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> It can be tempting to ask families receiving food assistance, If you’re really hungry, then how can you be—as many of them are—overweight? The answer is “this

> It can be tempting to ask families receiving food assistance, If you’re really hungry, then how can you be—as many of them are—overweight? The answer is “this paradox that hunger and obesity are two sides of the same coin,” says Melissa Boteach, vice president of the Poverty and Prosperity Program of the Center for American Progress, “people making trade-offs between food that’s filling but not nutritious and may actually contribute to obesity.” For many of the hungry in America, the extra pounds that result from a poor diet are collateral damage—an unintended side effect of hunger itself. This doesn't make sense to me. Doesn't calorie intake directly correlate with gaining weight? From earlier in the article: > Chances are good that if you picture what hunger looks like, you don’t summon an image of someone like Christina Dreier: white, married, clothed, and housed, even a bit overweight. The image of hunger in America today differs markedly from Depression-era images of the gaunt-faced unemployed scavenging for food on urban streets. “This is not your grandmother’s hunger Is this not because the people in the depression era were actually starving? I'm not intending to downplay the issues here, but I find it hard to follow the disconnect of people being overweight not having enough food to eat.

xherberta 12y ago
It's a disconnect that's not unique to the families NG interviewed. Take the Pima native Americans in 1905, where the women, who were quite physically active, basically treated like beasts of burden, had a distressingly high obesity rate, though these families were given a limited ration from the government, mostly white flour and sugar, and not more than 2000 calories per person per day. You can find the same trend in 1928 with Sioux on a South Dakota Crow Creek Reservation--very high levels of obesity in coincidence with extreme poverty. In the early 1960s, MIT nutritionists calculated that Trinidadians were getting no more than 2000 calories per day, yet they were seeing an extreme obesity problem among the females. Your (calories in = calories stored + calories used) basis for judging other human beings fails because these are not independent variables. Metabolic rate is not constant. If you feed your body few calories, your metabolism adjusts so as to use fewer calories and store more. If you skip some meals, your metabolism is receiving a signal that it had better use the absolute minimum and store the rest to be used in future food crises. A high-carbohydrate meal causes insulin to be released, and insulin causes sugars in the bloodstream to be stored as fat. And then your blood sugar is low, and you're hungry again. Have you ever noticed the intense hunger that follows an hour or two after a carb binge? Fat cells that are stimulated to grow (by insulin) scream loud for their share of the energy, just as a growing child's appetite is caused by hormonal messaging for growth and not the other way around. Fat cells scream loud, ensuring that they get their needs met even if the rest of you is weak, tired, and resorting to stealing energy from muscle, the brain, and other tissues. Also, preservatives, additives, and high-sodium foods can cause a person to retain water, which can add to weight independent of caloric intake. In an older discussion on this issue, travisp shared this article: http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1199154 http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1199154 >Effects of Dietary Composition on Energy Expenditure During Weight-Loss Maintenance >The results of our study challenge the notion that a calorie is a calorie from a metabolic perspective. During isocaloric feeding following weight loss, REE was 67 kcal/d higher with the very low-carbohydrate diet compared with the low-fat diet. TEE differed by approximately 300 kcal/d between these 2 diets, an effect corresponding with the amount of energy typically expended in 1 hour of moderate-intensity physical activity >In conclusion, our study demonstrates that commonly consumed diets can affect metabolism and components of the metabolic syndrome in markedly different ways during weight-loss maintenance, independent of energy content. The low-fat diet produced changes in energy expenditure and serum leptin42- 44 that would predict weight regain. In addition, this conventionally recommended diet had unfavorable effects on most of the metabolic syndrome components studied herein. In contrast, the very low-carbohydrate diet had the most beneficial effects on energy expenditure and several metabolic syndrome components, but this restrictive regimen may increase cortisol excretion and CRP. If you consider yourself a scientifically-minded, follow-the-research type, it's time to re-evaluate your (calories in = calories stored + calories used) hypothesis.
