| 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 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5708033/
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/healthy-vs-... 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. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25292135/ > 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. |
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.