Don’t ignore poverty in obesity fight:
Further, it is to a certain extent insulting and condescending — all the banter about teaching families to eat healthy, when just about everyone knows what constitutes healthy eating. The problems are lack of jobs, money, affordable healthy food and the high prices of healthy, nutritious food.
Maybe, maybe not. But I think whatever the actual dollar cost of raw ingredients, the perceived cost is such that poverty and obesity are clearly linked and for now, many equate “real food” with elitism, fairly or not.
Weight Maven is written by Beth Mazur. Beth believes that obesity is more symptom than cause and that the real problem is our modern culture -- especially diet. Beth writes about ancestral health, health policy, & mindfulness. And cats! 
In the supermarket last week I saw ground beef and ground bison next to each other. The bison cost twice as much per pound.
I didn’t bother to check if the bison was free-range, pastured, and organic.
We got the ground beef.
-Steve
Fast food *is* cheaper if you take into account how much time you can save. Picture a single mom with two kids working two jobs. When does she have time to prepare all those nice, homemade meals? In addition, calorie dense food like cheeseburgers keep your tummy full longer than an apple and a green pepper.
No, I’m not an apologist for junk food. Personally, I almost never touch the stuff but there’s lots more to the equation than simply how much a lettuce costs as opposed to a Mars bar.
Just saying…
The prohibitively high cost of nutritious food (to adequately feed a family) when accompanied by low income (or unemployment) contributes a potential social determinant of poor health–and, perhaps, obesity. Chronic stress (related to poverty and/or unemployment) contributes another–it can wreck havoc with endocrine functions and autonomic nervous system responses, for example.
When people experience long-term economic insecurities and uncertainties, chronic physiological stress results from the day-to-day lived experiences with heightened anxiety, increased powerlessness, greater social stigma, reduced social status, and mounting (valid) fears related to a myriad of critical factors and survival problems: housing, transportation, safety, exposure to environmental pathogens, relationship strains and fractures, reduced access to quality health care (including routine yet crucial dental care), increased incidence of serious illnesses and accidents, and higher rates of insomnia, substance abuse, clinical depression (and so forth). Any one of these factors can exponentially increase future health problems.
Forgoing regular dental hygiene appointments (a common practice–for obvious reasons–among low income families), for instance, increases the likelihood of developing gum disease, which–in turn–increases the risks for heart disease, diabetes, and malnutrition. Moreover, chronic stress, insomnia, and medications for depression have all been linked to (unwanted) weight gain. It doesn’t surprise me AT ALL that poverty and obesity are strongly correlated. What DOES surprise me: our culture’s continued insistence on blaming individuals for socially determined health problems and for obesity–and, then, adding insult to injury, our culture often stigmatizes people for getting sick or for getting fat. Prejudice and discrimination is then rationalized as the “logical moral consequence” for supposedly self-inflicted conditions.