Are the poor fat?

http://benswann.com/welfare-recipients-in-new-york-can-now-earn-more-than-teachers/

http://freepatriot.org/2013/11/18/listen-welfare-mom-speaks-candidly-about-why-she-will-never-work-and-still-collect-a-check/

http://benswann.com/welfare-recipients-in-new-york-can-now-earn-more-than-teachers/

http://freepatriot.org/2013/11/18/listen-welfare-mom-speaks-candidly-about-why-she-will-never-work-and-still-collect-a-check/

One story about a study published by the CATO Institute and one story from FreePatriot.org. Not exactly what I would call bastions of objectivity.

Unhealthy food is cheap. If you are afraid that you don't have any money to fill your stomach, you buy frozen meat pies and McDonald's. In some places good food is not available in stores. Being poor often means that you don't have a car and must use mass transit which takes forever and you have to stand for long times in the cold and heat, which is exhausting. Because of the exhaustion you have even less energy for preparing anything healthy, exercising, or resisting temptation. If you are poor you may be less aware that tater tot casserole, soda, cigarettes, sodium, etc are bad for your health. Although I'm not poor, got fat when I started commuting 3 hours a day to a stressful job in DC instead of playing with my friends, dancing, shopping, cooking and eating for strength.

MacDonald's soda and cigarettes are not cheap! I can prepare Boneless skinless chicken breast a sweet potato and frozen mixed vegetables consistently cheaper than any of those things.

Now I admit! It does take some discipline to prepare these meals. (possibly in advance on the weekends) Considering most peoples working schedules. But it's not impossible. Nothing worth doing is impossible!

I don't personally have a huge shopping budget, and there's no way I could afford to buy the produce to eat freshly cooked meals every day. Not a chance. It's just way too expensive and I cannot justify it.

As a result I tend to buy a lot of micro meals, but I only buy meals that suit my calorie budget too. When you can pay as little as £1 for a meal, its a lot more pocket friendly for those of us on a budget.

So yeah, imo..just because you are poor doesnt mean you HAVE to be overwight. I understand people might not be able to afford a home cooked balanced meal every day and its easier sometimes just to buy whatever you are able to. For me it's still about thinking about what you are eating but within your budget.

Unhealthy food is cheap. If you are afraid that you don't have any money to fill your stomach, you buy frozen meat pies and McDonald's. In some places good food is not available in stores. Being poor often means that you don't have a car and must use mass transit which takes forever and you have to stand for long times in the cold and heat, which is exhausting. Because of the exhaustion you have even less energy for preparing anything healthy, exercising, or resisting temptation. If you are poor you may be less aware that tater tot casserole, soda, cigarettes, sodium, etc are bad for your health. Although I'm not poor, got fat when I started commuting 3 hours a day to a stressful job in DC instead of playing with my friends, dancing, shopping, cooking and eating for strength.

I don't personally have a huge shopping budget, and there's no way I could afford to buy the produce to eat freshly cooked meals every day. Not a chance. It's just way too expensive and I cannot justify it.

As a result I tend to buy a lot of micro meals, but I only buy meals that suit my calorie budget too. When you can pay as little as £1 for a meal, its a lot more pocket friendly for those of us on a budget.

So yeah, imo..just because you are poor doesnt mean you HAVE to be overwight. I understand people might not be able to afford a home cooked balanced meal every day and its easier sometimes just to buy whatever you are able to. For me it's still about thinking about what you are eating but within your budget.

Say what? Vegetables are super inexpensive. Where are you shopping?

ETA - Here are some tips for eating healthy on a budget:

http://www.yummyinspirations.net/2013/05/real-food-on-budget-fruit-vegetables/

Fresh ones are expensive, but frozen ones are cheap. Frozen veggies are usually flash-frozen when fresh, so they are just as good. I rarely eat fresh produce in the winter, other than bananas or pineapples.

lol our chicken here is about $25 for 5 breasts

I bought chicken legs on sale.. spend 8.93 on them. there were 4 in the package.. they were huge.. My son ate 3 of them, along with a HUGE baking potato and a cup of peas.. that was after the cookies and granola bar he ate for a snack. he also had a Popsicle for dessert.