- colechristensen 12y ago
  The disconnect is the difference between being hungry and actual starvation. We are so rich that most of our poorest can still get fat on the food they can acquire. The worst of our problems is no longer starvation, but bad nutrition. (to an extent, starvation still must exist somewhere but it is very much less common) Starvation will always get more sympathy, and the dismissal of this is inappropriate.
  - xherberta 12y ago
    Starvation is extremely tragic, and no one's dismissing that. We do have a different problem here in America, but it's not simply that poor people are fat because they're just eating too many calories. I've offered physiological explanations for the observed phenomenon that people can be obese on low-calorie diets. It's troubling that America's "poor fat" are misled by the universal and government-touted notion that low fat is healthy and that carbs are a necessary nutrient. This guy has caclulated cost per calorie for a variety of foods, with pretty pictures: http://www.mymoneyblog.com/what-does-200-calories-cost-the-economics-of-obesity.html http://www.mymoneyblog.com/what-does-200-calories-cost-the-e... I've done calculations for some of my favorite foods, and found that no-sugar peanut butter, olive oil, mayo w/o canola or soy, no-nitrate bacon ends, roasted sunflower seeds, canned coconut cream, grass-fed butter, almond flour, and sour cream are all nutritious foods that are less than $.50 per 200 calories. These foods are satisfying, non-fattening, and make veggies taste great. But the poor aren't going to buy them because they've been told by the government to have 11 servings of carbs and to minimize fat intake. It's a problem that could be addressed.
    - fossuser 12y ago
      I find it hard to believe that people can get fat on low calorie diets(http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/ http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/). Nutrition research is a mess and yes there does seem to be connections between types of food, insulin spikes and how likely calories will be stored as fat - but to gain weight you still need a calorie surplus. I'd suspect the 'poor fat' is because of consuming a large amount of calories from unhealthy food combined with nearly zero exercise.
aianus 12y ago
The mean number of calories they eat is too high, but the variance is also too high. Some days they don't eat at all and other days they gorge.
seivan 12y ago
YMMV No. Have you ever noticed the "pot-bellies" of undernourished kids from all those poverty photos from Africa? That's because they get the cheapest crap we can send/buy them - Rice. It's not as simple as general thermodynamics. Kcal in and out is just half the equation. We eat too much sugar today. Everything has so much damn sugar in it. All sorts of different varieties of carbs that eventually just become blood sugar and activating your insulin causing you to store it all as fat.
- fossuser 12y ago
  I think the distended stomachs are caused by actual starvation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwashiorkor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwashiorkor Though it's possible you're referencing something else.
- EpicEng 12y ago
  Distended stomachs are caused by actual starvation and, no, those kids aren't fat in the slightest. The article is conflating hunger with poor nutrition. They're not three same thing.
- mkr-hn 12y ago
  It sounds like you're trying to fit the ideology of your diet to observations.
patio11 12y ago
It's quite possible if you understand the sense of the word "hunger" they're using, which does not comport to one's usual understanding of the term. Pretend I routinely consume 3000 calories a day of pizza and sugary drinks. The last week of the month, I run out of sugary drinks, and substitute water with my 2000 calories a day of pizza. I am, according to every instrument ever used to measure it, "food insecure" due to the persistent circumstances causing me to consume less than I had planned to. I may or may not feel any physiological response to lacking Coke for a week (hunger as natural people understand the term). I'm quite likely obese, much like I would be if I consistently consumed 3000 calories a day of organic orange juice, free range steaks, and arugula. The refocusing of anti-poverty programs and rhetoric on food insecurity as opposed to our now deprecated understanding of hunger is due to two causes. One is that food insecurity is more conveniently measurable in a (mostly) scientific fashion. The other is that the US has, for all intents and purposes, eliminated Depression-style hunger. (Though it has not eliminated dysfunctional parents who prefer drugs to feeding their children, which complicates the issue, but if you run into "Hasn't eaten in 3 days" your money should be on "child abuse" rather than "lamentable circumstances.")
- patio11 12y ago
