An outdated image: Poor people used to be thin
Posted
Dec 28 2007, 04:16 PM
by
Karen Datko
Rating:
Philip Brewer of partner blog Wise Bread has a lasting memory of a poor family he encountered many years ago. Their clothes were worn, their car was old, and they were skinny. "It's unusual to see that now," he writes. "The new face of poverty is fat." The fact is that poor people buy the least expensive source of calories they can find, Brewer says. As we've noted here before, it's often junk food. If you eat packaged, high-calorie food until you're satisfied, you are going to be fat, Brewer adds -- and, we might add, prone to diabetes and other health problems associated with obesity. He offers some possible solutions.
People have to get back to eating "real food," not food "full of partially hydrogenated soybean oil and high-fructose corn syrup." He says, "Ninety percent of what you bring home from the grocery store shouldn't have an ingredients list -- it should be ingredients." Of course, nutrition education has to be a part of this, and so does cooking, he writes. That doesn't have to be difficult. Filling a slow cooker with on-sale ingredients you find at the store is a great alternative to fast food.
