themselves or each other, while getting them both fed, bathed, and into bed, takes a lot more effort than you'd think if you haven't tried it. Most nights my wife and I complete, at most, the prep work before bedtime, and do the actual cooking and cleaning up afterwards (eating a meal with kids around is also quite a challenge, especially a toothless baby whose life's ambition is to seize your food with both hands and drag it off). Add to that the necessity of feeding the baby at night, plus all the other minor tasks like paying bills that can only be accomplished when the kids are down, and you can get to feeling quite a bit more tired than someone who works long weeks.
Sure, you can parcel out meats into the freezer on weekends, but you face the same problem of keeping kids busy and safe, while trying to do your laundry, vacuuming, etc. And of course if you happen to buy some fresh food and somebody gets sick, leading to a couple of sleepless nights, well, you get by on pizza and tuna sandwiches and let it rot.
I'm well-off, and my wife is a full-time mommy. We find it challenging to eat well and we throw out more fresh food than I would like. It will be literally years until we sleep reliably for 8 hours a night. I can well understand how a poor parent would find eating well extremely difficult.
Speaking as someone who has lost 125 pounds and kept it off, I can tell you that staying thin is all about self-discipline and delayed gratification, just like almost every other success in life that isn't pure, dumb luck.
There's your correlation between poverty and obesity.
Not in this area, NZ.
And that's just it--you're saying that every poor obese person is not THE poor obese person. Uh, you just keep pointing the finger at your picked-out target, then.
And given the words "grad school," I'm going to go ahead and guess that these people had: steady jobs that paid more than $8 an hour, no need to hold down other jobs outside school, and backgrounds that had already taught them good cooking and exercise habits. This campus has a huge percentage of students who come to college for the first time in family history. I think it shows.
Sharky: "And that's just it--you're saying that every poor obese person is not THE poor obese person. Uh, you just keep pointing the finger at your picked-out target, then."
I'm picking out the typical (median) poor person. You are picking out your roommate. Which of us do you think is more likely to have a representative poor person?
"And given the words "grad school," I'm going to go ahead and guess that these people had: steady jobs that paid more than $8 an hour, no need to hold down other jobs outside school, and backgrounds that had already taught them good cooking and exercise habits."
A $17k TA position works out to $8/hour, assuming we only worked 40 hours/week (we actually did closer to 60, except for a few perpetual grad students).
As for cooking/exercise habits, that's the point. If you make the right choices, lack of money and a full time job don't stop you from being healthy.
Criticism is fine, I'm one of the most self-critical people I know. I suck and I'll explain in great detail why. But criticism is not a solution. This pill might be.
Yeah, and your ability to do it and my lack thereof demonstrates how much better a person you are than I am. Bully for you. I'm still fat.
I'm using my roommate as a single-person example of someone who has two jobs and is still forced to compromise on diet; you're using "poor" people who are still able to own houses! Should we settle on our both using fairly strange samples, then? Even considering the housing bubble where people who couldn't afford houses got them, there's still plenty of realistic people in apartments.
And that's just it--grad students *don't* work that little. TA is also a bit of an odd call, because depending on the grad school, a student can score a better job. An English grad is stuck with TA, sure, but a chemistry grad can join a research group. And, as you pointed out, they can usually get more hours, and do. Compare to an unskilled worker in a factory. Once it closes for the day, that's it.
I do cook differently than my roommates, although again, there's the question of the foods I was raised to enjoy. I also walk to class and don't take the elevator. I've also got a natural advantage in the weight game: the metabolism of a mouse on crack.
I've had a weight problem twice in my life: the time I worked fast food and had an employee discount, and the time I had to take medication that deep-sixed my metabolism. In the first case, I also was working out at the time and could go for an hour in a weekly cardio class. I *still* had extra weight from one meal I ate daily at work and my tendency to grab one donut to make up for a bad shift at a minimum-wage job. (Mea culpa!) If I hadn't been able to afford my cardio, or been scheduled during my classes, it would have been double the weight.
In the second, I was eating the same foods and having the same exercise, but a slow metabolism meant I stayed steady at five pounds over. I didn't lose the weight until I dropped the meds and my metabolism returned to baseline. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people have undiagnosed metabolic problems because they can't afford to investigate.
Sorry about the TL;DR. But I think you have a bit too much distance here from a complicated topic.
"you're using "poor" people who are still able to own houses!"
I'm using the US government's definition of poverty. But you are correct, most of those classified as "poor" by the government are not really poor. Nevertheless, this is the group of people Meghan is referring to, and the group that is disproportionately fat.
"And, as you pointed out, they can usually get more hours, and do. Compare to an unskilled worker in a factory. Once it closes for the day, that's it."
TAs/RAs/etc may work more than 40 hours, but they don't get paid more. They get a fixed stipend, $17k when I was in school. I computed an hourly wage solely for the purpose of comparison to your friend making $8/hour.
University is actually a great experiment here. A large collection of people who typically are living for years on "poor" incomes, but who have better education and behaviour.
Looking around the universities I know, the women are much slimmer than when I go out to the outer suburb shopping centres. (I don't know about the men, why would I be looking at them?)
I'm disappointed in Megan:
upper middle class women will stop thinking that the ideal woman closely resembles a flagpole in form and function. I don't expect such a thing any time soon, but it is lovely to look forward to.