  Incidentally, if you're wondering "How does one define 'food security'?", you administer surveys, score them, and compare the scores to threshholds. For example, here is a 9 question survey for children: http://www.ers.usda.gov/media/476115/youth2006.pdf http://www.ers.usda.gov/media/476115/youth2006.pdf Typical question: "[In the last 30 days, d]id your meals only include a few kinds of cheap foods because your family was running out of money to buy food?" Choices are "A lot", "Sometimes", "Never." Score 1 point if the answer isn't Never. If you score 2+ points on this out of 9, you're food insecure. This is how you get headlines like "1 in 6 Americans doesn't know where their next meal is coming from."
dobbsbob 12y ago
Because junk food is cheaper. $1.75 pizza slices will fill you more than a $1.75 worth of Broccoli where I live. Fast food places are also closer to them than grocery stores because they are out in the suburban sprawl so they go to what is accessible, and often those places run promotions for 2 for 1 burgers or whatever. I guess the difference is during the Depression there weren't any food subsidies so everything was expensive.
- mattmcknight 12y ago
  Avg price for broccoli is $1.06 per pound[1], so you are getting around 1.75 pounds of broccoli. That's more filling than a 0.2 pound slice of pizza. [1] http://www.ams.usda.gov/mnreports/fvwretail.pdf http://www.ams.usda.gov/mnreports/fvwretail.pdf
  - dobbsbob 12y ago
    I used my local rates which are $1.50-$3.00/lb for heads of Broccoli depending if organic or not. A pizza by the slice place here is huge NY style
dragonwriter 12y ago
> Doesn't calorie intake directly correlate with gaining weight? No, calories surplus does. Poor nutritional balance can lead to low energy and make maintaining activity difficult (leading to a calorie surplus where with a more balanced diet the same person would act in a way which would produce calorie balance or deficit), and trigger a desire to eat driven by the body seeking to address deficits in particular nutrients even with a calorie surplus. > I'm not intending to downplay the issues here, but I find it hard to follow the disconnect of people being overweight not having enough food to eat. Nutrition is multidimensional and more than just calorie intake -- that seems to be the thing that you are missing.
- vixin 12y ago
  True but people forget (or don't know) that calories from fat, protein and carbohydrate are not the same! The metabolic fate of these components explains why this is a fact and not, as stated on many links, a 'suggestion'.
cpwright 12y ago
I agree wholeheartedly. The anecdotes they cite don't encourage much sympathy from me either. Three declined credit cards and a loan from a relative for $8.11 in fried chicken. Or the home health-aide who buys ready made food from the grocery store, because "You can’t go all the way home and cook." I'm pretty sure you could have packed a PB&J or Ham and cheese sandwich; for less than the grocery store would have charged. Heck, you could eat a cold slice of pizza. Or notice, "When the food stamps come in, she splurges on her monthly supply of produce, including a bag of organic grapes and a bag of apples." The organic fruits and vegetables are more expensive around here. Regular golden delicious apples are something like $1.49/lb, whereas the organic are $1.99/lb. If you were watching every penny, you would have not picked the bag of organic grapes; you would have gotten a regular bag of grapes. I also don't buy that the, (paraphrased) "Oh we can't eat cheaply and healthy, because all that are available are processed foods." You won't go hungry if you eat processed foods, and they are not actually expensive if you are living in a home with electricity. If you're homeless, there are greater logistical challenges like finding a way to refrigerate food or even heat it up; but those are not the people described in this article.
- fred_durst 12y ago
  I exactly agree. But the reality of our free market laissez-faire policies mixed with increasingly effective, data driven marketing, results in a portion of the population who we are essentially leaving hung out to dry. They do not have your intellect and understanding of expenses as well as the prior knowledge to avoid and deal with addictive food additives and sophisticated merchandizing techniques. Just to name a few of the issues at play here. Its a shame that you cannot understand and have some sympathy for them. When are the smart people of this country going to start taking some responsibility for the rest of the US?
  - cscurmudgeon 12y ago
    > When are the smart people of this country going to start taking some responsibility for the rest of the US? When the country starts listening to them.
oh_sigh 12y ago
Is the "paradox" explainable by the fact that satiety is not a true signal about nutritional needs being met? If you are forced to eat foods which provide more than enough calories/nutrients, but don't tell your body "Hey, that's enough!", then you could theoretically be gaining weight while remaining hungry.

