The obesity-hunger paradox

The perceptions of what hunger is in America have changed quite a bit since the 1970's. With Lyndon Johnson's Great Society came programs such as food stamps, and in their current form the they are known as the bridge card. With these programs, hunger was significantly reduced in America. Our poorest populations could use these food credits to afford enough food to allow for basic nutrition.

However, things have changed drastically since the creation of government food assistance in the 1970's. The United States convenience economy has created the fast food industry, as well as a plethora of quick-stop style shops that offer foods and snacks high in salt, sugar and fat. Obesity is an epidemic and our belts are growing at an alarming rate.

One could assume that food stamp assistance could be a fuel to to that obesity trend, as people in poor neighborhoods use food stamps to purchase pop, unhealthy snacks and other items that would inflame their health maladies.

So why not cut food stamps? Isn't the obesity epidemic evidence that Americans need a reduction in food, not a subsidized fund for unhealthy habits?

The situation is in fact far more complex than it first appears.

A recent article by the New York Times speaks to the obesity-hunger paradox that is a common experience in many American cities and communities:

WHEN most people think of hunger in America, the images that leap to mind are of ragged toddlers in Appalachia or rail-thin children in dingy apartments reaching for empty bottles of milk.

Once, maybe.

But a recent survey found that the most severe hunger-related problems in the nation are in the South Bronx, long one of the country’s capitals of obesity. Experts say these are not parallel problems persisting in side-by-side neighborhoods, but plagues often seen in the same households, even the same person: the hungriest people in America today, statistically speaking, may well be not sickly skinny, but excessively fat.

Call it the Bronx Paradox.

“Hunger and obesity are often flip sides to the same malnutrition coin,” said Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger. “Hunger is certainly almost an exclusive symptom of poverty. And extra obesity is one of the symptoms of poverty.

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Such studies present a different way to look at hunger: not starving, but “food insecure,” as the researchers call it (the Department of Agriculture in 2006 stopped using the word “hunger” in its reports). This might mean simply being unable to afford the basics, unable to get to the grocery or unable to find fresh produce among the pizza shops, doughnut stores and fried-everything restaurants of East Fordham Road.

Precious, the character at the center of the Academy Award-winning movie by the same name, would probably count as food insecure even though she is severely obese (her home, Harlem, ranks 49th on the survey’s list, with 24.1 percent of residents saying they lacked money for food in the previous year). There she is stealing a family-size bucket of fried chicken from a fast-food restaurant. For breakfast.

That it is greasy chicken, and that she vomits it up in a subsequent scene, points to the problem that experts call a key bridge between hunger and obesity: the scarcity of healthful options in low-income neighborhoods and the unlikelihood that poor, food-insecure people like Precious would choose them.

Full-service, reasonably priced supermarkets are rare in impoverished neighborhoods, and the ones that are there tend to carry more processed foods than seasonal fruits and vegetables. A 2008 study by the city government showed that 9 of the Bronx’s 12 community districts had too few supermarkets, forcing huge swaths of the borough to rely largely on unhealthful, but cheap, food.

In Kalamazoo, we have struggled to maintain a grocery store on the North Side Neighborhood that is economically sustainable. It doesn't make the need any less apparent. Our communities need healthy food options and we need to work together to create ways to generate these opportunities.

One final though from the article:

Poor people “often work longer hours and work multiple jobs, so they tend to eat on the run,” said Dr. Rundle of Columbia. “They have less time to work out or exercise, so the deck is really stacked against them.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/nyregion/14hunger.html?hpw