So that's about 10 bucks for that meal right??

That does not include his lunch/snacks for school
(lunch meat usually on rye, yogurt, fruit, cheese stick, protein bar, granola bar, a few cookies or a pudding cup)

or breakfast
a HUGE bowl of cereal, we generally go through a box every 2-3 days. with milk or course and a banana

I make him drink water as I don't purchase him drinks to take to school and we rarely purchase juice.

So that' s 15-20 dollars a day I'd estimate.. JUST for my son.. as this is a pretty typical day for him. He's not supposed to eat 2 granola bars or 2 protein bars a day, but he does anyway.

Then I have to eat.

MdDonalds would have been much cheaper.

LOL nevermind, I couldn't do it. Thought I could ignore this thread and leave it at that but nope. So lets talk about SOCIOECONOMIC FACTORS :happy: Please refer to google if you don't know what that means or believe that it's a synonym for "excuse".

Please note: Not all factors affect "the poor" equally! Some people living in poverty are affected by different factors to different degrees! This is why a discussion about "the poor" as a faceless homogeneous mass will never be a real discussion, because it ignores the variability of factors at play within a person or families poverty! How's that for annoying? It's much easier to pigeonhole an entire group of people, amirite?

So here are some FACTORS to consider next time before you make authoritative blanket statements about people you don't know living in a system you might not have experienced or fully understand:

The first and foremost important factor in every aspect is ACCESS: Access relates to many variables, including access to transport, access to grocery stores, access to a comprehensive education, access to birth control and sexual health services, access to food in general, access to general health and nutritional care, access to jobs, and access to community resources. This factor plays a LARGE PART of how much one factor plays into a persons poverty versus another factor. A persons level of access determines what steps need to be taken to alleviate the effects of poverty on their life. If a person has ZERO ACCESS to, say, birth control, then that will play a large part in their ability to regulate how many children they might have if they are sexually active and therefore how much money is spent on expenses related to children.

Now that you understand the important of access, lets take a look at some of specific factors that access plays into and how they might affect a person living in poverty.

TRANSPORTATION

Transport is a ~huge~ factor in general access to other resources. PUBLIC TRANSIT can be an effective resource for families suffering from a lack of personal transportation. A family living without a car in New York might not suffer from a lack of personal transportation because the city is built to accommodate public transit. Many larger cities have public transit in some form, though the majority of American cities public transport systems are severely lacking in enough buses, routes offered, times offered, and efficiency. If you live in California please try to take the 91 metro line from LA to the IE any time from 9am to 2pm or after 8pm during the week (or at all on the weekend), and tell me how far you get.

Public transit is pretty much a laughable concept for most people living in semi-rural to rural neighborhoods. A lack of personal transportation in these areas can not only be extremely isolating, it can severely affect ones ability to access food, health care, education, and jobs. Having a mode of personal transport is not a guarantee towards better access, however. Whether in an urban, suburban, or rural setting, the cost of maintenance and gas for cars can also be extremely prohibitive on when and how personal transportation is used. Since the majority of people living in poverty cannot afford a newer car and often suffer from low credit scores that exclude them from loans for a newer vehicle, people in poverty tend to drive older vehicles. These often need a lot more maintenance just to keep them running, and they tend to be highly inefficient on fuel, so the relative cost of repair and gas for an older car is much higher than a newer vehicle. AREA can greatly affect gas prices, so it's not unusual for a tank of gas to cost anywhere from $50 to $100 dollars. If you only get 20 to maybe 30 mpg and do not have the money for many repairs, limiting your use of personal transportation to extreme necessities is one way to save money, but it will often result in less trips to the grocery store, doctors, and possibly missed days at school.

