At the link, economist Darius Lakdawalla debates the question with public policy professor Carol Graham. A key issue is why poor people are fatter than rich people.
Graham: While it is extremely difficult to precisely isolate the effects of norms and expectations versus those of cheap food and sedentary lifestyles, it seems very plausible that differences in the former set of factors play some role in explaining differences in incidence. Our research suggests that stigma against obesity is much lower in some racial, socioeconomic, and professional groups than others, and that accords with the higher obesity rates among those groups. It also suggests that obese people are less likely to experience mobility into higher status professions where obesity is rarer....
Lakdawalla: [I]ncentives explain the variation between rich and poor at least as well as social norms. The seminal work of Michael Grossman, in 1972, argued that richer and more educated people have higher demands for health, because they stand to lose morein the way of lifetime income if they die young. Dr. Graham's examples make this point as well. For instance, she cites recent work by Jay Bhattacharya and Kate Bundorf that shows "discrimination against overweight and obese individuals is higher in higher status professions." In fact, Bhattacharya and Bundorf argue that people with health insurance face a larger wage penalty if they are obese, because their employers end up paying for their higher medical costs. They rely on incentives, not social norms, in explaining the phenomena they observe. Incentives also have several important practical advantages over social norms. Norms-based theories always involve a "chicken-and-egg" type problem. Are people fatter because it is more acceptable to be fat, or did it become more acceptable when more people got fat? Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it is often difficult to act on a theory of social norms, because policymakers can change incentives much more easily than social norms.
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It's not just affluence, it's that our food is unbelievably cheap, relative to other expenses. When I visited eastern europe, I was startled by how much more of their income families have to spend on food (while housing was inexpensive by American standards).
I wonder what would happen to prices if we eliminated all the agricultural subsidies? Not a popular idea in Wisconsin, I know.
I agree with Jim. When food is expesive, fat is indicia of being rich. But food is so cheap here that you can be very poor and still very fat.
So, to a very great extent it seems like we have the opposite here - thin indicates wealth and success, not fat. I have heard posited that it may because all those health clubs, healthy food, etc. cost more money. Not sure, but we really do have an inverse relationshipo here.
People have been looking at obesity this way for years without success, but the new en vogue theories are that it's more the food, not people's behaviors toward the food. Seems plausible to me. The most expensive foods these days are the least processed.
Chris said...
Richer people tend to eat better foods
I think this is an important point especially if 'better' means 'more nutritious.' In general, when a body's nutritional needs are met, hunger subsides. Less hunger > fewer calories stored. Don't wealthier people tend to be better educated about such things as nutrition and exercise?
I agree with Chris. Its not just that food is cheap and we are rich. Its that the available cheap and easily prepared food is really fattening and the least affluent members of this affluent society are more likely to rely on those cheap and fattening sources of food.
In the 1950s, they never put high fructose corn syrup in foods.
HFCS (High Fructose Corn Syrup) is a boon to manufacturers, because it stimulates the taste buds to want more, and eat ever more foods.....be more tempted to buy more of the manufacturer's product....which might be dirt cheap (affordable to the poor) to begin with.
Even Mexican don't put HFCS in their soft drinks. They won't use HFCS---they say it tastes like plastic. The Mexicans use real sugar; even that would be better than HFCS.
Splenda is almost akin to arsenic. All those sugar substitutes.
You never had that in the 1950s. Sugar is added to everything.
The sugar substitutes and HFCS are ten times worse, though.
Life is sweet!
Peace, Maxine
I lost 10 pounds this summer, when I worked in Manhattan, and commuted by foot and subway. Also, the fact that it was so brutally hot probably meant that I had less of an appetite. I didn't work out once all summer -- the weight just came off. When I'm in law school in Madison, I commute by bus or by car, and don't walk around as much during the day as I did in NYC. Americans today live in endlessly sprawling suburbs, and more and more office space is being moved to large, single-level suburban office parks, which have their own parking lots. Few people who don't belong to a gym walk more than a mile or so in the course of a day, whereas a New Yorker probably walks at least three or four times that. Some people walk 20 blocks just to get to the subway. That doesn't happen in Madison, or in my hometown of Buffalo. The middle and upper classes can afford gym memberships, but not everybody can. This is not to be underestimated -- most of my friends who worked at corporate firms joined gyms this summer, when I and most of my fellow non-profit friends couldn't afford to do so.
