Is Weight a Cause of Poverty?

Our world is more nutritionally sophisticated than ever before in history. A hundred years ago, your average poor person might have adequate calories to live on, but he or she was likely starving in other ways. For instance, for decades the Irish diet depended almost exclusively on the potato, with a little butter or greens occasionally. Wealthier people were able to eat meat and colorful vegetables and even citrus fruit, providing them with more easier sources for essential vitamins and minerals.

Irish farmers were skinnier overall than their wealthier counterparts. They were also generally of more delicate health, susceptible to diseases that didn't even phase their contemporaries and that would be unthinkable today.

Today, things have changed. The most calorie-rich, fat-rich foods (by weight) are also the least expensive -- and they are also bad for you. Compare, for instance, a pound bag of potato chips and a pound of tomatoes. You'll find they cost about the same, but the chips provide roughly ten times the calories and much less real nutrition. Poorer people purchase calorie-dense, cheaper foods, even though they may not be as healthy. Because nutrition is harder to get out of chips, they are also more likely to eat a higher caloric value of chips at one sitting than they might with tomatoes; without certain nutrients, they don't feel satisfied with less.

As a result of this one fact, the diet of a poor family is much fattier, and much less healthy in nutrient content, than that of a wealthy family today. This means body shape and financial ability have been swapped around. Modern wealthy people tend to be slender because healthier foods and better nutritional education are more available to them. Poor people, on the other hand, tend toward fatness.

Don't Believe It?

Try it yourself. Limit your family -- not personal, but family -- food budget to about half of what it normally is. You'll find that the first thing you do is start buying generics. There's nothing wrong with that, overall. The second thing you'll probably find yourself doing is putting back some of the produce. Then you'll put back some of the fresh meat. You may start stretching meals with pastas and maybe rice -- white carbohydrates that may add a lot of sugars that over time can trigger blood sugar issues.

It's counterintuitive, but enough canned beef stew to feed the family costs much less than enough fresh beef, potatoes, carrots, peas, flour, and seasonings to make the same amount of beef stew. Part of that is because storing cans of food is less expensive for food companies; once preserved in cans, the fresh foods don't go bad. Part of it, though, is because canned food companies generally buy lower grades of food because they can process it to make it taste better.

Moving on -- fresh dairy costs a lot. You may find yourself eating processed cheese food instead of drinking milk. Canned tuna will take the place of fresh broiled salmon. All across the board, the cheaper choice is the one that's not as good for you.

Cheaper foods almost always contain more fats, salts, and other preservatives. Why? Because food that has been well preserved doesn't go bad as readily as fresh foods -- and it doesn't have to be of as good initial quality as fresh foods.

Add to the sudden lower quality of nutrition in your family's diet the following factors: because you are struggling on the poverty line, you must work more, which means you have less time to prepare foods or supervise your children's eating habits; because you are poor, suddenly the only real pleasure that may be open to you is eating; because you are poor, you don't have the money to pay for expensive weight-loss programs when you find the pounds starting to stack on. It's an obesity trap.

It Gets Worse

According to some studies, obesity can cause you to remain poor. A longitudinal study done by Ohio State University followed a group of people over fifteen years. The found that those who lost weight increased their wealth by an average of 8% per BMI point. There are several theories as to why this happens, but the researchers agreed that the most plausible could be the inherent bias against fat people in the United States.

We can't do anything about bias; it's going to be there, no matter what we do. However, if we can find ways to help poor people make healthier food choices, we may see some of the poverty issues we currently have disappear. Those ways may include required nutritional classes in school and for those who are receiving food stamps, or there may be other solutions I haven't thought of. Either way, the benefits of higher wages and better health will almost certainly offset the dollar amount we would pay for such programs.