December
2007
The Poor Body
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Take a look at photos of your average poor American from the 1930s and now. What’s different?
The size of people. Throughout time, obesity has not been the problem it is today. And no clearer example of that can be seen than when looking at what it has historically meant to be poor. Until the advent of corn syrup and fast food and vending machines, being poor and being too skinny were synonymous. No longer.
Further Reading:
How did Americans not come up with this first?
The New Face of Poverty is Fat
Technorati Tags: fat, skinny, poor, cheap food
I’d attribute it to a decline and fall of the tradition of family cooking and family dinners. Cooking- and cooking on a budget and when dealing with time constraints- is a more advanced skill than most people realize, especially people who’ve folded it seamlessly into their lives and way of living.
Free time is something Americans rich and poor alike value. A poor family of sixty years ago cooked because they had no other choice; now people can make the trade of a little less money for more time and convenience off fast food and preprepared items. Until relatively recently- when the effects of that really started to hit- not having to cook was a sort of luxury, and a status symbol at that. That’s not true anymore, but the skill set required to make big, cheap family meals on a budget of both time and money has eroded in the meantime. Now cooking is seen as practically a luxury/leisure activity in and of itself, and not cooking because you “can’t afford the time and fancy ingredients” (even though that’s not true, but the people who knew better are dying off) is the norm.
Poor immigrant families DO cook, because the tradition has been preserved up to far more recently in their culture.
The link to the Wisebread article is broken (the ‘t’ at the end is gone).
I unfortunately know this ‘phenomenon’ first hand. Growing up, my family had a lot of money problems, and as a result, most of our foods were pasta, pancakes, and stuff that would be made, in general, with cheap ingredients such as flour. Fruits and vegetables were almost always absent–there’s no wonder it took me 28 years to discover that veggies-lover inside of me, since I was never really ‘taught’ to eat and like vegetables.
Information (or perhaps taking the time to learn one’s own tricks?) is a key, though. Since I’m on my own and am trying to eat in a healthy enough way, I’ve experimented with, and discovered, lots of things.
Eating crap IS more expensive, probably for the reason you mentioned, even if I had never thought of it this way. When I consent to ’sacrifice’ money to buy fresh fruits/veggies/lean protein/etc., I tend to eat less overall, likely because I get the nutrients I need, so at the end of the month, the bill is not as big as I’m afraid it will be. But you don’t learn that overnight. It takes experimenting and comparing prices, and learning how to cook healthy and fast, so to say.
All in all, some empty calories food are indeed cheaper. But IMHo the trade-off isn’t so great nor such an advantage in the end.
I think you need to connect the lack of lean meats and fresh veggies not to ignorance, but to geography, as you note in passing in your third theory: in lots of places poor people live (urban ghettos, rural enclaves) you don’t have access to good food in well-stocked supermarkets, but only to junky processed food in corner stores.
There’s also a correlation of obesity and depression if I’m not mistaken, which makes some sense: the momentary sugar and caffeine high of soda helps lift your spirits, but only temporarily, setting you on a roller coaster and wanting another jolt (but with diminishing returns, as we know).
Another concept not discussed: I would say that a lot of poor people will look for quantity of food versus quality. The buffet restaurants where you can load up for $7, a Big Mac versus fresh fruit for example.
I also agree with what LabRat said about cooking. It is definitely becoming more of a leisure hobby in our culture than survival skill. I love to cook, and it usually ends up costing more than going out would, but is always better tasting and better for me.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I have four things to add.
First, it’s not universally true that poor people used to be skinny. Just one example: the Pima Indians, some of the poorest people in America, have had some of the highest obesity rates since they were pushed onto reservations decades ago and forced to live on white flour, sugar, tea, and other cheap foods instead of their traditional diets of game and fish. This may seem like a minor point, but if we don’t recognize that poor people have been fat for a long time (not just recently), we will not get very far in understanding causes.
Second, because of things like farm subsidies, giant agribusinesses, monoculture, and the like, many of the cheapest foods are high-carbohydrate grain products - those that provoke a large insulin response. Heck, even candy and soda are grain products now, loaded as they are with high-fructose corn syrup. And as you know, Mark, insulin is the hormone that not only causes fat storage but prevents stored fat from being used.
Third, I just ran across this on Regina Wilshire’s excellent blog, Weight of the Evidence. http://weightoftheevidence.blogspot.com/2007/12/obesity-is-it-form-of-malnutrition.html. It suggests that obesity might indeed be a variety of malnutrition. I wrote my thoughts on a comment there, but since her comments are moderated, it might take a while to show up.
Finally, government nutrition policy, which as you know is totally **ed up, probably affects poor people disproportionately. If a middle-class family wishes to buck the conventional wisdom and eat full-fat foods and red meats instead of fat-free dairy products, soy, and whole grains, they are perfectly free to do so. If a poor family wishes to do so, tough luck, they have to buy what’s allowed by WIC.
Research since the turn of the century into the condition of Pima Indians demonstrates quite clearly the relationship between poverty and obesity. These people went from a rich hunter gathered semi settled community in harmony with their land: they were typical Indians - slim and active. Since the White man hunted out the region and used up the rivers further upstream, they became impoverished and survived off government stores…. Today, they live principally on flour and sugar. They are poor but fat.. but this carbohydrate induced obesity does not satisfy. Their concomitant hyperinsulinemia ensures, as Taubes demonstrates, that their fat reserves remain locked in. They have to continue eating the junk they get from the government to assuage their carb induced hunger cycles. How the poor are kept poor and infirm….!!!!
Also:
It’s a myth that a low carb high fat diet has to be expensive. The cheapest cuts o f meat in the UK are the healthiest – the fatty cuts and organ meats are dirt cheap because everybody thinks they are unhealthy. Eggs are very affordable and so is cheese and full fat milk. Veggies and fruit are also cheap. Because we need much less bulk on a low carb diet, we need less food overall… Not endless bags of crisps, bumper bottles of coke or biscuits and cakes….
I haven’t totted up the costs, but I bet one could live a supremely fit an healthy low carb lifestyle as cheaply – if not more so, than on the standard obesogenic poverty diet of today’s overweight Westerners.
Us middle classes can pay for unpasteurised milk and organic, outdoor reared produce of course, which is expensive, but the general benefits of cheap animal and plant products far outweigh the marginal benefits of a few extra vitamins and finer quality meat. Anyway, cooking up a good French provencal chicken using cheap meats and butter and cream will still taste dam good whatever.
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