The “Girth-Wealth” Gradient: the poorer you are the fatter you're likely to be | Hacker News Reader

The “Girth-Wealth” Gradient: the poorer you are the fatter you're likely to be

slate.com

12 pointscwan37 comments

They don't need to do anything to solve the fat people problem. Just remove all crop subsidies and the problem will eventually solve itself. It's more expensive to eat healthy because the crops used in making unhealthy foods are heavily subsidized. At my local Kroger two red bell peppers cost more than a twelve pack of generic soda. A sprig of cilantro costs $.75 inside, but a soda can be bought from a vending machine in the front for $.50.

Without any data, the opposite conclusion is as likely. If subsidies are removed it's still going to be cheaper to grow, harvest, transport and store corn when compared to a vegetable like broccoli. One could easily argue more subsidies are needed. Broccoli needs to be heavily subsidized to make it cheaper to produce than corn syrup.

Good idea. Or if it is somehow impossible to remove subsidies at least subsidize all crops equally. They must also pass true labeling laws for all restaurants, that actually cover things that are bad for you (transfats!).

If you do not cook for yourself, there is no way to know how healthy your food is.

Is that hypothesis backed up by any data?

Australia and New Zealand have (almost) no agricultural subsidies, and yet have the sixth and seventh highest obesity rates in the world.

Do they import cheap food from abroad?

Australia hardly imports any food at all, because it's large and climatically diverse enough to support just about every crop in the world.

And yet people are still fat. Y'know why? Because they eat too much. Do they eat too much because they're too poor to afford better food? Nope, they eat too much because food is tasty and they have imperfect self-control.

Link is just a Times landing page; here's the real article: http://www.slate.com/id/2229523/pagenum/all/

This is a well known problem. Healthy food is just too f-ing expensive.

If anyone is looking for a billion dollar idea, try making a healthy tasty affordable fast food chain. And no subway does not count, it tastes like cardboard.

The biggest problem with the healthy fast food chain is supply of fresh produce. One of the main reasons bad food is so much cheaper is simply because it lasts longer and thus can handle the long nationwide supply chains that are currently prevalent.

But that is the exact type of problem that should be solvable with present technology. You could connect all the small farmers in an area in some kind of online market and allow them to sell produce directly to restaurants at weekly or daily auctions or even sell contracts for future delivery of produce. Thus, the restaurants can have a way to get their supplies cheaply and reliably and directly from the farmer.

try making a healthy tasty affordable fast food chain.

Well, there's Sub--

And no subway does not count, it tastes like cardboard.

Oh. Well, that points out the real problem, then. People have different tastes. It isn't that there are no tasty, healthy, affordable fast food places, but that you don't like healthy affordable fast food. ;)

I bet that all proper food tastes like cardboard after you've become accustomed to high-sugar and high-sodium junk food.

Subway tastes bad because it is junk food. Make me a sandwich with decent quality bread (not the spongy, sugary stuff at Subway), some nice roast beef (freshly sliced off a hot roast directly out of the oven), some decent-quality cheese (I could go nuts here but I'll spare you the cheese snobbery) and fresh vegetables that haven't been sitting around in a tray all morning, and... well, _that's_ what a sandwich is supposed to be like.

Where do people keep getting this idea that healthy food is expensive? Do they live in areas substantially different from mine? At my local supermarket most fruits and vegetables cost between $1 and $2.50 a pound. A whole head of lettuce is, like, a buck. Rice costs almost nothing. A potato costs... I dunno, but it's not much.

You can almost always find frozen dinner meals at some local supermarket for about a dollar each. Perparation is "partially open box; throw in microwave for X minutes". That's it. If you want more food with slightly more prep time, there are lots of box dinners that are a dollar or less, but require margarine, a gigantic tub of which is two dollars, and will keep for many weeks in the fridge.

I agree about rice, but at a minimum you'll also need egg, meat, and soy sauce. ;) Anyway, speaking from experience, the amount of rice I make creeps up week to week, so I end up making three cups plus a breast of chicken and two eggs, for example, even though that's way more than I ought to be eating. Since I cook for two or three, usually, you can double or triple that for what I actually prepare.

I can eat very cheaply and still eat healthy food, but unless I spend lots of time cooking, I tend to get bored very quickly with what I'm eating, and since I try to optimize so I spend less time cooking, I end up spending far more than I would strictly need to.

Do they live in areas substantially different from mine?

Probably. The article is talking about how poor people are fat. At grocery stores in poor neighborhoods, healthy stuff is significantly more expensive, or simply does not exist. For instance, a can of black beans at the ghetto grocery store by my apartment near Bushwick costs twice as much as it does at the Whole Foods in Union Square. Produce is rarely available, and when it is, it's almost spoiled.

For what it's worth, the "local supermarket" I was talking about is on the border of Oakland, and the area is so ghetto that they keep not only the liquor and razor blades, but also the toothbrushes and condoms, in locked cabinets.

I see plenty of fat people there.

Which supermarket is it? I used to live on the Oakland border.

The Pak N Save in Emeryville.

I hate these articles which pop up every week or so, trying desperately to make the claim that fat poor people are the victims of anything other than their own lack of self-control.

We all have to make decisions in life. Do we go to school, or do we cut class? Do we work hard, or do we slack off? Do we eat that cheeseburger, or do we have the salad? Do we go to the gym, or do we sit around eating chocolate ice cream in front of the TV?

Some people are better at making these decisions (i.e. choosing the less immediately satisfying option for long term gain) and some people are worse. It should not be surprising that the people who are bad at making these decisions tend to wind up both fat and poor.

