Obesity and Poverty

[Mina]

Based on walmart's online delivery prices?

YOu are way too far out of touch to be commenting on this.

Your inability to think of a counter-argument is noted, and your de facto surrender is accepted.

 

[Gateman_Wen]

Your inability to think of a counter-argument is noted, and your de facto surrender is accepted.

Just because you can't see it doesn't mean it's not there.

 

[Mina]

People in rural areas are normally more active than just taking a short stroll (like you mentioned).

How do you explain the massively higher obesity rates in most rural areas, then? According to the CDC: "Obesity prevalence was significantly higher among adults living in rural counties (34.2 percent) than among those living in metropolitan counties (28.7 percent)." And that latter figure throws all urban counties together, which would include a lot of car-based cities plus surrounding car-based suburbs. When you look at walkable, public-transit-based cities, like NYC, it's still lower (22% in NYC, 22% in Boston, 22.4% in Seattle, etc.)

I know the image people cherish is of rugged country folk doing outdoorsy stuff, while soft urban residents live pampered lifestyles. But the reality appears to be much different, with the car-based lifestyles of rural people contributing to a more sedentary existence. Fitbit had some data supporting that impression at the state level, too:

Map: the states that keep active despite bad weather

One state tops the list of steps taken per day in both winter and summer.

www.vox.com

Generally speaking, the states where people are taking more steps are more urbanized.

Having lived in NYC and then visiting country relatives, I was really struck by this disparity when it came to attitudes about everyday physical activity. Like we were looking to go to a restaurant in the rural town where my relatives lived. I looked at a map and saw it was only about a mile away and I thought "well, that's just like 20 blocks in NY... we can do it in 15 minutes if we walk briskly, and the weather's nice." But when I suggested walking, they looked at me like I had two heads. Later, after getting to know the area, I saw why. The roads don't have sidewalks, or even decent shoulders, so you're risking getting hit by a car. Even when you get into more settled places, it can be hard to get anywhere, since everything is set up with cars in mind.... you wind up walking from parking lot to parking lot, sometimes without any way to get from one to the next without jumping out in the street for a minute, with no crosswalks or pedestrian traffic lights. Even the short distance to that restaurant would wind up being dangerous and terribly impractical. So, rather than 30 minutes of brisk walking sandwiching the meal, we sat in a car for a few minutes, then in the restaurant, then in the car again. No wonder they were fat.

 

[Mina]

Healthy food is cheap the problem with cheap healthy food is preparing it.

Something you throw in the microwave or in the oven for a few minutes is far quicker to prepare then roasting broccoli and frying eggs and so forth and then there's clean out takes longer.

Highly processed refined junk food is more expensive but it's quicker.

Fast food is even quicker.

Think about making a picture of tea versus buying soda.

Yes. I suspect that helps to explain the paradox with somewhere like Italy, which is quite poor by US standards, but quite healthy and long-lived. Italians get a lot of time off, including a long break mid-day when people sometimes go home and make a proper meal. They also have policies and culture that favor multi-generational dwellings, which really comes in handy for such meals. A retired Nonna can wind up doing the cooking for a half dozen others. She gets somewhere to live, financial support, and family life, they get cheap, healthy, convenient, delicious meals made for them. Win, win. In the US, by comparison, we treat it as some sort of systemic failure when people have to live in multi-generational situations (e.g., the constant hand-wringing articles about Millennials who can't afford to move out).

That said, there are ways to cook healthy meals with relatively little time invested. Like if you have an Instapot, you could spend just seconds throwing stuff into the pot before heading to work, and have a nice healthy slow-cooked meal ready when you got home. Rice is another good example -- like it takes just seconds to throw rice, water, salt, and a little fat into a cooker, then you can go and work out or do some errands, then come back and the rice is done. It needn't involve any more actual prep time than popping a hot pocket into the microwave.... just a little more patience in getting the food.

 

[Josie]

Food (i.e. insulin and other hormone levels) is almost entirely the reason for obesity. Exercise is a small part of that. You can lose a ton of weight without doing anything other than your everyday activities.

 

[Mina]

Interesting that you couch the price of these foods in terms of cost by calorie. Is that the way they are packaged and sold?

No, they aren't labeled that way, but they are labeled in a way that makes it easy to calculate. I couched it that way just because that was the way I calculated it to make sure I was getting up to 2,200 calories, which is an average healthy amount for an adult.