Similarly, the cost of even GETTING a drivers licence can often be out of reach for many people living in poverty. Unless they have access to a reliable vehicle and a person who can teach them to drive, a person looking to learn how to drive will have to rely on driving school services (if available in their area) and these can be highly cost prohibitive. Likewise, access to transport to & from the DMV, and access to a car on testing day are all factors that determine if a person can get their licence.

Disability is another factor that plays into transportation as well. A disproportionate amount of people living in poverty are also people living with disabilities. Physical disabilities can make driving difficult or prohibitive, either physically or in the expense of buying a vehicle that is modified for a persons needs. Public Transit and physical disabilities are often at odds, even when buses include an area specifically designed for such accommodations, and it's an unfortunate truth that we still live in a country that doesn't always enforce the ADA or train their employees to follow it. Budget cuts to public transportation, too, can be annoying to those looking to save a bit of money by skipping the car for the day, but devastating and isolating to those living in poverty or with disabilities.

AREA

Where you are affects your access as much as how you get there. This is extremely obvious in Urban vs Suburban vs Rural comparisons, but in a less obvious way to many, what area you live in within your community can deeply affect your access to certain things. Focusing on food, not only does area affect if and where your grocery stores might be, but the PRICES in those grocery stores for various items. I recently lived in an area that, aside from the small enclave of poverty-line apartments on a back street where my place was located, the majority of the neighboring houses belonged to middle or upper-middle class families. This meant that despite my income level I had relatively easy access to grocery stores with healthy food. The rest of my family still lived in a poor area but had access to the same store brand as I did. However, the PRICES between the two stores was vastly different! I could get a head of romaine lettuce for about $1. At the store in my family's neighborhood, that same lettuce was $1.79. A bag of lays potato chips at my store was about $4 dollars. At my family's store it was about $3.25. THIS IS NOT UNUSUAL. There's a reason why people "shop around". That's an excellent way of saving money...if you have access to enough transportation. The price of a banana in a well developed neighborhood will not be the same as the price (or quality) or a banana in the middle of a food desert. Anyone who suggests otherwise is woefully mistaken.

Of course, if you live in a rural area where hunting and farming are an option, this might not be as big of a problem, but then other factors will come into play more than they might if you were in an urban setting. Likewise, urban gardening requires some space. Many urban apartments have minuscule or NO patio or outside area of any kind, or restrict residents use of these areas and forbid things like starting a container garden, or these areas might not have enough sun to sustain a garden in the first place. While gardening is a great way to offset problems with access to grocery stores, it requires space and other resources that are often not present in poverty-level/section 8 style housing in urban and some suburban areas.

Similarly AREA can contribute greatly to activity level based on how safe an individual feels there, and what spaces are available to them. Urban areas have fewer parks and safe spaces for communities to use for physical activity. Possibility for violence against their person may influence an individual to stay at home, or the aesthetic feel of an area may discourage people from engaging outside. Being sedentary plays a key role in health, so having access to safe, effective activity spaces is key. The distribution of these spaces, however, is disproportionate. Cities and towns often neglect to place or properly maintain public spaces in poverty-stricken areas, while wealthier areas usually have more and better maintained spaces. Next time you call someone lazy for not being poor and not walking/whatever in their area, please drive to the poorest area in your city and take a walk. Were the roads and sidewalks well maintained? Were there adequate street lights? Was the street clear of debris and well paved? Were there plenty of open green areas to be in, or trees to shade you from the sun? Was it possible for you to avoid traffic and resulting fumes? Was it relatively hospitable to your activity? Would you want to use that space for activity again, maybe on a daily basis? The answer might be yes. It can depend on where you are, and some cities work to help maintain spaces for activity even in the most impoverished areas. For many people, however, this isn't the case.


EDUCATION

"The poor are uneducated", "the poor just don't know any better", "the poor just don't care about education", "the poor don't want to learn", "the poor--" STOP. Seriously stfu and sit down because it's time to talk about education and access.