Maxine - I agree. On a recent trip to Panama, I noticed how much better the Coke tasted there than in the U.S. The reason is that they use actual sugar from actual sugarcane, instead of HFCS. Drinkers of regular soda probably gain five pounds every couple of years from sugary beverages alone.
The easiest way to manage weight without a lot of contrived dieting is to eat healthy, fresh food with no additives such as corn sugar and trans fats. Healthy food is pretty expensive in terms of median income.
The easiest way to make your weight soar and pick up lifestyle diseases like Type 2 diabetes is to eat crappy food loaded with corn sugar and trans fats. That food is incredibly cheap.
Given these everyday realities, it doesn't seem to take a lot of analysis to figure out why affluent people are thinner than poor people. (Not a lot of fat people at Whole Foods, and not a lot of poor people, either.)
Of course obesity is caused by affluence.
The fact that we can eat more calories for less is one of the greatest acheivements of human civilization. Even one hour of labor at minimum wage can buy one pound of ground beef, five pounds of pasta, or a week's worth of calories in sugar water. Even less than 100 years ago, the average American couldn't have imagined feeding oneself so easily. Over half of the population of the world still can't imagine this.
We live in a country with industrialized food, and we should count ourselves lucky.
Madison Guy: I was at Whole Foods yesterday, and there were plenty of fat people. But I do agree that your chances of getting healthy food are higher there. Still, there's plenty of junk food too. You can get sugary soda -- and if you think sweetening with corn sugar rather than beet or cane or whatever sugar makes a difference, I think you're delusional. It's empty calories either way. There are all sorts of candy and sweet cereal and pastries and chips and ice cream and mayonnaise-y salads and beer. You can get fat on that stuff just as well as on cheaper junk food.
"Healthy food is pretty expensive in terms of median income."
Absolutely. I have a job that pretty much requires me to eat lunch (and sometimes dinner) out everyday--commuting between multiple schools, no office, etc., and, while it would be tempting to only spend $3.75 for a Wendy's #1 combo, I'd also weigh about 900 pounds if I did that on a regular basis. Eating nicely on a minimal basis in my area (i.e. Subway), puts me out about five bucks and change. To eat things with a little more green stuff in 'em runs at least seven bucks these days.
" On a recent trip to Panama, I noticed how much better the Coke tasted there than in the U.S. The reason is that they use actual sugar from actual sugarcane, instead of HFCS. "
It is possible to get real sugar in a soda these days (even at times other than Passover), but you have to go to Texas to do so:
Dublin Dr Pepper
Ann/John Lesser: there is a major difference between High Fructose Corn Syrup, and sugar.
Most sugar comes from beets, only a small percentage comes from canes. But it's a more natural, plant-based sugar than HFCS.
Splenda, HFCS, Aspartame, etc...are all dangerous, almost-drug like, chemicals that react in the body.
You can taste the difference between the plastic taste of a cola sweetened with HFCS, and one that is sweetened with cane, or beet sugar.
Sugar is bad period. I'm just saying the lesser of two evils is natural plant-based sugar that was up till recently, always used.
As for Mexicans.......the rate of obesity is a little under that of the United States........in terms of Mexico City. Once they come to the United States, of course their rate of obesity skyrockets.
Sugar is bad period, but HFCS/Splenda etc... is 20 times worse.
Peace, Maxine
Re the suburbs, why haven't the mommy-state Dems demanded that every town and suburb be required to install walkable sidewalks? That could take ten lbs each off a lot of us.
Being from Iowa, I can attest to the fact that High Fructose Corn Syrup does come from green growing plants. Lots and lots of them
Yeah, I think this reaction to corn syrup is weird. I remember 10 years ago when people acted like cane sugar was awful and high fructose corn syrup was the natural alternative. I remember saying to a very intelligent person believed this, "but it's still sugar." And she was all fructose, it's good for you, unlike sucrose. It's sugar processed from a plant, either way. Fear of corn is silly. Worrying about eating too many empty calories makes sense.
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