Whatever the impact of obesity's end, its effect on "upper middle class women" and their thinking is pretty low on my list of concerns...
The effect on the appearance on middle class women is number one on my list.
Re: Nice theory, but the typical poor person's work week is 16 hours.
The only way that passes the laugh test if if you are including college students, housewives, retirees, and disabled people all with part time jobs (and low income). Many WORKING poor people are employed at two or even three jobs.
Jonf: College students are part of their parent's household. So no, that number excludes college kids, unless their parents are also poor. Similarly, a housewife is in poverty if her husband's income is below the poverty threshold for their family size.
The source of the numbers is simply the US government, so I'm not including anyone that they don't include.
As for *multiple* jobs, I can't find good info. However, I know that very few poor people are in that situation. Out of 37 million poor people (and about 23 million poor adults), 7.8 million are classified as "working poor". 4.5 million of these actually worked full time (35 hours/week or more).
So 80% of the poor work
http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2004.pdf
(Note: I'm remembering a number like 13-14 million poor children, but please correct me if I'm wrong. )
My father worked 50+ hour weeks before his second heart attack. Now he's a 'typical poor person' working less than 16 hours a week; in fact he works zero hours, which brings down the 'average.'
. But I wonder if that isn't offset by the fact that a disproportionate number of poor people work at manual labor jobs - I bet a day on a construction site burns way more calories than a 90-minute gym session.
Construction is actually quite well-paying, when there's work. Most poor people work at factory or retail jobs. You don't burn up many calories as a cashier at Wal-Mart.
We've always had poor people. What's changed? Not that poor people continue to be poor. But rise of soda and food stuffed with high fructose corn syrup? You better bet that's changed things. Read some labels-- you'll be shocked by how much shit has HFCS in it.
There are strong links between obesity rates and high fructose corn syrup (HFCS), which due to corn subsidies and the political clout of ADM has largely displaced many other sweeteners in our food supply. See: http://www.ajcn.org/cgi/content/full/79/4/537 and especially see Fig. 1. This graph is telling. There are other proof sources, too.
The cultural analysis of fat vs thin and who can exercise vs who can't/won't is correct. Even so, HFCS is in practically all processed and convenience foods (read the fine print) and I would agree that the Orwell section is relevant to the poorer individual of today who likes sweetness where he/she can find it in packaged foods designed to please in the moment. Lower-class consumption habits favor gratification now; higher-class consumption habits favor deferral of gratification ("a moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips") because of different degrees of faith in the future. This is why some fools consider arugala an élite symbol, even though it grows as weedily and has vitamin content similar to collard greens.
That must be it - obesity is caused by poverty and poor people just can't help themselves, they've been forced into that situation!
I mean just look at all those poor Chinese immigrants. They come to this country and they just balloon up! Because they're poor their kids will never go to college!
Oh, my heart bleeds for those obese, un-educated, unemployed Chinese immigrants...
Oh wait, that doesn't happen, because we cook our own food, we watch what we eat, we work hard, and we sneer at all you lazy turds who had the good fortune to be born in this country - and yet manage to screw it up royally anyways.
I was recently in Europe, and noticed that all the plates and cups in the house I was staying were about half the size of American ones. Also, there were very few fast food places. Guess what? They're uniformly skinnier than Americans.
I await your comments on how this must really be because Americans are lazier and dumber than Europeans.
Flour, corn/corn syrup, sugar, are all cheaper calorie sources than veggies and lean proteins. Go to any chain restauant and order a pasta dish and you always get one serving of meat and sauce spread out over 4 servings of pasta. You have the same thing at fast food restaurants with the hockey puck hamburger bun between two doughy buns and a huge supply of french fries.
Max, there are many weight loss programs out there titled "Skinny-@ss French Chick Diet" or variations thereon, based on (supposed) European eating habits. Basically, the idea is "Eat real food. Enjoy it, don't gobble it. Eat single serving sizes instead of supersize portions. Sit down for real meals, at tables with other people to converse with, not in your car or at your desk and never, ever, in front of the TV. Don't snack. And don't, for the love of God, 'diet.'"
Sadly, back in the real world, Europeans are fast catching up to Americans in the obesity rankings.
brooksfoe: I live in a truly rural area where the rich and the poor do share the same grocery stores. The fat/thin disparity here is so marked that it is almost automatic: go to Wal-Mart, or the demolition derby at the fairgrounds, and EVERYBODY you see, including the children, will be at least overweight if not obese. Go to a concert at the Arts Council or a children's theater presentation in the refurbished opera house and there will be almost nobody over a medium weight. (As for McDonalds vs. Olive Garden, we have McDonalds, but you have to drive 50 miles to find an Olive Garden. The demographics here won't support one.)
It is not about availability. The good food is not more expensive than the fat food. It has something to do with choice. Stand in the same line at the supermarket and the poorer people have carts full of Ding Dongs and non-diet soda; the richer people (almost nobody here is really rich) are buying greens, fruits, and fish. What governs the choice? I'm not really sure, but I incline toward the theories of several commenters who noted that it's easier to be fat than thin in a cheap-food society, and people who know how to defer gratification and wait for what they want don't, for the most part, stay poor for long.