Why Most Obese People Are Poor

It's not because they're spending their $1.40 per person per meal from food stamps on on gold-flecked truffles.

Via Firedoglake:

- A new study has found that obesity is mainly affecting poor people, specifically minority women in the U.S.

This shouldn't be a surprise. Good nutrition and healthy, low-calorie food is extremely expensive: fresh vegetables, fresh fruit, lean meat, gluten-free food are the highest-priced items per calorie in the grocery.

If you have limited money to buy food, you seek the highest number of calories for the least amount of money.

The lowest price-per-calorie items in the grocery are also the least nutritious and the most fattening: potatoes, white bread, pasta and rice.  They also have the advantage of making you feel "full" even though you are not getting the nutrients needed for good health.

Most poor people have jobs - minimum wage jobs that don't pay a living wage for one person, much less a family - but require food stamps to survive. 

Often poor people have multiple part-time jobs, all paying minimum wage, and all with constantly changing schedules that mean workers have no time to plan, much less prepare and cook, the nutritious meals you can theoretically achieve on food stamps - but only if you have hours every day to spend cooking from scratch.

Poor people have even less time than they have money. So poor people eat cheap, filling calories that don't require a lot of preparation. That's why they're obese.

One-third of Americans are obese because one-third of Americans are poor, and one-third of Americans are poor because the one percent of Americans with all the money are greedy, motherfucking parasites who killed the middle-class economy.