That said, out of curiosity I plugged my day's items into MyFitnessPal and confirmed that it would give you a strong overall nutritional profile. It's not like a peasant diet of mostly porridge or bread, for instance, which would get you your calories but be deficient in protein and lots of vitamins and minerals. It wound up something like 90 grams of protein, 80 of fiber, most of the fats were monounsaturated, low cholesterol, low sodium, and over 100% of all the major vitamins and minerals. You could have eaten nothing but that day after day, and be eating healthier than 90% of Americans... all for $3.50 per day.

 

[NatMorton]

Well the other problem, is that if you’re poor you are usually very Prone to short-term decision-making. A lot of people I know whom are poor, even ones who otherwise make good money, Are usually impulsive and do not think in the long term. If you look at businesses like Rent-A-Center, they exclusively market based on the fact that their target demographics of buyers are not good at long-term thinking. If they were willing to go without a couch for three or four months and put aside what they would otherwise pay Rent-A-Center for one, they could just buy one outright for like a 10th of the cost of leasing it from Rent-A-Center. But a lot of poor people just don’t think like that. It’s why a lot of Democrats keep doing the problem of poverty as a problem of money. A lot of Democrats truly believe all human beings are totally equal in every way and so a middle class to rich liberal will think that if you just give a poor guy Another welfare check you are solving their problem.

Yep. Something our friends on the left generally just don’t want to accept: choices have consequences.

 

[Pippi Longstock]

Not sure how you sleep at night with no room left in your bed because of all of that self-righteousness.

What a stupid response

 

[Mina]

What are you going to eat day 2?, day 3?, day 4?

You'd need to change it up, of course, but it's possible to do it using cheap staples and come up with similar price tags and nutrition profiles day after day with different ingredients. Like maybe day 2 it's pasta instead of rice, canned sardines instead of tuna, chickpeas instead of black beans, etc. I expect that with a little time and effort, I could come up with seven daily meal plans, each for less than $5, each with good nutritional profile, allowing a different one every day of the week.

And my original menu didn't take advantage of any coupon-clipping or other savings ideas. For example, at most grocery stores you can buy bruised or ugly produce, dented cans, day-old bread, etc., for next to nothing. Take your cues from what's available for cheap at any given time, and let it dictate your menu.

Another trick I used when I had no money was shopping the post-holiday discounts. Like sometimes frozen turkeys would practically be free right after Thanksgiving, if they sold too few for the holiday and had to clear inventory. Or Matzo right after Passover. Sometimes in-season local produce is also practically free -- like go to a farmer's market right before it closes and whatever is in season is probably so oversupplied that they still have a bunch of it that has spent the day wilting, and they'll let you fill up a shopping bag for a buck or two. Carrots with wilted greens may not look nice, but they wind up tasting exactly the same.

Yes it is possible to eat healthier for a day, maybe two. But if you want variety, you are screwed. If you want to address a topic seriously, perhaps you should start by addressing it honestly.

As you can see, I did. However, I understand you're attracted to making a dishonest rebuttal. Have you considered instead engaging with the issue forthrightly?

What do you have to say about all of those Americans who have moved to other countries, not changed their diets one bit, and have lost 20 to 50 lbs, eating the same as they have always eaten.

First, I'd suggest they think through whether they're really eating the same at they always have been. Sometimes, there are differences we barely even notice. Like a French-sized muffin might be less than 20% smaller than an American-sized muffin, which is scarcely visually noticeable unless you have them side-by-side. But multiply that across a whole diet, and it may mean you're eating 500 fewer calories per day. Based on the rule-of-thumb that you can lose one pound per 3,500 calories of deficit, you'd be losing a pound per week. Live in a foreign country for a year, and you could well be down 50 lbs just by way of that minor difference in serving sizes.

But, I suspect much of the reason has more to do with other factors, like moving to less sedentary lifestyles. European cities, for example, are big into bikeability and walkability, and a lot of people get around by hopping a subway or street car and then walking several blocks. Do that throughout your day, and you're going to be burning a significant number of additional calories. In a lot of older cities, too, a bunch of the urban buildings are pre-elevator structures, such that you have five stories accessed by stairs. So you spend a lot more time walking up and down stairs, which builds glutes and hamstrings, which are huge calorie burners.

I also wonder whether air conditioning is a factor. A lot of other countries don't have air conditioning everywhere. Heat can be an appetite suppressant, because when you overeat your metabolism spikes and you feel really hot and uncomfortable. So, if you're living somewhere with little air conditioning, you may be subconsciously eating less. That may also factor into how the American South (where there's air conditioning practically everywhere) tends to have higher obesity than the North (where people often live without air conditioning).

