Why do the poor become fat?

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I never said all were the same. Pretty much any Walmart has cheap and healthy groceries, though.



In other words, it's pretty similar to France, Sweden, Great Britain, Belgium or for that matter Norway.



Nor is it legal to bike on a highway, at least not in Europe. With that being said, anywhere there are highways, there is less traffic on the other roads.



This is how it is in Europe as well. The European Union has laws that direct this.



Milk can handle 12 hours in room temperature.



I'm not. With a degree in history, litterature or english in Norway, you'll never get hired, though, which there's still a small (but not nonexistant chance) you will in the US.

As for the paychecks:

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0883617.html



Your eductation is put in place by the only democratic superpower that has ever existed. You put these moronic congressmen there yourself.

When it comes to debts, a college degree in Norway is 200,000-300,000 kr (~35,000-45,000 $) in student loans.



Canned tuna is cheap, chicken is cheap, oats are cheap, fruit is cheap and vegetables are cheap. While there are unhealthy foods that are even cheaper (donuts, for instance), these food types are still way cheaper than the food you buy on gas stations.



Yep.



All the time. A producer of chocolate spread tried to label their products as "healthy" until recently.



Average serving sizes today are higher than they were 30 years ago. Food producers all over the world are using the standards from 30 years ago.



Sodium causes water bloating, not fat gains.



Check the calories and the nutritional values instead; they tell you far more important information.



Apart from water bloating, artificial sweeteners are usually harmless.



This is how it works in Europe as well.



Casein is very healthy.



Who is responsible for teaching children that pizza is unhealthy, the parents or the congress?



There's lobbyism everywhere here. The biggest newspapers all serve the socialist parties, for instance.

It must be nice living in a country where children are served food in school. Most cafeterias in your country even offers the kids to choose the food in the cafeteria.

What does healthcare prices have to do with the availability of healthy foods? Smaller examinations and dental care are not free here. More severe stuff (eg. cancer therapy) thankfully is. Too bad most Americans oppose a system that gives cancer patients or HIV sufferers free treatment.



Any dairy product is "previously refrigerated" in any industrialized country.



This is what you get for 1800 dollars:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/2000-Vol ... 3a78d21255

This is what we get:

http://www.finn.no/finn/car/used/object ... e=36746993

Your car parts are even cheaper, according to eBay.



Or a Volvo S80. There very same car with the T6 engine in that condition is 15,000$ here.



The average car here is 13 years old and cars are not scrapped until they reach the age of 20. To top it off, they do not commonly have leather seats, lots of space, V8 engines and all that.

I'm well aware of the financial situation your country is in. Compared to what's going on in Russia (where people have a reason to complain), it's next to nothing, though.



We're going through a bubble right now.



No, we just teach our children to stay the hell away from fastfood chains.



At the most, we have more internet sites that deal with nutrition and access to faster broadband systems. The two largest newspapers in Norway (Dagbladet and VG) are all full of lobyism.



This sounds a lot like what happened to much of the cattle here in Europe when ringworm was discovered.



Farmers in the Middle East, South-Eastern Europe, Spain, Italy or the Caribean all work in temperatures that often exceeds 100 degrees fahrenheit.

this is a topic where people seem to take it upon themselves to do a double-judgement. they can judge people for being both fat AND poor, and i wonder if they are mistakenly believing that poverty is also caused by a lack of willpower.

also, where are these $1.40 eggs? we pay 3 to 4 dollars for a dozen. and anyway, the newest research about eggs demonstrates they are extremely unhealthy for you to eat on a regular basis (may as well smoke as eat eggs every day, apparently). and canned tuna is no better, unless you go for a light and low sodium variety (much more expensive) and only eat it once a week to avoid the mercury. it's funny how people's recommendations for cheap healthy food are not healthy at all.

http://www.torontosun.com/2012/08/13/eg ... ttes-study
http://www.livestrong.com/article/37300 ... nned-tuna/
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/ ... sting.html

anyway, none of them are asking us for dietary advice on this thread, so going back to the actual topic. here is what researchers have to say about obesity and poverty (and it is exactly what some members have been arguing since page 1):

http://www.ajcn.org/content/82/1/265S.full

in my city, the lowest cost grocery stores are located close to high-cost housing. low-cost housing is located near expensive and unhealthy corner food stores and fast food outlets.

North American cities are sprawling and largely have inadequate public transport simply because of the high public cost of maintaining the system over a large area, plus the fact that many of our cities are "young" and do not have the infrastructure already in place. also, it is culturally less common to take public transit if a person can afford otherwise, so the demand is lower for a comprehensive transit system. therefore the people who need public transit have fewer buses or trains to choose from. it is also less safe for cyclists and pedestrians because our roadways and traffic laws are not designed to accommodate them.

http://ecohearth.com/eco-blogs/eco-inte ... e-usa.html

YES!

The question "why do the poor become fat?" is not the same as the question "how can I create a healthy meal using only X amount of money?". Giving answers to the second question has no bearing on the first question.

Three to four dollars on a Canadian salary is still very cheap. Sodium is pretty much harmless is moderate amounts apart from the water bloating. The mercury levels you get from skipjack tuna are very low. A study where poor pregnant women ate enough tuna everyday to cover their omega-3 levels revealed that the mercury was not enough to cause any birth defects, but the fact that the omega-3 levels were satisfying, the children became more intelligent than other children from the same economical background.

When it comes to eggs, scientists disagree. Most evidence points to eggs being healthy, though. A living proof of this was Reg Park, who benchpressed 500 lbs at a low body fat level UNASSISTED; he ate up to 36 eggs everyday.



