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The author suggests her work applies to "obesity", but she is not obese. The obesity rate in the UK is 27%; the poverty rate is 17%, and I doubt the overlap is
by scythe 3y ago
The author suggests her work applies to "obesity", but she is not obese. The obesity rate in the UK is 27%; the poverty rate is 17%, and I doubt the overlap is that strong (the link below supports me). Many of her examples in fact deal with people who can't afford things that aren't food, like a kitchen, or free time.
On the one hand, it's certainly true that the support for the poor is insufficient, but the price of food, being perhaps the lowest it has been in thousands of years in real terms, is probably the wrong lever to pull. Consequently, "food poverty" is a misclassification, since, while spending £7 per week on food, she probably spent more on transportation, housing and possibly clothing (which can be essential to actually getting work), and it would make more of a difference to tackle that. (She recounts severe problems getting a home!)
If she had been able to spend half as much on food, would that meaningfully improve her life? An extra £3.5 per week isn't yanking anyone out of poverty.
In fact, there is more evidence that obesity causes poverty than that poverty contributes to obesity! See:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5781054/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5781054/
There are some suggestions that deficiencies in certain minerals, particularly zinc, which is most concentrated in relatively expensive foods like beef and oysters, are correlated with obesity and disordered eating. A bottle of zinc gluconate makes potatoes look like matsutake (at least at wholesale prices), but the safe and effective use of the supplements (avoiding overuse) is not well established or normally recommended.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12011-020-02060-8 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12011-020-02060-8
The point I guess I want to make is that we should have compassion for the author, but that compassion should ignite the best faculties of our minds — the desire to really understand the problem, because that is where solutions come from.
- bluedino 3y ago> The obesity rate in the UK is 27%; the poverty rate is 17%, and I doubt the overlap is that strong US, not the UK: Counties with poverty rates of >35% have obesity rates 145% greater than wealthy counties. Back to Europe: The Paradox of Poverty and Obesity Among the reasons for the growing obesity in the population of poor people are: higher unemployment, lower education level, and irregular meals. Another cause of obesity is low physical activity, which among the poor is associated with a lack of money for sports equipment.
- scythe 3y ago>Counties with poverty rates of >35% have obesity rates 145% greater than wealthy counties. Not causal. Read the rest of the post. >Among the reasons for the growing obesity in the population of poor people are: higher unemployment, lower education level, and irregular meals. Claims that should be evidence-based. Again, the correlation between poverty and subsequent obesity vanishes after correction for publication bias.