 

[Mina]

People will gravitate to what is the cheapest and easiest to prepare; especially in cases where people may not have sufficient time to make food from scratch. I bolded that particular point because I saw that to be the main reason anecdotally; that and cheaper processed food lasting longer as well. Some of the other points you mentioned certainly contribute as well.

Yes, I do think that's a big factor. Generally speaking, for instance, Europeans work fewer hours, giving them more time to cook from scratch. They also tend to have more multi-generational households, where there may be a retired grandparent available to do a lot of the cooking for the whole family.

I'm curious about South Korea, though, since they actually work longer hours than in America, and yet are much thinner.

 

[Josie]

People will gravitate to what is the cheapest and easiest to prepare; especially in cases where people may not have sufficient time to make food from scratch. I bolded that particular point because I saw that to be the main reason anecdotally; that and cheaper processed food lasting longer as well. Some of the other points you mentioned certainly contribute as well.

Time management is always a struggle especially when the single mom works a lot or both parents are always working. I'm a big proponent of batch cooking in those instances. You can take a few hours on a Sunday (or any slower day of the week) and make a bunch of food to keep in the freezer for the week's meals. Slow cookers are also helpful. If you make it a priority, you don't have to just eat Totinos pizzas and pop tarts all of the time.

 

[Mina]

rice is not 'healthy'.

Rice can be part of a healthy diet. Globally, the three top countries for life expectancy, in order, are Japan, Singapore, and South Korea. Care to guess what the staple of all three diets is? In the US, we eat 12.3 kg of rice per capita per year, compared to 56.7 in Japan and 67.4 in Korea.

It's all a matter of making sure it's in good proportion with other things. The day's meal plan I laid out got 59% of its calories from carbs, 26% from fat, and 15% from protein, which is within the Dietary Guidelines put out by the US government (which say no more than 65% from carbs). And it contained about three times as much fiber as what is recommended, so it wouldn't be spiking your insulin, since all that rice would take a looooong time to digest when paired with so much fiber (e.g., in a Cuban-style beans-and-rice mix).

What are you eating the rest of the week, or is this an every day, every meal thing?

I talked about this above, but there are comparable options for each of the staples I chose -- like pasta instead of rice, chickpeas instead of black beans, sardines instead of tuna, yogurt instead of milk, canola oil instead of olive oil, etc. The next day, bread, black eyed peas, eggs, cheese, flaxseed oil. The next, barley, pinto beans, chicken thighs, cabbage, and lard. That's four days without a repeated ingredient.

Flour is even cheaper than rice (like around 4,500 calories per dollar). Oats are comparably cheap (2,100 calories per dollar). Peanut butter is also economical (around 1,500 calories per dollar). Barley's another good one, at around 1,400 calories per dollar. Protein tends to be the expensive bit, but you can get eggs at Costco for around 802 calories per dollar. And since beans have a bunch of protein, you don't need to add much if you're including some kind of bean as one of your staples already.

And it's worth remembering the "blue zones" where people live long are almost all places with diets heavy in beans (Okinawa, Loma Linda, Sardinia, etc.)

Sometimes these substitutions will be a little more expensive than my original menu (canned sardines cost a bit more than canned tuna). Sometimes they'll be a bit cheaper (flour's cheaper per calorie than rice). But there are infinite combinations that'll get you $5/day or less, with decent nutrition.

And my calculations were based on buying fairly small amounts from Walmart, without coupons, and without waiting for specials, etc. If you are willing to buy in bulk, things get even cheaper. Like a small bag of black beans at Walmart is 8 cents per ounce. Buy a few 20 pound bags (which will keep forever) from a bulk retailer, and it's 7 cents per ounce. Rice can be 6 cents per ounce in bulk.

Fresh vegetables and fruit are more expensive than the box of Mac and cheese. Go organic and the prices increase.

Yes. To be affordable, you've got to mostly stick to in-season fresh veggies and fruit, and even then treat it more as a garnish than a staple. Like a big bowl of bean chili, with a single cayenne pepper chopped up for flavor. And organic is basically out of the question.

 

[JasperL]

They always make big claims like that. I am sure that there are other esteemed doctors selling books that tell you to eat small meals all day. Eather way nutrition is a case-by-case thing not a generalized utopia gimmick.

I really have not known anyone that eats all day. Is this a rich person problem? BTW being between meals isn't fasting. It is just called being not hungry.

It's not a gimmick. There is a ton of academic research out completed and ongoing about IF or "time restricted eating" (TRE) which is the same thing. And he's got an entire practice built on teaching mostly the obese about fasting and diet. He's published the results of some of his case studies, and more.