In other words, similar to the rest of the world.

Edit: I eat tuna everyday; have for at least four years. Lab tests this spring show perfect blood pressure and a heart resting rate of 53. Cheap tuna is--ironically--much lower in mercury than expensive tuna.

anecdotal stories are just that, and not evidence. sodium is extremely bad for most people's health in excessive amounts, so it is bad advice to suggest people should eat a food that is high in sodium just because you personally do not have any ill effects. people may as well take the advice to smoke cigars from smokers who live to be 100. also, low mercury tuna is more costly. and you don't actually know how our food costs work or what's expensive here, so maybe do some research or ask a canuck

Yes--excessive amounts, but that takes A LOT of sodium. We're probably talking about a daily consume of a two digit number of tuna in brine.

The cigar smoker, allthough alive, probably has high (or low) blood pressure, damage to the veins, the arteries, the heart and may have cancer.

Low mercury tuna is cheap. The cheapest tuna of them all (skipjack) also happens to have the lowest mercury levels. If you want high mercury levels, buy tuna from the Pacific at 100$ a pound or whale meat. THIS is high in mercury.

Canadian salaries are lower than American (at least if you hold a degree), but living costs compared to Europe are low.

I have to agree with the fish thing. I hate canned tuna, so I eat canned clams and frozen pollock (very cheap), haddock, or mussels (also cheap frozen). I eat salmon as a treat. Fish might not be cheap, but it is cheaper than beef or lamb. It can be cheaper than chicken, depending on what fish it is. Also, turkey is pretty cheap if you can't afford chicken, and it's very lean.

I'm not too worried about the mercury levels in fish, though. I eat little other sources of salt and my blood pressure is optimal recently.

I think the poor are larger mainly due to comfort eating. It's not ignorance or lack of access to food so much as life just sucking more for the poor.

Last edited by puddingmouse on 23 Aug 2012, 3:10 pm, edited 1 time in total.

A dozen medium eggs here is about 83 cents. I can get a large thing of 2 1/2 dozen eggs for about 3 something here. I guess prices vary depending on where you live.

actually Kurgan, the minimum wage is higher here than the U.S., and many jobs pay more. some food is cheaper, gas varies depending on region, food costs are all over the map. the cost of living is nearly identical between my city and Manchester UK - i've spent many hours doing the calculations with a resident of the city. sorry, but you can't do a quick calculation and try to arrive at a useful destination - otherwise you're fudging numbers.

Canada has much more stringent guidelines about mercury than most nations, but that doesn't make the cautions objectively wrong. each person can make their own decisions around healthy eating, but i can tell you that when deciding which meal is cheaper and faster and more filling and more psychologically satisfying - tinned fish and a salad or a hamburger with fries, the answer is obvious to many millions of people. not that i choose the latter, but i understand the choice

Last edited by hyperlexian on 23 Aug 2012, 8:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Rural America does not have buses. Many American cities do not have buses or public transit. Many American cities that have public transit have limited routes to the point of being useless. Many American cities are not bike safe or pedestrian safe (roads with maybe 1 foot of shoulder).

That's not really true. Not all models of Wal-Mart stores have groceries. Only the "super" Wal-Marts have groceries. Many Wal-marts have been upgraded, but not all.

I am poor, but not fat. But this is because I exercise every day and do not eat very much food (food is very expensive where I live, by the way). However, as a child (when I was also poor) I was fat, but that is because I did not exercise much and ate more calories than I needed. I grew up in a place with very little fun stuff to do, and now I live in a place where there are lots and lots of opportunities for fun exercise.

Wal-Mart's food in general is ridiculously-expensive where I'm from.
You can do that, when you move to town, bankrupt small town grocery stores, and boast the only place to buy food for hundreds of miles (other than gas stations).

If it were the only place to buy food for "hundreds of miles", it wouldn't bankrupt other grocery stores. You're showing a fundamental lack of knowledge when it comes to microeconomics.

It IS the only place for that area, AFTER those stores are driven out of business. (Note the order of events in the very sentence of mine you quoted.)
Was my phrasing that confusing, or do you doubt the existence of monopolizing entities in capitalist economies altogether?

Sweetheart, I don't really need lectures on microecon from someone who denies the existence of food deserts and thinks salad and tinned tuna is a more viable choice for an exhausted, cash-strapped wage worker than a dollar menu feast.




I've never once seen you acknowledge the plethora of variables which make the poor disproportionately fat.

Not for hundreds of miles. If people have to pay 50 cent more for a carton of milk when they don't have to drive 20 miles, that's usually what they do--thus making Walmart several miles away an irrelevant factor.



No. People aren't willing to drive hundreds of miles to buy milk and bread, though, which means that Walmart don't bankrupt all grocery stores within a hundred mile radius.

Besides, the US regulates and actively tries to prevent monopolies. Microsoft has tasted this a couple of times.



It's a more viable choice if you don't want to get fat. I study the most demanding subjects at my university, I'm among the top computer science students, I exercise a lot and I work roughly 20 hours per week outside my studies. I still don't feel an urge to eat at McDonald's.

A food desert is a place where the nearest grocery store is more than 10 miles away (not that far with the ludacrously low mass transit costs or fuel costs in the US). It's not that uncommon and several Europeans who live that far from the nearest grocery store still buy regular food instead of eating their everyday dinners at some junkfood chain.



There are many variables, but the most important variable (the one where most of the variables flow from) is lack of dicipline.