Education is a HIGHLY POLITICAL AND MONETARILY CHARGED SYSTEM that punishes those who live in poverty by decreasing their ability to gain access to better and higher levels of education by sucking what little money there might be in "poor" schools away and then blaming it on poor performance on test scores. Who do those punishment-cuts hit most? Children. It's cut from their ability to access one-on-one time with teachers, it's cut from their educational material, and it's cut from their nutritional programs. Children living in poverty often depend on school food to provide them with 1 to two meals every weekday. Next time you want to see the "quality" of mist school lunches for children living in poverty, please find your way to the "worst" school in your area and ask to buy a school lunch. Then please choke that **** down with the carton of warm chocolate milk they give you (or if you're really being persnickty, try the plain milk lol) and come back to talk with me about school lunches and nutritional education. Like grocery stores, school lunches and nutritional education for children varies depending on where you live. And if you don't believe that schools divide their district lines to keep people in poverty out of "rich" schools then please compare a k-12 district chart to one of the same area outlining neighborhoods by income, and tell me why a district line can exclude children living on one side of a street (usually the one with apartments).

There is so much related between poverty, education and nutrition that I don't even have time for it here. Try googling terms like "school to prison pipeline" or the statistics of students living in poverty that attend or complete a college degree. Believe me, people living in poverty want to be (or are) educated, but our educational system in impoverished communities is often designed to be a barrier, not a stepping stone.

HEALTH CARE

I feel like this one should be obvious. Better access to health care means more preventative steps are taken to keep people from getting to a medical crises state. People living in poverty have limited access to general health care, and often NO access to things like dental, vision, sexual/reproductive care, and mental health care. Dental problems can lead to altered eating habits if you're living with tooth pain or missing/no teeth (because the only thing currently covered for 18+ adults by most public health insurances is tooth extraction). Statistics have proven that access to sexual health care, sexual education, and birth control methods leads to an overall lower rate of STIs and unwanted pregnancies, but access to these resources is often limited or unavailable for people living in poverty (and don't make me lol with abstinence only talk, seriously). Access can be restricted by other factors such as religious, cultural, or familial disagreements with birth control or sexual education, but just as important in restrictions is budget cuts to essential services like Planned Parenthood, eliminating coverage for these services in public low-income health plans, and political policies that restrict or block these services in an area.

Also, another obvious affect of a lack of health care and poverty: the effects of injuries, hospitalizations, and undiagnosed or untreated medical conditions that can restrict proper activity levels! Who knew that access to a doctor could mean so much! Gee!

JOBS, WAGES and TIME

Recent statistics show that there is only 1 job for every 3 unemployed people in America (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/09/unemployed-job-opening_n_3568646.html). This is obviously not evenly distributed though. Areas with a higher poverty rate also tend to be areas with higher unemployment rates (duh). Once again, access is key: if you can't get to a job, how can you do it? While many people living in poverty are also employed, that doesn't guarantee that they are receiving a LIVING WAGE. Likewise, a job can often mean sacrificing TIME for MONEY. If you have the money to eat relatively well but are working two jobs, then the likelyhood or resorting to fast food to feed yourself or children after a long day, or overeating in an effort to combat exhaustion, increases. Many families living in poverty juggle not only one or even two jobs, but attempts at gaining a higher education as well! TIME, especially LEISURE TIME, is a key factor in eating a healthful diet as well, and often those living in poverty have very little of it. LEISURE TIME is another factor that plays a key role in health, and the toll of America's No Vacation Nation attitude can be felt on our health system, especially by those who literally can NOT take a vacation if they want to survive.

Also a key factor under wages and time: CHILD CARE! If you have a child who isn;t in school (either too young or on vacation) then finding affordable child care is really hard. Many families must sacrifice wages for parenting time, or wages for child care. Either way they lose wages and time, which affects what they can afford to buy for food and how much time they might have to make that food.