xherberta 12y ago

It's a disconnect that's not unique to the families NG interviewed. Take the Pima native Americans in 1905, where the women, who were quite physically active, basically treated like beasts of burden, had a distressingly high obesity rate, though these families were given a limited ration from the government, mostly white flour and sugar, and not more than 2000 calories per person per day. You can find the same trend in 1928 with Sioux on a South Dakota Crow Creek Reservation--very high levels of obesity in coincidence with extreme poverty. In the early 1960s, MIT nutritionists calculated that Trinidadians were getting no more than 2000 calories per day, yet they were seeing an extreme obesity problem among the females. Your (calories in = calories stored + calories used) basis for judging other human beings fails because these are not independent variables. Metabolic rate is not constant. If you feed your body few calories, your metabolism adjusts so as to use fewer calories and store more. If you skip some meals, your metabolism is receiving a signal that it had better use the absolute minimum and store the rest to be used in future food crises. A high-carbohydrate meal causes insulin to be released, and insulin causes sugars in the bloodstream to be stored as fat. And then your blood sugar is low, and you're hungry again. Have you ever noticed the intense hunger that follows an hour or two after a carb binge? Fat cells that are stimulated to grow (by insulin) scream loud for their share of the energy, just as a growing child's appetite is caused by hormonal messaging for growth and not the other way around. Fat cells scream loud, ensuring that they get their needs met even if the rest of you is weak, tired, and resorting to stealing energy from muscle, the brain, and other tissues. Also, preservatives, additives, and high-sodium foods can cause a person to retain water, which can add to weight independent of caloric intake. In an older discussion on this issue, travisp shared this article: http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1199154 http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1199154 >Effects of Dietary Composition on Energy Expenditure During Weight-Loss Maintenance >The results of our study challenge the notion that a calorie is a calorie from a metabolic perspective. During isocaloric feeding following weight loss, REE was 67 kcal/d higher with the very low-carbohydrate diet compared with the low-fat diet. TEE differed by approximately 300 kcal/d between these 2 diets, an effect corresponding with the amount of energy typically expended in 1 hour of moderate-intensity physical activity >In conclusion, our study demonstrates that commonly consumed diets can affect metabolism and components of the metabolic syndrome in markedly different ways during weight-loss maintenance, independent of energy content. The low-fat diet produced changes in energy expenditure and serum leptin42- 44 that would predict weight regain. In addition, this conventionally recommended diet had unfavorable effects on most of the metabolic syndrome components studied herein. In contrast, the very low-carbohydrate diet had the most beneficial effects on energy expenditure and several metabolic syndrome components, but this restrictive regimen may increase cortisol excretion and CRP. If you consider yourself a scientifically-minded, follow-the-research type, it's time to re-evaluate your (calories in = calories stored + calories used) hypothesis.

