Why Are So Many Low-Income People So Overweight? - Pacific Standard: The Science of Society

Profound article. Economically precarious people -- say, people at the bottom end of an increasingly unforgiving and intolerant economic regime that constantly stresses and amplifies social insecurity -- take comfort in a feeling of immediate subconscious abundance provided by junk foods that deftly hit our biological triggers.

Essentially the first world poor today still live in our caveman past, where the imperative was always to load up on calories whenever available because famines were frequent and lasting. Having evolved that internal command, why are we surprised that those who are constantly under threat of having what little they have obliterated obey the ancient command to load up on calories because deprivation is close by.

Seems the solution to obesity among the poorz is to ignore the obesity as much as possible while addressing the insecurity.

http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior/many-low-income-people-overweight-87379/

We might begin this process by trying to understand diet as a psycho-socioeconomic phenomenon rather than as a matter of food access. There's a critically important aspect to McMillan's story that's essential to this shift in perspective: the people she profiles live lives defined by persistent scarcity—not necessarily food scarcity, but a generalized and even traumatizing kind of material instability. Absolutely nothing about their lives is secure.

Critics of McMillan's piece complained about how the low-income cohort she profiled possessed houses, cell phones, decent clothing, and televisions. Nobody mentioned how precariously close these people were to losing those things, much less the anguish such anxiety entails. One unexpected medical bill, one glitch with the car, one minor brush with the law, one argument with your shift manager—all these events could have sent the entire edifice of material life crumbling. And that's terrifying. The subjects pictured and videotaped in McMillan's story are not just overweight. They're scared out of their minds.

And being scared out of your mind affects how you eat. In their book Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much, Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir write that "scarcity captures the mind." Scarcity, they note, "has its own logic." It doesn't take much imagination to hypothesize that, if your entire material existence teetered on the edge of loss—that is, if you were obsessed with scarcity because you had to be—that you'd likely blow your limited food budget on a bag of cookies and fried gizzards rather than a peck of apples and sweet potatoes. Nobody's saying such a choice would be advisable in terms of maximizing personal or public health. To the contrary, buying crap over carrots means that you are driven to eat by a scarcity-induced craving for the most immediate and gratifying satiation—the kind that sugar, salt, and fat excel at providing. But you remain, in fact, a victim.

Of what? Critics of the American diet frequently note that obesity rates have spiked over the last 30 years. They tend, as they should, to excoriate food companies churning out obesity-inducing processed junk. But do note: The problem is much bigger than our sinister food corporations. Consider the political economy of the United States in the 30 years before our waistline started to expand epidemically. Between 1945 and 1975, wages increased in proportion to worker productivity, the federal government maintained progressive taxes and expanded social service programs, and—while not all Americans had everything they wanted—a majority of us lived lives in the middle class, mercifully free from the distorting logic of scarcity.