I know this is far less politically correct than discussing subsidies and prices, but can it be that poorer communities just assign less value to eating well and staying healthy and are not necessarily looking to maximize nutrition per dollar?

Could be. Looking at it economically, let's say I have a farm that produces equal amounts of two food items. They're fairly indistinguishable, but one is healthier, say because it has lots more omega-3 oils.

Which one would I charge a premium for? Which one would I make most of my money on? Which one would end up with the fancier packaging? Remember, that's presuming it's no more expensive to produce the healthy stuff.

And who would pay that premium? Who would eat the less-healthy stuff? Taking those two kinds of consumers as the model, I think that's why anywhere a business can apply price discrimination to a healthier food, it totally will.

I don't know which one you'd pay a premium for. You'd see which one you're selling more of and charge a premium for that.

The reality is, foods aren't indistinguishable. They have different tastes, different marketing, different cultural value, etc. How "good" something is is not, and never was, a prime indicator of success in the marketplace or value to the consumer. If Pepsi wants to spend billions on advertising, people will buy Pepsi.

I'd also venture a guess in saying that you don't just get a tally of every food component available within some distance of your house, their nutritional content and their price, and then you just optimize on nutrition regardless of what your favorite childhood dish was, or what you're in the mood for or what your friends are having.

All I'm saying is it isn't that simple as turning into a simplified problem of supply and demand. Go to a fried foods place at a poor neighborhood and watch how people order; I sincerely doubt they'd always end up getting the cheapest thing just that's what they can afford. Certain lifestyle choices lead you to a certain lifestyle (or perpetuate it) and completely forgetting those choices for problems like obesity is being disingenuous with yourself.

It's not as simple as you say either, so I don't know what I'm supposed to say here. But thanks for the conversation.

Who says healthy food is more expensive? For $20 I can get enough bananas, oatmeal, tuna, eggs, and cucumbers to last me a week (easily). What's expensive is the great tasting healthy stuff - lean chicken breasts, sushi, good cuts of steak, exotic fruits and vegetables, etc. And this is a rude thing to say, but there's a lot of fat people who given a little more money would prefer an extra big mac and mcFlurry with their combo rather than wild rice and BBQ'd salmon.

Though I hate social engineering taxes, the easy way to fix the regressive nature of the fat tax would be to cut a cheque to every person legally living in the country. While the poor now have to pay, say, $1000 more per year they are also cut a cheque worth $1100, giving them real choice between healthy and nonheathly.

Nah, that's not how it works. I rarely go to supermarkets any more but when I do I always see the same thing: fat mothers, fat kids, trolley full of processed food and then to the cigarette kiosk to load up on fags, gossip and TV magazines, and lottery tickets. You can feed a family of four healthy food bought from the market for a day for the cost of 20 smokes - Indian and Italian food in particular is incredibly cheap to make from scratch. The problem is not one of affordability. Anyone who says it is has a political agenda.

Kind of. Having lived for the past two years now on the low end of the income spectrum, eating well is definitely more expensive than eating for the least possible. White bread is cheaper than Whole Wheat. Low fat meats are always more expensive than the fattier meats.

Mind you, either way it is cheaper or it breaks even at worst when compared to buying pre-processed foods, but the point is: you can save some money by eating a little worse.

It depends on how much prep you're prepared to do. You can make a hearty lentil curry very cheaply, for example, if you buy the basic ingredients in bulk. 'Course this presupposes that you know how to cook, but that knowledge is very nearly free, the only investment is in time.

But the time investment is considerable. One reason I don't cook more (and I do cook 3-8 times a week) is that to make anything except a few very simple dishes, there's so much coordination that it's barely worth it. Most recipes call for 5-15 different ingredients, and the chances are very good that you'll be out of at least one, and if you try to stock up so that it's less likely, stuff goes bad before you can get to it. The only solution I know is to go to the store to buy ingredients every day or two, which adds an average of half an hour prep time to each meal (assuming you go every two or three meals, optimistically).

Also, the first few times I make something, it'll often not be very good, meaning that I have to be prepared to eat a few meals I don't even like, and which take extra time, just to learn a new dish. If I'm in an experimental mood, that's fine, but most of the time I just want to put in minimal effort and have a nice meal to eat while watching Sons of Anarchy or whatever.

I guess the summary is: lots of time, and getting the knowledge of how to make something costs several unenjoyable meals and extra cooking time on top of that.

Wasn't it pointed out in a previous article linked here on HN that the poor tend to have less free time?

Some poor people have too little free time (the ones working two minimum-wage jobs) while others have too much (the unemployed). It would be interesting to compare the obesity rates of the two groups. I doubt you'd find that the unemployed were thinner.

> White bread is cheaper than Whole Wheat.

But brown bread is cheaper (and healthier) than white bread.

I personally agree with your objective assertion (it's not a question of affordability of healthier food).

But it's awfully dirty pool to build straw men and convenient demons and then pass judgment on anyone advancing a contrary position with a judgment about their motivations.

Incidentally, the social engineering aspects of tax law are the reason we will never see a flat tax. Tax is as much about behavior modification as it is about revenue.

Not really. The main reason we'll never see a flat tax is because as soon as a flat tax is enacted, a politician can easily gain votes by promising to lower taxes for 99% of the population by raising them on the top 1%.

That's no different than a politician saying they will lower taxes if they are elected right now. Granted, the simplicity of implementation would be easier if it where a flat tax, but the difficulty it always in getting the legislation passed, just as it is today.

I'm just saying that taxes tend to head towards a level somewhere between the economic optimum (as flat as possible) and the political optimum (all taxes paid by a tiny minority).

Ah, I see, that is an interesting observation. I wonder if you could map this using some of Nashs' work.

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