colechristensen 12y ago
The disconnect is the difference between being hungry and actual starvation. We are so rich that most of our poorest can still get fat on the food they can acquire. The worst of our problems is no longer starvation, but bad nutrition. (to an extent, starvation still must exist somewhere but it is very much less common) Starvation will always get more sympathy, and the dismissal of this is inappropriate.
- xherberta 12y ago
  Starvation is extremely tragic, and no one's dismissing that. We do have a different problem here in America, but it's not simply that poor people are fat because they're just eating too many calories. I've offered physiological explanations for the observed phenomenon that people can be obese on low-calorie diets. It's troubling that America's "poor fat" are misled by the universal and government-touted notion that low fat is healthy and that carbs are a necessary nutrient. This guy has caclulated cost per calorie for a variety of foods, with pretty pictures: http://www.mymoneyblog.com/what-does-200-calories-cost-the-economics-of-obesity.html http://www.mymoneyblog.com/what-does-200-calories-cost-the-e... I've done calculations for some of my favorite foods, and found that no-sugar peanut butter, olive oil, mayo w/o canola or soy, no-nitrate bacon ends, roasted sunflower seeds, canned coconut cream, grass-fed butter, almond flour, and sour cream are all nutritious foods that are less than $.50 per 200 calories. These foods are satisfying, non-fattening, and make veggies taste great. But the poor aren't going to buy them because they've been told by the government to have 11 servings of carbs and to minimize fat intake. It's a problem that could be addressed.
  - fossuser 12y ago
    I find it hard to believe that people can get fat on low calorie diets(http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/ http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/). Nutrition research is a mess and yes there does seem to be connections between types of food, insulin spikes and how likely calories will be stored as fat - but to gain weight you still need a calorie surplus. I'd suspect the 'poor fat' is because of consuming a large amount of calories from unhealthy food combined with nearly zero exercise.

aianus 12y ago

The mean number of calories they eat is too high, but the variance is also too high. Some days they don't eat at all and other days they gorge.

seivan 12y ago

YMMV No. Have you ever noticed the "pot-bellies" of undernourished kids from all those poverty photos from Africa? That's because they get the cheapest crap we can send/buy them - Rice. It's not as simple as general thermodynamics. Kcal in and out is just half the equation. We eat too much sugar today. Everything has so much damn sugar in it. All sorts of different varieties of carbs that eventually just become blood sugar and activating your insulin causing you to store it all as fat.

fossuser 12y ago
I think the distended stomachs are caused by actual starvation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwashiorkor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwashiorkor Though it's possible you're referencing something else.
EpicEng 12y ago
Distended stomachs are caused by actual starvation and, no, those kids aren't fat in the slightest. The article is conflating hunger with poor nutrition. They're not three same thing.
mkr-hn 12y ago
It sounds like you're trying to fit the ideology of your diet to observations.

patio11 12y ago

It's quite possible if you understand the sense of the word "hunger" they're using, which does not comport to one's usual understanding of the term. Pretend I routinely consume 3000 calories a day of pizza and sugary drinks. The last week of the month, I run out of sugary drinks, and substitute water with my 2000 calories a day of pizza. I am, according to every instrument ever used to measure it, "food insecure" due to the persistent circumstances causing me to consume less than I had planned to. I may or may not feel any physiological response to lacking Coke for a week (hunger as natural people understand the term). I'm quite likely obese, much like I would be if I consistently consumed 3000 calories a day of organic orange juice, free range steaks, and arugula. The refocusing of anti-poverty programs and rhetoric on food insecurity as opposed to our now deprecated understanding of hunger is due to two causes. One is that food insecurity is more conveniently measurable in a (mostly) scientific fashion. The other is that the US has, for all intents and purposes, eliminated Depression-style hunger. (Though it has not eliminated dysfunctional parents who prefer drugs to feeding their children, which complicates the issue, but if you run into "Hasn't eaten in 3 days" your money should be on "child abuse" rather than "lamentable circumstances.")

patio11 12y ago
Incidentally, if you're wondering "How does one define 'food security'?", you administer surveys, score them, and compare the scores to threshholds. For example, here is a 9 question survey for children: http://www.ers.usda.gov/media/476115/youth2006.pdf http://www.ers.usda.gov/media/476115/youth2006.pdf Typical question: "[In the last 30 days, d]id your meals only include a few kinds of cheap foods because your family was running out of money to buy food?" Choices are "A lot", "Sometimes", "Never." Score 1 point if the answer isn't Never. If you score 2+ points on this out of 9, you're food insecure. This is how you get headlines like "1 in 6 Americans doesn't know where their next meal is coming from."

