Low Income Leads to High Obesity Rates

     In a society where children can outweigh their parents, staggering rates of childhood death, diabetes, and other deadly diseases have been linked to obesity in America. Today, obesity is becoming a trend that many cannot prevent from spreading. Obesity is linked to more complex factors nowadays; it’s not just limited to eating unhealthy and lack of exercise. The economy, stress, income, and other issues have huge impacts on the eating habits and lifestyle of many individuals and their families. In particular, families with lower incomes seem to be the target audience for obesity. Lower income neighborhoods lack the necessary resources to provide local low-income residents with a variety of healthy foods at an affordable price. You won’t see a Whole Foods store in a neighborhood that barely has any middle class people living in it. What you will find is a local grocery with cheap snacks, limited options, and nutritionally compromised food. Individuals who have lower incomes have greater exposure to the marketing of obesity promoting products. Healthy food is often expensive; so many low-income families will limit themselves to one local grocery store that provides inexpensive unhealthy food, but still food nonetheless. Low-income homes may also be located in neighborhoods, which do not provide enough access to attractive physical activity resources. Higher income homes may have residential parks where people can walk, a local swimming pool where people can swim, and bike paths for people to ride their bikes, but a low income neighborhood will have less outlets to help advocate a healthy lifestyle. Low-income neighborhoods tend to be unsafe and the safety issue tends to make people in those regions engage in sedentary activities (i.e. watching television for 8 hours and being safe as opposed to running outside for 30 minutes and risk being involved in an altercation). Low-income families, including children, may also face high levels of stress resulting from the financial and emotional pressures of food insecurity, low-wage work, lack of access to health care, inadequate and long-distance transportation, poor housing, and potential neighborhood violence. Obesity, like many difficult issues in our current times, will not go away on it’s own. We need to integrate the lower-income end of the economic spectrum into a new realm of healthy living and the only way to do this is by giving them more affordable and accessible options.

http://www.science20.com/news_releases/study_low_income_equals_high_obesity