Obesity: The New Symptom of Poverty

Sarah Reyner
December 4, 2012
ENG 102
Chris Brunt

Precious, the main character of the 2009 Academy Award-winning film titled by the same
name, would ironically fall under the socioeconomic status of hungry even though she was a
severely obese African American teen. Providing her desperate want for food Precious is shown
wobbling down the streets of a ghetto-like community after thieving a family size bucket of fried
chicken from a fast food restaurant. Puddles of grease and remnants of fried skin blanketed her
plump checks and cascaded stains down the front of her white blouse following her brutish
devouring of the entire bucket, for an early morning breakfast. The repulsive amount of grease
that that she hastily inhaled came spewing out of her mouth just as promptly in a panicked
projectile into a public trash can. This offensive scene presents the epidemic that contradicts all
national trends and common logic: the high prevalence of obesity within low income regions.
The most hungry are essentially the most gluttonous. Even though Preciouss arteries were
prevented from being lubricated with a layer of lard, her battle with hunger and improper food
choices present the problem that experts refer to as the key bridge between hunger and obesity:
the notion that healthy foods are unaffordable and scarcity of nutritious food options in such
neighborhoods.
The increased prevalence of obesity and hunger in the same population seems
paradoxical. Even though its quite mind boggling and difficult to conceive, there have been a
multitude of studies done which have resulted in the identification of these trends by means of
statistics and numerical data. James Levine, of the American Diabetes Association, reported a
study in his article Poverty and Obesity in the U.S., that was conducted across 3,139 counties
nation wide which observed the correlation between poverty and obesity rates. The study refuted
international trends; occupants of the lowest income areas were at highest risk of being obese.

The research concluded that counties with poverty rates greater than 35 percent had obesity rates
145 percent greater than the more affluent counties.
(provide facts from HBO film)
Seven of the ten states with the highest poverty levels are among the ten states with the highest
obesity rates. Examples of poor neighborhoods with over voluptuous inhabitants are prevalent
and scattered throughout the country.
When peering through the eyes of the victims trapped in this vicious circle of hunger and
weight gain, the root of their problem seems lucid and justifiable, yet well-thought solutions for
them requires seeing the whole picture and acknowledging the issues level of complexity.
Imagine if you find yourself continuously hungry and face a daily battle to meet the minimal
recommended calorie intake. Of course you are going to eat what fills your belly, regardless of
the nutritional value. Even though there is a struggle to obtain enough food for satisfaction, if
one obtains this mindset, they uphold a high risk for substantial weight gain.
The American definition of hunger deviates from the popular depiction of hunger many
visualize: African famines, skeletal figures with holocaust-like demeanors, and babies with
inflated and swollen bellies. The difference between the third-world hunger we witness through
the eyes of media and the hunger that American citizens suffer from is the category of
malnutrition that each falls under. The bone protruding bodies in underdeveloped nations that we
commonly associate with hunger is classified as calorie-malnutrition whereas the hunger in the
U.S. is nutrient-malnutrition.

It boils down to obtaining either minuscule amounts of food that

do not meet energy requirements verses irregularly receiving the desired amount and type of
food at given times. These disparities reveal the obvious physical differences between the boneprotruding stick figures in impoverished countries compared to the over-satiated round bodies in

the U.S.. The hungriest people in America today, statistically speaking, are not bone-thin skinny,
instead they raise speculation because they are excessively fat.
The struggle for food in the U.S. is not necessarily true hunger. In 2006 the United States
Department of Agriculture dropped the term hunger in favor of food insecurity in order to
provide such distinctions. The USDA defines food insecurity as [households that are uncertain
of having], or unable to acquire, enough food to satisfy of all their members because they had
insufficient money or other resources for food. According to their research, over 14.9 percent
of the population, or 17.9 million U.S. households fall into this category. Food-insecure
households include those with low food security or very low food security. The USDA defines
low food security as consisting of food-insecure households that obtained enough food to avoid
substantially disrupting their eating patterns or reducing food intake by using a variety of coping
strategies, such as eating less varied diets, participating in Federal food assistance programs, or
getting emergency food from community food pantries. Very low food security includes foodinsecure households, where normal eating patterns of one or more household members have been
disrupted and food intake was reduced at times during the year because they had insufficient
money or other resources for food. Even though low food security is most prevalent affecting
11 million households and 9.2 percent of the population, very low security follows closely with
5.7 percent affecting 6.8 million households.
When living on a limited budget, it is a natural tendency to stretch funds by
buying cheap processed food. Even though such bargain food buys temporarily satisfy
bank accounts, the unintended physical harm that arises when unnatural ingredients
enter the digestive system substantially outweighs the perk of saving a few pennies.
Calorie-rich, sugary, and processed foods are what most people result to if they are

