Why do the poor become fat?

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How is having an apple for my lunch, carrots through the day and other vegetables for my tea an "afterthought"?

I do understand about food deserts, but both the Asda supermarkets I regularly shop at are located within areas identified as being of multiple deprivation.

You tell me- you're the one who first mentioned a sammich with bread and egg being cheap as if those are low-calorie (IE, non-fattening), nutrient-packed foods. Most of the people we're talking about can afford an egg McMuffin.

If neither price nor distance makes healthy foods inaccessible, then it's not a food desert, by definition.

I do not eat fruit unless it's in a pie or cobbler. I love vetetables but they have to be either boiled with fatback and onion for hours or dipped in flour and fried. I do not eat any of them raw except green onions, and I will eat a tomato raw if I put mayo on it. I eat lots of carbs and fried meat. Pretty unhealthy.

I am 5-10 and weigh 128 at the moment. That's even with only half a thyroid gland. I do not exercise, and I can tell now because my stomach, while still flat, is not hard like it used to be. I need to do crunches I guess, since I'm 48. I still have great legs though, I hear those are the last to go, luckily.

I think metabolism has a lot to do with it. I also think body type does too. I happen to be tall and thin like my parents. My husbands parents weren't very tall and were kind of fat, but he got the tall, thin gene from his grandfather. My two boys are tall and thin/wirey, one daughter is short and thin, one daughter is tall and big. The boys and thin daughter can eat whatever they want and not gain an ounce. The heavy daughter can look at a piece of cake on Google and gain three pounds. I've never dieted really or worried about what I eat.

Poor people get fat for the same reason girls in jail (not prison, jail time) get fat. Food that is cheap and filling is loaded with carbs and calories. To make it taste good, usually you fry it. Girls in jail don't get exercise. Poor people who work all day are tired when they get home and don't want to exercise.

Beer has a lot of calories. So does Mtn Dew. Most poor folks I know (meaning, most of my friends) drink those two items exclusively, plus of course sweet tea which is loaded with sugar.

That's why poor people get fat. Eating and enjoying it is one of the few pleasures they have. So is sitting around watching tv and drinking a cold one or twelve. Don't for a moment think that they don't know about what they are "supposed" to eat and not eat, or the amount of exercise they should get but don't. They know. But it's a choice between having a few relaxed moments where they can chill, or just pushing themselves further and making life suck even more so they can have that killer body because hey, the construction worker husband whose drunk out of his mind by 8:30 at night, and the co-workes at Wal Mart will really appreciate seeing the hardbody they worked so hard to get.

My point is, that while being fat isn't the best thing in the world, most poor folks don't have that much of a reason not to be fat.

Wish I could upvote this!

except that isn't correct as a blanket assertion. each european country is a bit different. you can get the data here:

http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.UEM.TERT.ZS

not only is your post-secondary education FREE in Norway, as compared to the high costs in the US, you also have a better chance of getting a job afterward. in the United States in 2008, individuals with tertiary education made up 46.5% of the unemployed, and in Norway they made up 17.8%. google is your friend.

Your stats show who's unemployed--not who's underemployed. A lot of people here with a degree in history end up as bus drivers or forklift operators. 52% of all Americans with a bachelor's degree are either unemployed OR underemployed, meaning that 48% still have a job relevant to their degree. Allthough probably 70-80% of everyone with a bachelor's degree in history won't get a relevant job, a degree in economics, nursing, teaching or science usually will.

http://www.tu.no/jobb/utdanning/2008/06 ... -ikke-jobb

Education here is free if you have good grades, if you want a degree in something useless or if you want to be an engineer. This is because of the high rent costs, where the rental price of a small apartment is 1500 dollars every month. Most economists or lawyers go to private universities or colleges, though, with the largest one being BI (Bedriftsøkonomisk Institutt). The preparatory course for engineering is usually taken privately as well, as it requires very high grades.

Wow, free college? That's baffling to me as an American.
Even the books cost hundreds a piece here.

http://images.businessweek.com/ss/10/01 ... eges/1.htm

College books aren't free in any country except Cuba and North Korea, I think.