It's similar to the theories underlying Keto eating - basically letting insulin drop low enough (through fasting or avoiding all carbs) to allow the body to burn fat. Both are very promising treatments for obesity, when so far the standard advice almost never works. They're both based on the Carbohydrate insulin model, or CIM. You can find the papers if you want.

True enough there's not a one-size fits all approach to anything involving the human body, but the biggest violators of that truism are the 'traditional' diets and the national nutrition guidelines published every 5 years and that dictate diets for....everyone, one size fits all. Those guidelines control meals in schools, hospitals, nursing homes and more, and the results speak for themselves - disastrous.

And by 'eat all day' we obviously don't mean that literally, but maybe 3 meals, with another 4-5 or more snacks, so 7-10-12 or more eating events every day. The theory is that keeps insulin high all day long, leading to metabolic disorder, and then obesity, T2 diabetes, etc. that are all epidemics in this country and all over the industrialized world.

 

[ElChupacabra]

Yes, I do think that's a big factor. Generally speaking, for instance, Europeans work fewer hours, giving them more time to cook from scratch. They also tend to have more multi-generational households, where there may be a retired grandparent available to do a lot of the cooking for the whole family.

I experienced that for a while in my youth when my grandmother came up from South America to live with us for a while. Both of my parents worked, so she took care of the cooking, which was great, but she was still competing with the processed foods I loved as a teenager and would get my hands on after school.

I'm curious about South Korea, though, since they actually work longer hours than in America, and yet are much thinner.

I suspect the kind of food that's eaten there versus here played a part, but now as more western traditions dominate, obesity is trending upward in Asia as well. The shift from manual labor to work that is mainly sedentary hasn't helped either.

 

[EMNofSeattle]

rice is not 'healthy'. What are you eating the rest of the week, or is this an every day, every meal thing?

Fresh vegetables and fruit are more expensive than the box of Mac and cheese. Go organic and the prices increase.

Rice is perfectly healthy, and as a grain is probably better then wheat. It’s especially better then any bread product made by modern American food processors

 

[Superfly]

What a stupid response

Not nearly as stupid as you yammering about people buying meat, then saying you don’t look in any body’s cart. Which is it? Make up your mind.

 

[Mina]

I experienced that for a while in my youth when my grandmother came up from South America to live with us for a while. Both of my parents worked, so she took care of the cooking, which was great, but she was still competing with the processed foods I loved as a teenager and would get my hands on after school.


I suspect the kind of food that's eaten there versus here played a part, but now as more western traditions dominate, obesity is trending upward in Asia as well. The shift from manual labor to work that is mainly sedentary hasn't helped either.

One frustrating thing is that the wingnuts block even common-sense efforts to work towards a solution. Take Bloomberg's efforts to restrict serving sizes of sugary drinks. It was a really minimal intervention. It's not like you couldn't buy all the sugary drink you wanted.... they'd just come in additional servings. And that minimal intervention really might have helped -- research has confirmed people tend to consume fewer calories when given smaller portions, even if they have the ability to help themselves to as many additional servings as they like. But even that small, common-sense intervention was greeted by crazed histrionics from the right.

 

[Mina]

Just because you can't see it doesn't mean it's not there.

It wasn't though. Go back and look for it.

 

[ElChupacabra]

One frustrating thing is that the wingnuts block even common-sense efforts to work towards a solution. Take Bloomberg's efforts to restrict serving sizes of sugary drinks. It was a really minimal intervention. It's not like you couldn't buy all the sugary drink you wanted.... they'd just come in additional servings. And that minimal intervention really might have helped -- research has confirmed people tend to consume fewer calories when given smaller portions, even if they have the ability to help themselves to as many additional servings as they like. But even that small, common-sense intervention was greeted by crazed histrionics from the right.

Efforts in this area tend to get overrun by the ideological aspects of it than the practical ones. While I understand the concern around over regulation, portion control is definitely a step in the right direction. One thing that fascinates me with food in this country is the connection between food and perceived value for the price. If we incentivize large portions for a low price, then it's going to have negative outcomes in terms of how much people eat. The entire concept of buffets comes to mind because you're encouraged to eat as much as you can for a specific price point.

 

[Mina]

Efforts in this area tend to get overrun by the ideological aspects of it than the practical ones. While I understand the concern around over regulation, portion control is definitely a step in the right direction. One thing that fascinates me with food in this country is the connection between food and perceived value for the price. If we incentivize large portions for a low price, then it's going to have negative outcomes in terms of how much people eat. The entire concept of buffets comes to mind because you're encouraged to eat as much as you can for a specific price point.