dobbsbob 12y ago

Because junk food is cheaper. $1.75 pizza slices will fill you more than a $1.75 worth of Broccoli where I live. Fast food places are also closer to them than grocery stores because they are out in the suburban sprawl so they go to what is accessible, and often those places run promotions for 2 for 1 burgers or whatever. I guess the difference is during the Depression there weren't any food subsidies so everything was expensive.

mattmcknight 12y ago
Avg price for broccoli is $1.06 per pound[1], so you are getting around 1.75 pounds of broccoli. That's more filling than a 0.2 pound slice of pizza. [1] http://www.ams.usda.gov/mnreports/fvwretail.pdf http://www.ams.usda.gov/mnreports/fvwretail.pdf
- dobbsbob 12y ago
  I used my local rates which are $1.50-$3.00/lb for heads of Broccoli depending if organic or not. A pizza by the slice place here is huge NY style

dragonwriter 12y ago

> Doesn't calorie intake directly correlate with gaining weight? No, calories surplus does. Poor nutritional balance can lead to low energy and make maintaining activity difficult (leading to a calorie surplus where with a more balanced diet the same person would act in a way which would produce calorie balance or deficit), and trigger a desire to eat driven by the body seeking to address deficits in particular nutrients even with a calorie surplus. > I'm not intending to downplay the issues here, but I find it hard to follow the disconnect of people being overweight not having enough food to eat. Nutrition is multidimensional and more than just calorie intake -- that seems to be the thing that you are missing.

vixin 12y ago
True but people forget (or don't know) that calories from fat, protein and carbohydrate are not the same! The metabolic fate of these components explains why this is a fact and not, as stated on many links, a 'suggestion'.

cpwright 12y ago

I agree wholeheartedly. The anecdotes they cite don't encourage much sympathy from me either. Three declined credit cards and a loan from a relative for $8.11 in fried chicken. Or the home health-aide who buys ready made food from the grocery store, because "You can’t go all the way home and cook." I'm pretty sure you could have packed a PB&J or Ham and cheese sandwich; for less than the grocery store would have charged. Heck, you could eat a cold slice of pizza. Or notice, "When the food stamps come in, she splurges on her monthly supply of produce, including a bag of organic grapes and a bag of apples." The organic fruits and vegetables are more expensive around here. Regular golden delicious apples are something like $1.49/lb, whereas the organic are $1.99/lb. If you were watching every penny, you would have not picked the bag of organic grapes; you would have gotten a regular bag of grapes. I also don't buy that the, (paraphrased) "Oh we can't eat cheaply and healthy, because all that are available are processed foods." You won't go hungry if you eat processed foods, and they are not actually expensive if you are living in a home with electricity. If you're homeless, there are greater logistical challenges like finding a way to refrigerate food or even heat it up; but those are not the people described in this article.

fred_durst 12y ago
I exactly agree. But the reality of our free market laissez-faire policies mixed with increasingly effective, data driven marketing, results in a portion of the population who we are essentially leaving hung out to dry. They do not have your intellect and understanding of expenses as well as the prior knowledge to avoid and deal with addictive food additives and sophisticated merchandizing techniques. Just to name a few of the issues at play here. Its a shame that you cannot understand and have some sympathy for them. When are the smart people of this country going to start taking some responsibility for the rest of the US?
- cscurmudgeon 12y ago
  > When are the smart people of this country going to start taking some responsibility for the rest of the US? When the country starts listening to them.

oh_sigh 12y ago

Is the "paradox" explainable by the fact that satiety is not a true signal about nutritional needs being met? If you are forced to eat foods which provide more than enough calories/nutrients, but don't tell your body "Hey, that's enough!", then you could theoretically be gaining weight while remaining hungry.