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.
Veggies are not cheap. Rice and beans aren't particularly healthy. People in poverty lack money, but they also lack time, cooking equipment, and food storage equipment. You tend to get a lot of food with high carbs and salt and sugar and nothing else. Perhaps you don't really know what your poor contacts eat, or they're just not representative. This is well studied.
Veggies are not cheap. Rice and beans aren't particularly healthy.
Veggies are dirt cheap. Sure, pre-sliced baby carrots in star shapes aren't cheap, but the poor shouldn't buy those.
You should tell the 80% of the world population that lives off beans and rice as staple foods. They tend to have a lot less obesity and live longer than Americans. And we're comparing it to unhealthy food - how on earth is rice and beans "not particularly healthy" compared to potato chips and fast food?
Amazing how the poor of America eat worse than the really poor in the rest of the world. And amazingly they have the time, equipment (a pot!) and storage (fridge) to make it work.
Sounds more like a lack of life skills and poor choices more than anything.
It is well studied that healthy foods tend to cost more. Vegetables are not dirt cheap. And are especially not dirt cheap per calorie. Worth nothing that rice and beans are not a vegetable as that seems to be a weird fork in your argument
The correlation between poverty levels and obesity are also well studied and are not uniquely american. Although the trends don't hold for developing countries where the poor are often on their feet all day.
> Amazing how the poor of America eat worse than the really poor in the rest of the world. And amazingly they have the time, equipment (a pot!) and storage (fridge) to make it work.
It is rent, wealth inequality, spread out urban planning leading to single dollar trees being the only available grocer, commute times, social support structures, corn subsidies, and a myriad of other factors that make this a very complicated issue.
But sure, let's just blame the poor for being stupid. I'm sure you'd be just fine making $7.25 an hour.
>The correlation between poverty levels and obesity are also well studied and are not uniquely american. Although the trends don't hold for developing countries where the poor are often on their feet all day.
Is it possible the kind of self-discipline needed to prevent yourself from over-eating is more heartily rewarded economically in the US than in some of the particularly impoverished nations where only a tiny fraction escape poverty? I don't know, but it's worth noting the causative direction could influence going from obesity to poverty, poverty to obesity, neither, or even merely correlative dependent variables caused by some other 3rd stimulus.
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.