Not having read all posts, when I was a kid, I always wondered about this thing that unemployed people - or people with low-paying jobs that includes hard physical labour - tend have a higher tendency to be overweight. Now that I have acquired some knowledge about nutrition for my own sake, it is rather obvious to me why that is:
1. Cheap food is unhealthy
Healthy food, even if you exclude the really expensive stuff like organic, is comperatively expensive. Vegetable costs you alot compared to the amount you have to eat to cover your basic energy requirement. Bread and noodles give you the most nourishing food source when considering the price, but their carbohydrates come from refined white flour, which is, together with refined sugar, the worst possible source for carbohydrates. Your body absorbs it fast, you get hungry again very soon, and it does not contain many other important things like protein and vitamins.
2. Alcohol, Beer
WIthout wanting to show prejudice, working class people are more prone to consuming large amounts of beer. I see them drinking their first bottle after work right there on the subways or while walking home, and it is usually neither their first for the day (at least in Germany, it is not uncommon for construction workers to drink a beer or two while on duty), nor their last. A bottle of beer has somewhere between 150 and 250 kcal, which is not that much, but even if you consider a healthy diet that covers EXACTLY your daily requirement in food alone, drinking two to four bottles of bear a day pushes you over your requirement by quite alot. This applies to other types of alcohol as well, but beer is the most consumed.
3. Low Self-Esteem, Depression
People with low-paying jobs or that are unemployed are more prone to have low self-esteem, and thus more likely to develope some kind of compensatory behaviour. Even amongst mentally stable people, large amounts of stress can result in bad eating habits. And when you have nothing to do all day and do not know where to go with your life, you might start eating out of boredom. Same reasoning applies to things like an alcohol addiction, or - sadly, an increasing number where live - gambling addiction.

the rents are high in the united states too.

the world bank didn't look at different statistics for the US and Norway - they are fully comparable. many people in the US are similarly underemployed.

your comparison of universities is the same in the US except the split isn't public/private universities. it's cheap vs ivy league, or local college vs state college.

if you look at this page, it's obvious that underemployment is not a problem in Norway. nor is unemployment a problem. a much smaller proportion of people are unemployed at all, not even looking at college grads.
http://www.ssb.no/aku_en/

p.s. you can't even get into university here unless you have decent grades.

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You're ignoring the difference between "unemployed" and "underemployed". If you hold a degree in history, but you drive a bus or work behind the cash register at Wal-Mart, you're underemployed. Only 13% (significantly higher for nurses, engineers or teachers; significantly lower for everyone else) of every Norwegians with a bachelor's degree hold RELEVANT jobs after six months, as opposed to 48% of all Americans.



A dorm room is 2,000-3,000 dollars per season. That's not expensive.



The world bank doesn't take into consideration that 10% (90% of everyone with Asperger's syndrome, 33% of all Middle-Eastern immigrants, and 75% of everyone with ADHD) of the Norwegian population is on disability, that most disabled people here are because nobody wants to hire them and that the only difference between disability checks and unemployment checks here is that the former is permanent whereas the latter is temporary.



... Or free colleges, if you're into engineering.



There are college students in the US with a 2.5 GPA, so if you know where to look (and accept the fact that you won't get into your first choice), getting in is fairly easy.

Fields such as medicine, economy or law requires good grades in ALL countries. Medicine here requires an A in all subjects + specialization in math and chemistry--despite a slight shortage of medical doctors.

On topic:



This dinner cost me 4.50 dollars. It has roughly 850 calories, 75 grams of protein, no sugar and the only starch it contains is one tea spoon (divided on all the nuggets combined) of wheat flour to give the nuggets a crispy surface. If I had made the mashed potatoes from ground instead of buying a finished bag, I'd probably save another dollar. This dinner took roughly 20 minutes to prepare.

If 850 calories is too much for you, the price is 2.25 dollars at Norwegian prices for 425 calories. At American prices, you could probably make a similar dinner for half the price.

For comparison, a full hamburger menu at the nearest gas station is 25 dollars.

i'm not ignoring the difference - i am explaining that the statistics for Norway looked at the same proportions. Norway isn't special.

no, many dorms cost a thousand dollars a month (your googling is failing, once again). plus only certain students often have access (i.e. out-of-town students), so other students do not have that option. so they have to pay even higher rents off-campus.

your discussion of people on disability is irrelevant. at least they are getting government money, which is much harder to get in the United States.

so what if there are colleges with low entrance requirements in the united states? those are the same colleges that give a degree that is worth being used as toilet paper for all the jobs that will come of it. the good colleges require higher grades, just like your free colleges do. *gasp* another parallel.

your dinner does not have enough vegetables (and not enough variety) to be considered truly healthy. and that is a lot of calries to consume for one meal. it looks very fatty too. not exactly healthy.

I'm speaking of single dorms. I have statistics that back this up. Furthermore, renting a room instead of a full apartment isn't expensive either.



