[notch656a]

Malnutrition death rate in the US is something like 1 per 100,000 per year. It's likely a large fraction of those are mentally ill people or neglected children.

While even in 1 in 100,000 is sad, the idea 10% of America is even close to starving is a fictional reality designed to deceive.

[spywaregorilla]

Believe it or not, there is a middle ground between having enough to eat and dying of malnutrition

[refurb]

Yet the US has an obesity problem particularly among the poor.

Hmmm

[spywaregorilla]

Counter-intuitively, food insecurity makes you more likely to be obese.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4584410/

> Based on self-reported data from 12 states, one in three food insecure adults are also obese. Furthermore, food insecurity and obesity were found be associated in the general population and many population subgroups, especially women. These findings corroborate the relationship between food insecurity and obesity found in previous research. Although the association between obesity and food insecurity found in this study was cross-sectional, contributing factors to obesity and food insecurity suggest a need to address the importance of increasing access to affordable healthy foods for all adults.

[notch656a]

The study you cite shows that "food insecurity" is associated with obesity. Not that it causes obesity.

Study uses questions like: “How often in the past 12 months would you say you were worried or stressed about having enough money to buy nutritious meals?”

By design, this study causes obese people who eat up their food supplies to be more likely to be captured by the study than their less consumptive counterparts, even with equal amount of available food.

I would expect someone who shovels enough food in their mouth to be obese to be the kind of person to spend more than needed for meals (or to end the meal with less spare reserve food), causing them to stress about their overspending. It's not much surprise an obese person shoveling down food is more worried about overspending than the skinny person not shoveling down their hatch until they are the size of Oklahoma. Eating 4000 calories of even the cheapest food like rice and beans costs more than eating 2000 calories worth rice and beans; of course the blimp-sized person eating the 4000 calories of rice and beans is going to stress more about the cost than the person eating 2000 calories of rice and beans.

Put another way, it makes sense to me a food insecure person might say "I will buy 4000 calories worth of rice and beans instead of 2000 calories worth of rice and beans because I am food insecure, then I will save the difference in case food is inaccessible later." An obese person will then eat all 4000 calories and stress about being out of money, and become "food insecure" via this study by answering they're worried. Whereas the skinny person is not gonna stress as much, because they still have 2000 calories worth of rice and beans after their meal is done, and thus be less likely to be classified "food insecure" by the question of this study. That is, the study is designed to capture the obese person as being more food insecure even when they have same food availability of the less obese person.

[spywaregorilla]

Wow, that's a hot take. Not only are you blaming the fat people for being fat, you're also implying their preference for food is a causal factor in them being less financially stable?

[wfhordie]

Either I’m having a stroke or GPT-3 needs some serious work when the topic is human nutrition.

[refurb]

So people who are "food insecure" end up eating too much food and becoming obese?

How does that work?

[spywaregorilla]

People who are food insecure are poor. Poor people eat shitty food, binge eat more commonly when presented the opportunity, and likely suffer from more stress / malnutrition.

Food insecurity doesn't mean you're constantly underfed. It just means you can't generally know where your next meal is going to come from. Hunger sucks. It's not tough to see how that could cause you to eat more.

[refurb]

The poor people I know eat healthier food than the crap I do. Veggies are cheap, rice, beans.

They aren't buying TV dinners at $5 per pop.

What do you mean they are forced to eat crappy food? It's usually more expensive than the healthier options.