falling short on cash. The detriment of such decisions are difficult to argue because one
can fill up on 1,200 calories of cookies or potato chips for $1, but only receive 250
calories from carrots for that $1. (A food stamp paradox) If you were hungry, what
would you buy?
The carrot and cookie comparison is sadly the only thought process that streams
through most thoughts when making food decisions. Such narrow-mindedness has
played a huge role in the high body masses in poor neighborhoods. Even though high
percentages of impoverished obesity is a perplexing puzzle that seems impossible to
piece together, there are prevention solutions should already be incorporated in to daily
life.
As we pass from one generation to the next, the kitchens stovetops, knives,
mixers, and ovens accumulate a layer of dust while the microwave is worked to a point
of exhaustion. Cooking has transgressed to a forgotten art form from one generation to
the next as families increasingly rely on prepared convenience meals that are ready at
the chime of the microwave timer. TV dinners and instant meals do save time and effort but
deprave many of the benefits that cooking provides. The argument that processed foods are the
thriftiest choices has led many families to believe that there is no alternative options, which
initiates a tug-of-war between their physical and economic health. Blaming junk food
purchasing on a tight budget can be avoided through the education of elementary culinary skills,
yet most kitchens remained abandoned.

Lynette Brown, a program assistant for the Expanded Food and Nutrition Education
Program at OSU, teaches a nutrition, cooking, shopping, and meal planning class to those who
receive federal food aid. I can give somebody a zucchini and they will say, Thank you very
much, and it will rot in their refrigerator and they will throw it away, she recalls while
explaining the common trend of cooking and nutrition ignorance. Throughout the 42 years of the
classs existence, culinary knowledge has been observed to lack most in what she refers to as
generational poverty, people who grew up in poverty and are still living there. She identifies
their differences as she states The folks who found themselves newly poor, do not take the
assistance card and buy a soda at the gas station. But a lot of other people do.
Someone classified as food insecure that buys a jumbo bag of cheesy puffs is equivalent
to those that use food stamps to buy a pack of gum. Each satisfies some unnecessary need,
however neither serve a beneficial nutritional purpose. Against popular belief, potato chips and
cookies are not always the cheapest option and certainly rank at the bottom regarding nutrition.
Stretching the monthly food budget is not an easy task. Those labeled as food insecure typically
qualify for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly referred to as food
stamps. According to the Federal Nutrition Assistance Program a family receives an average of
$133.85 a month in aid. It is a difficult task for even the most intense coupon clipper to stretch
this budget on any kind of manufactured product. However, what many fail to realize is that
preparing a meal instead of buying it provides a surplus of benefits, saving money being one of
them.
Beans and rice are two bargain ingredients that are nutritious and satisfying, however
people do not know how to prepare them into a meal. By learning three key lessons of meal

planning, shopping, and preparing families on low budgets will be able to use such ingredients as
a medium to create tasty, nutritional, satisfying, and cost effective meals.
Without exercising more or changing your diet to adjust the 790 calories you just
consumed from the KFC chicken pot pie you had for lunch, you could easily join the obesity
club. You did not have to put forth any effort to make this meal and only sacrificed three dollars,
but you gained an unnecessary amount of empty calories and received little to no nutritional
satisfaction. Resorting to the quick and easy methods of obtaining foods

Manually preparing meals promotes many unrecognized benefits, having saving money

South Bronx, New York is a place with some of the most severe hunger related
issues and the countrys leading capitals of obesity. According to Andrew Rundle, and
epidemiologist at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University, the
residents have an 85 percent higher risk of being obese than people in the neighboring
community of Manhattan. Following the trends of the rest of the impoverished regions
of the U.S., food