Not Too Rich Or Too Thin
Is a healthy diet hard on the wallet?
By Lisa Takeuchi Cullen
STEVE LISS FOR TIME FOOD DESERT: Grocery shopping in Atlantic City, N.J.
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June 7, 2004
One of the first things that strike foreigners visiting the U.S.
is that the rich tend to be skinny and the poor fat. Studies bear
this out. The less money you have in America, the likelier you
are to be overweight. One in 4 adults below the poverty level is
obese, compared with 1 in 6 in households with an income of
$67,000 or more. For minorities, poverty has an even heavier
effect: obesity strikes 1 in 3 poor African Americans.
On the surface, this makes little sense. If the poor must
struggle to buy groceries, how can they pack away enough to gain
all that weight? The assumption used to be that the poor were
making bad food and lifestyle choices—Krispy Kremes instead of
crispy greens. But now researchers have begun to suspect that the
blame lies elsewhere.
The cost of food—quality food—is perhaps the best place to
start. Calorically speaking, the best bang for the buck tends to
be packed with sugar, fat and refined grains (think cookies and
candy bars). In general, processed foods hog ever larger portions
of all Americans' diets—one reason we spend just a tenth of our
incomes on food today, compared with a fifth in 1950. But a pound
of lean steak costs a lot more than a pound of hot dogs. "The
stomach is a dumb organ," says J. Larry Brown, director of the
Center on Hunger and Poverty in Waltham, Mass. "It doesn't know
anything about quality. It knows only when it's full."
Processed foods aren't just cheap, tasty and filling. They're
also more accessible. One study found that 28% of Americans live
in what nutritionists call "food deserts," places where big
supermarkets are at least 10 miles, or a 20-min. drive, away.
People who live in these places wind up buying much of their
daily groceries from convenience stores or gas stations, where
they can find Chef Boyardee but not baby carrots. Some
communities are trying to remedy this. Philadelphia, for
instance, recently announced a $100 million effort to open 10
supermarkets in urban neighborhoods. But for much of the country,
says Troy Blanchard, a sociology professor at Mississippi State
University who studies this issue, "you have people who are
literally distanced out of healthy diets."
Children of the poor face especially steep odds in fighting
obesity. The cash-strapped schools many of them attend are more
likely than others to cut physical-education classes and strike
franchise deals with snack-food and beverage makers. After
school, working parents would rather their kids stay inside
watching TV than play outside in unsafe streets. Those hours in
front of the tube, meanwhile, feed them a diet of ads heavy on
sugary cereals and greasy burgers. No wonder obese adolescents
are twice as likely to come from low-income families.
Though the ballooning obesity problem among the poor is finally
getting the attention of academics and the government, nobody has
yet come up with an easy fix. "Our remedies are very middle
class," says Adam Drewnowski, director of the Center for Public
Health Nutrition at the University of Washington. "They tell you,
Seek a healthy diet and exercise. Well, if you're working two
jobs and living in a trailer, you're in no mood to get home and
make a salad." In the end, fitness may have less to do with
genetics than with tax brackets.
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