Reply #73: well until the last sentence there [View All]

[sui generis]

I was trying to figure out what the hell you were saying.

Now I know. Profound ignorance being that I don't agree that poor people in America are helpless to prevent becoming fat or that people in China would be fat if they didn't have to walk everywhere?

What's your point again?

Poor American workers can just as easily buy dried beans and onions and rice as any rich person, for the same amount. Choosing to go to a drive-through fast food place for a hamburger is done for convenience, not net worth. It is inconvenient to cook and prepare a meal regardless of your income bracket, and the ignorance here is presuming that anyone who has any money at all has a private chef and nutritionist apportioning out their dreadfully healthy meals for them. That's ignorance, and it appears to be yours. Sorry - you started, so I'll have to finish it.

For the most part, obese people in America are obese because they make poor eating choices, not because they are poor. Everyone expects a drive through fast food microwave instant meal for instant nutrition - it is not and has never been that way throughout human history. That's a recent unrealistic expectation, but the fact is that you can make the right choices even on a budget.

Nobody is making people on food stamps buy Coca Cola when they could as easily buy enough tea bags or even instant tea to make more than ten times the volume, AND control how much sugar they take in with their liquids. Nobody has EVER made the claim that anything that's not a food staple even remotely belongs in your grocery basket at the supermarket, regardless of your income.

I shop every week for my family - and 90 percent of what I get comes from the produce section. I don't buy soda, candy, cookies, chips, cakes, snacks, nothing. I do buy milk and yogurt and pick through the meat specials, avoid canned foods and package mixes, but I shop like a general store farmer more than a city slicker, and I can tell you I spend less at checkout than some people WITH food stamps are spending on orange soda, doritos, velveeta, microwave mac & cheese and fried chicken tv dinners. I buy fruit and veggies by the bag, go to farmer's markets, and when we do snack it's usually on a bowl of cherries or grapes, or whatever's in season.

Your post is judgemental and unreasonable. If you want something you have to work for it. If you want physical and nutritional health, for the most part, you have to work for it regardless of your income. People expect instant nutrition - there is no such thing.

Everyone burns calories at the same rate, and everyone stores calories more or less at the same rate, with tiny nods to metabolism here and there that again have nothing to do with income.

For the record, we are primarily speaking of American obesity, not subsistence level poverty in Somalia (or China). For the most part, we are fat because we make ourselves fat. Nobody else is doing it to us. Nobody else is to blame.