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.

Tied with Texas? We Can Do Better

If the preventive care provisions of Obamacare accomplish nothing else, I hope they address the underlying causes of this country's obesity epidemic: poverty and the power of Big Ag.

According to the CDC, Kentucky is the ninth fattest state , tied with Texas as having 30.4 percent of the adult population obese.

If that sounds not too bad, the least-obese state - Colorado - has an obese adult population at 20 percent.

We're fatter than five of our seven adjoining states: Missouri at 30.3, Tennessee (!) at 29.9, Ohio at 29.6, Viginia at 29.2 and Illinois at 27.1. Indiana is barely worse at 30.8, and West Virginia checks in at a horrible 32.4.

In my own county, I see a thousand things that contribute to obesity and very few that fight it:

•  A farmer's market that's far too small and that fails to accept electronic benefit cards (food stamps and family assistance.)
• A school system that fails to teach healthy eating but serves deep-friend poison for lunch every day.
• A "public" parks and recreation center that charges fees too expensive for most county residents.
• Thousands of roads without shoulders, much less sidewalks, much less bike lanes.
• Every fast-food joint on the planet but no place to buy healthy but inexpensive meals.
• Schools that have eliminated recess, gym and non-team sports.
• A food bank heavy on filling starches and processed food but light on fresh fruits and vegetables.

Kentucky is the ninth-most obese state because we're fine with that. It won't change until we stop being fine with it.