RESOURCES

Buying a slow cooker to save on time is a great idea if you're living in poverty and want to eat in a more healthful manner. If you do not have access to water or electricity, this is not a practical option. About 2 million Americans still live without running water or insufficient running water (http://www.rcap.org/stillwithoutbasics). These statistics are mostly for rural communities, but people living in poverty in urban or suburban areas can suffer from short-term or long-term lack of water, electricity, and other necessary utilities for basic American living. If you're lucky your neighbor might let you run an extension cord from his balcony through your window to power some lights or a minifridge. If your not, than many aspects of life, including food choice and food prep are deeply affected. Uncooked canned food tastes disgusting, for the record. Fast food is often the best choice for a hot meal when you live without utilities, but it's also incredibly unhealthy and calorically dense.

DEMOGRAPHICS

If you don't think that race, gender, and sexuality play a massive part in WHO we see the most living in poverty, then here's a couple statistics for you: http://kff.org/other/state-indicator/poverty-rate-by-raceethnicity/ | http://www.nclej.org/poverty-in-the-us.php | http://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/headlines/beyond-stereotypes-poverty-in-the-lgbt-community/ | http://www.apa.org/pi/ses/resources/publications/factsheet-disability.aspx | http://www.fccmh.org/resources/docs/MentalIllnessandPovery.pdf


CONCLUSION

A myriad more factors play key roles in the socioeconomic status of an individual, and paired with these factors, that status can deeply affect a persons access to healthy foods and their ability to engage in meaningful, sustainable activity levels. This can result in an increase in obesity. Not all people living in poverty are fat, but people who live in poverty are certainly at risk for the factors that can play in to ill health, and that might result in weight gain.

But lol lazy fat stupid right? :grumble:

I bought chicken legs on sale.. spend 8.93 on them. there were 4 in the package.. they were huge.. My son ate 3 of them, along with a HUGE baking potato and a cup of peas.. that was after the cookies and granola bar he ate for a snack. he also had a Popsicle for dessert.

So that's about 10 bucks for that meal right??

That does not include his lunch/snacks for school
(lunch meat usually on rye, yogurt, fruit, cheese stick, protein bar, granola bar, a few cookies or a pudding cup)

or breakfast
a HUGE bowl of cereal, we generally go through a box every 2-3 days. with milk or course and a banana

I make him drink water as I don't purchase him drinks to take to school and we rarely purchase juice.

So that' s 15-20 dollars a day I'd estimate.. JUST for my son.. as this is a pretty typical day for him. He's not supposed to eat 2 granola bars or 2 protein bars a day, but he does anyway.

Then I have to eat.

MdDonalds would have been much cheaper.

This is an unbelievably sad story of ignorant parenting and bad habits. Go through your message again and actually realise the amount of food you are putting into your son. 3 huge chicken thighs, huge baking potato, followed by cookies, granola, and THEN a dessert.

My daughter, although still only 5, is happy with a small chicken breast, some carrots and broccoli, a small portion of chips, and then some fruit for dessert, sometimes something sweet once every other day. Done. Doesnt need anymore. She is not mal-nourished, but of a good weight.

Sometimes she will also go to McDonalds. Nothing wrong with that. Costs more than the meal above mind you.

Your argument does nothing to support the fact that you think that healthy food is more expensive, but highlights gluttony and unneccesary eating. A sad story.

WTF? Did you really just compare your 5 year old's eating habits to her teenage son? Yes, this is a story about ignorance!!

Bit rich insinuating that I am ignorant, eh, siding with a woman who has openly admitted feeding her son, regardless of age, portions that would make even the most metabolistic adults obese. That is the main point here. Get a grip.

That's silly. I'm not going to ignore the actual content of your posts just because I'm not "supposed" to agree with her. Surely everybody knows teenage boys enjoy the luxury of growth spurts and high metabolisms, especially if they partake in after school sports or other physical activity. Mentioning your own teenage son could be relevant. Detailing your own eating habits when you were a teen dude would make sense. Citing your 5 year old girl, I mean is this for real?!? :laugh:

And for the record, Confuzzled already made the best arguments against her own points. I don't know if it was this topic or elsewhere, but I thought she basically said that based on what she knows now, she would have reached out for help rather than try to handle it all alone. So personally I'm just reading and taking it all in.