Ironically, even buffets get the concept, because they tend to give you small plates to work with, which cuts down on food waste. People can still go back for all the servings they want, but when they finish a plate, they tend to assess their hunger level and not go back if they've had enough, whereas with a bigger plate you may wind up in a position where you either throw a lot of food out or gorge yourself until you're sick to clean the plate.

 

[JasperL]

Look you’re a leftist so I already know your pre-programmed response. Because all leftist do this. They endlessly whine and bitch and complain about how the world is, and then when offered an alternative or a solution they immediately criticize that as being unrealistic.

Your problem here, is that Your example family has put themselves in a situation where they are making worse and worse choices. They need to move out of the city that they can’t afford to live in, and move somewhere that they can’t afford to live in where the mother only has to work part time or can stay home. I see these kinds of people all the time in LA. They want to be good lifestyle liberals, but they’re not very intelligent and they’re not very connected, and so they end up moving to LA from some small town in Oklahoma or Michigan or something like that, and they endlessly rail about how their parents are evil bigots but they’re not of able to afford to live in Los Angeles. When in reality those people need to just give up on the pretend liberalism, repair their relationship with their parents and move back to their small town and stop trying to make it in the city. You failed in the city.

The health costs of feeding the kids junk and yourselves junk, far exceeds any renumerative value you are making from working. Unless you make a lot of money. Like over a quarter million a year.

What’s missing is how the cities function when there are no people for the cumulative 10s of millions of jobs that don’t pay 250k per year. Poor people work in cities and everyone in that city should be glad they do because that’s how the world functions. Any plan that basically requires the collapse of local economies isn’t serious.

 

[ElChupacabra]

Ironically, even buffets get the concept, because they tend to give you small plates to work with, which cuts down on food waste. People can still go back for all the servings they want, but when they finish a plate, they tend to assess their hunger level and not go back if they've had enough, whereas with a bigger plate you may wind up in a position where you either throw a lot of food out or gorge yourself until you're sick to clean the plate.

Yes, but what I've seen the few times I've been at them, people will load their plates with food. It's an "eat with your eyes" scenario. As a result, I would see a lot of waste because they wouldn't finish all they put on their plate. Anecdotal of course.

 

[JasperL]

Does it need to be said, and while not exclusively, but don't poor people tend to be stupid people? Especially in the United States where even a C- student can achieve at least the lower middle class if they are willing to work, and willing to live within their means.

It's not about being stupid. I had a meeting yesterday with a multi-millionaire client, a partner in a CPA firm, his staff member also a CPA, and two attorneys, both of them named in their respective firms, so very competent people. Me and the client were the only ones not obese, and that's not an unusual ratio around here.

 

[CLAX1911]

Yes. I suspect that helps to explain the paradox with somewhere like Italy, which is quite poor by US standards, but quite healthy and long-lived. Italians get a lot of time off, including a long break mid-day when people sometimes go home and make a proper meal. They also have policies and culture that favor multi-generational dwellings, which really comes in handy for such meals. A retired Nonna can wind up doing the cooking for a half dozen others. She gets somewhere to live, financial support, and family life, they get cheap, healthy, convenient, delicious meals made for them. Win, win. In the US, by comparison, we treat it as some sort of systemic failure when people have to live in multi-generational situations (e.g., the constant hand-wringing articles about Millennials who can't afford to move out).

That said, there are ways to cook healthy meals with relatively little time invested. Like if you have an Instapot, you could spend just seconds throwing stuff into the pot before heading to work, and have a nice healthy slow-cooked meal ready when you got home. Rice is another good example -- like it takes just seconds to throw rice, water, salt, and a little fat into a cooker, then you can go and work out or do some errands, then come back and the rice is done. It needn't involve any more actual prep time than popping a hot pocket into the microwave.... just a little more patience in getting the food.

It isn't the cooking part that's time consuming it's learning how.

 

[Court Jester]

It's not about being stupid. I had a meeting yesterday with a multi-millionaire client, a partner in a CPA firm, his staff member also a CPA, and two attorneys, both of them named in their respective firms, so very competent people. Me and the client were the only ones not obese, and that's not an unusual ratio around here.

The OP talks about obesity and poverty. My point is that all of the bad things that come with being stupid probably may include obesity too; a sign of being unable to manage one's life. That doesn't mean wealthy and/or educated people can't also be stupid too. Just look a Joe Biden. Guy is educated, wealthy, powerful, and dumb as a rock.