You're missing my point. They end up on disability after being unemployed for an extended time period (usually three years). The disability is usually (unless you have much work experience) of 2,000 to 2,500 dollars--in a country where renting a one room apartment is 1,500 dollars a month (plus electricity and internet), gas is 10 dollars per gallon, food prices are twice as high as the US, car insurance is 250 dollars a month, the taxes a disabled person has to pay is between 350 and 500 dollars and a bus pass allowing for a 15 mile travelling distance is 250 dollars a month.

The very same time period that land these people in disability (this takes three years) would probably get a person with ADHD or Asperger's back into work again in another country.



What degree and what experience you have matters more than the prestige of the college.



I get my fibers from oats and my minerals and vitamins from pills, fruit and eggs in other meals. More vegetables than that at 8.30 pm would just be wasteful calories. The chicken is 9% fat, yes. The mashed potatoes are 15% fat.

I'm not saying that Europe is a sh!tty place to be, but Americans aren't really worse off than us either, so there's no reason for them to eat less healthy food. If you want a real financial crisis, take a look at Greece, who has an unemployment rate of 24.4% and won't return to their Western-European living standard any time soon.

people in the United States don't have the same kind of safety net that you do. it is harder to qualify for their benefits and they don't get paid as much. you essentially have a welfare state that they do not - they have to keep on struggling to find a job when there is no chance of getting instead of relying on disability benefits. must be nice to live in Norway, that you have that option.

you are not telling me that for those 3 years it takes to get on disability, people have NO funding from the government. don't try to pretend that you have any disadvantage in that system compared to Americans.

about Norway's cost of living... sure it's expensive but there are obvious benefits:

and again about the degrees - there's another parallel. the type of degree matters very much in the US too. no surprise there.

this is really off-topic though, so i'm going to leave that part of the discussion.

on topic: pills cost money, and we are talking about impoverished people. perhaps you are not so impoverished so you can afford to pop your tablets, but many people cannot.

your meal was not healthy by any stretch of the imagination. i could fry up two fatty hamburger patties and eat them plain and call it a cheap meal, but that's neither balanced nor healthy. if you want to offer examples of cheap meals that poor people are supposed to eat to stay thin, you have failed utterly.

They still get unemployment benefits. Living here in Norway (for 95% of the population) is no different than living in Sweden Finland or any other western country.



If you deviate in any way from the norm, you do. People do have funding from the government during these three years, but unless they've been continuously working for three years before hand, this funding is 7000 NOK or 1250 dollars a month.

A politically incorrect truth that nobody wants to admit, though, is that it's financied by loans and that the welfare states in Europe highest foreign debt per capita in the world (much moreso than the US, Canada or any Asian country with a western standard of living.



Actually, in purchasing power, we have the 2. most expensive cars in Europe and the housing prices have doubled in five years.

Some people who bought houses after an economic crash in the late 80's are millionaires, though. There's no point in denying that.



Did I claim otherwise?

Of course degrees matter, or else there would be no point in spending years obtaining them. An American with a degree in engineering, economics, teaching or something equally useful won't usually have any problems finding jobs, though.



Three months worth of multivitamins are 5 dollars at Walmart. If you do not have access to Walmart, they can be ordered on the internet.



If I'd split the meal in half, it would be 425 calories, dinner for TWO days and 35 grams of protein. This would probably be an even better example as it would be cheaper. Given that to gain muscle you need one gram of protein DAILY per bodyweight in lbs, it's indeed balanced and to top it of, chicken is a great source of creatine.

Given that I exercise a lot, 850 calories for dinner suits me well.

The meat I used was chicken and contained 9% fat. The fat in the potatoes is exclusively from low-fat milk and oils primarily consisting of unsaturated fat. Meat is not synonymous with unhealthy. Unsaturated fat is important.

A hamburger of 30% fat is not uncommon and the buns are very high in sugar and white flour.

we are not talking about what works for you, as you are not a poor person in a nation that has many poor obese people. so your choices don't reflect their options nor does your life reflect their lives.

your chicken appeared deep-fried to me. if it was, then it contains more than 9% fat. also, boiled and mashed potatoes are severely lacking in nutrients compared to other cooking methods (freeze dried is better, but much more expensive). you mention a lack of starch, but you seem blissfully unaware that potatoes are almost pure starch! potatoes have a high glycemic index, which can cause a blood sugar drop and subsequent unhealthy eating choices later in the day.
http://breastcancer.about.com/od/cancer ... tatoes.htm

there should also be 2 vegetables in your meal, of different colours. Canada has a food guide where you can get good information about how your meals could be healthier:
http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/fn-an/food-guide ... ex-eng.php

if you want to offer cheap meal ideas, great. but if the ideas are not actually healthy, that is not helpful.

are you really saying that you only take one single multivitamin a day? i sincerely doubt that.