Farmageddon said:
Now the poverty line depends on number of people and age on a household and I have no idea about the costs of living in the USA, but for a single, under 65 years old person, 130% of it comes to roughly U$ 14,750 (using 2010 data). So my question is, does this strata take in a lot of people who actually would have money for non-financially-optimum food? What I mean is, are a good percentage of the people included in "130% of the poverty line" actually capable of forfeiting cheaper alternatives in favour of something more akin to the average american diet, including consumption levels, maybe making use of cheaper versions of similar products? Cause the results of the paper (although I just skimmed through it, so I might be completely wrong) would make me guess so, which would actually render the paper pretty irrelevant in the discussion of healthy food avaibility for poor people. If we suppose you can eat healthier and cheaper, than they're making the same kind of decision other americans do, because they're not that poor to actually be forced to eat a cheaper variation. Other factors (as working thigther hours or more physically draining jobs or whatever you can come up) might help steer them in this direction. For similar reasons they might be eating in a similar way to the rest of the people if we suppose healthier to be necessarily more expensive or at the same level of the standard american's way of eating. Then again, I have no idea about costs of living and people's choice in the USA, that's the reason I'm asking. But I think it makes sense. I mean, the poverty line probably takes into account an expenditure on food that's not optimal, but based on statistics from the country, and the extra income of people in this group would facilitate this hipothesys even more (even though I don't know the distribution of income in the USA, I venture to guess after some point close to the poverty lines further drops in income become less and less likely). Anyway, I think a much more interesting study for the discussion in this topic would be one taking the lower incomes you can find where people are usually not malnourished and comparing that to the rest, or possibly use continuos data. |
Well A, I'd point out again the cheapest food actually IS the healthiest food.
Outside which... I think your question would be best answered by the next sentence.
"I use this income cutoff primarily because it matches the gross-income
eligibility criterion for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the largest of the
Federal food assistance programs"
So it's poor enough that the government feels like it needs to give you money to make sure you can afford food. Additionally, while nonsignificant, it's actually the rich who show a slightly higher amount of "overweight" making it seem likely if the higher income group was causeing a problem that it MIGHT actually be that it's bringing up the percentage of poor fat people.
The poor can't afford fast food every day, and Mcdonalds doesn't take Food Stamps.
