Too poor to be thin

One of the oddest contradictions of industrialized nations is this: the less money you have, the more likely you are to be fat. Globally, it’s exactly the opposite: the populations of poor countries are more likely to be malnourished and underweight than the populations of rich nations. But within wealthy nations, we’ve had a complete reversal of what seems like a completely logical and obvious relationship: the more money you have, the more food you can buy, so the more likely you should be to be fat, right?

 That’s one of the perverse aspects of our globalized modern food system: the more processed food is, the cheaper it is. Wheat bread costs more than white bread; canned vegetables are cheaper than fresh ones. This has a lot to do with sheer quantity: since we make a lot more white bread than wheat bread, volume reduces the unit price so it ends up being cheaper even though the flour is processed, bleached, and then “enriched” by having vitamins added to it. It seems illogical, but not much about the way we make and distribute food today is common-sensical.

And it turns out that cheap foods are often less healthy. White bread has less nutritional value (despite all that “enrichment”) and has more easily-accessible sugars than wheat bread; the same is true of white rice vs. brown rice. Pre-packaged and processed foods often have lots of added corn syrup, fats, and other ingredients that, quite simply, make us fat.

In an amazingly short period of time, considering all of human history, we’ve upended a long-standing pattern: that rich people were fat and poor people were skinny. Today, low-income people in the U.S. and other wealthy nations can’t afford more nutritious foods, since our food system makes them relatively expensive compared to less healthy choices. They can’t afford the gym memberships or pilates classes that the middle and upper classes enroll in to mitigate the effects of our modern eating habits. And of course they also are less likely to have access to medical care to deal with the health problems that arise from eating a high-fat, high-calorie diet.

 Even more nonsensical, a 2006 study* found that young children from families that routinely go hungry because they are unable to afford sufficient amounts of food are also more likely to be overweight than other kids. Why? Because these families are the least able to afford more expensive, healthy food options like fresh fruits and vegetables. Reliance on government food assistance may also put kids at risk for obesity. If you’ve ever seen the types of food the government provides to those on assistance, this won’t surprise you–vats of peanut butter, pounds of butter and cheese, and other high-calorie foods are passed out to the nation’s poor because the government needs to get rid of some of our agricultural surplus. The food isn’t chosen because it’s good for people or provides a healthy, balanced diet. Food assistance programs just serve as a convenient way to get rid of a lot of the extra agricultural products the government buys to help keep farm prices up, a system that disproportionately benefits large industrial producers.

 And so we have our current system: for the first time in human history, the rich can afford to be thin, and the poor–and hungry–are more likely to be overweight.

* Dubois, Lise, Anna Farmer, Manon Girard, and Marion Porcherie. 2006. “Family Food Insufficiency Is Related to Overweight among Preschoolers.” Social Science & Medicine. For some reason I don’t have the volume or page numbers.