It’s often cheaper to buy fastfood than healthy food
It is a fair point, being obese and poor can definitely be a a horrific feedback loop to get out of.
In developed countries anyways, you don’t really see it in places where food is scarce, of course.
This is just wrong, the tiny island nation of Nauru have a huge obesity problem as the only food they can get in any decent quantity are preprocessed food with very low nutritional value.
I don’t know about that. A combo meal at McDonald’s is inching closer to 15$ in a lot of places. You can go down to the grocery store and get a good amount of food for that much. Healthy doesn’t necessarily mean only the expensive organic, free range, non GMO whatever foods are worth eating.
It’s more than just the monetary investment though. It’s time and energy spent creating healthy meals, that if you’re working 12-14 hr days just becomes too much to handle.
It takes roughly 5 min and 1$ to scramble up a few eggs. It doesn’t need to take an hour to prepare a decent affordable meal at home.
It takes much more effort to make a healthy well-rounded meal than just scrambling up “a few eggs”. I’m happy you have enough time, energy, and physical ability to spend an hour making dinner, but a lot of people don’t.
Some have multiple jobs, kids, disabilities, ect. Others live in food deserts where it’s impossible—or at least very difficult—to find cheap, healthy food. Not to mention the people who were never taught how to cook, and would have to spend even more time, energy, (and very possibly wasted food) on learning how.
This is coming from someone who can and does cook cheap, healthy meals all of the time.
I’m not claiming to spend an hour making dinner. I haven’t ate fast food in a year mainly because it takes 20min waiting in line and costs way too much for junk unhealthy food. I often eat just scrambled eggs for meals because it is fast and easy. You sure as hell aren’t getting a balanced meal at a fast food chain. You can make excuses for eating that unhealthy junk all you want.
Gee, straw man, you somehow wrote an entire paragraph while ignoring literally all of my points 👍
The points keep changing. Went from cheaper to buy fast food to takes more effort to make food to it needs to be well rounded. The goal posts keep moving. It’s been my experience that it takes less time and money to make a healthy meal at home. I don’t know why that’s a problem to you.
I’m about to eat my fourth or fifth McDonald’s free double cheeseburger so far of this month just because someone on the local baseball team got a double and they give away a free one in the app to anyone who claims it in the state the next day.
With promotions and deals (which are pretty much always going on) it’s actually tough to get cheaper than eating fast food a lot of the time.
I wouldn’t say cheaper, but it’s definitely easier.
If time is money, than fastfood and processed foods are way cheaper than healthy options that require preparing and cleaning of pots/pans etc
Stopping to buy fast food vs making food in one go for several days would make the difference a lot smaller. If you order online, especially if you have a recurring order, then fast food again gains a lot.
Fast food implies prepared food. What healthy prepared food are you thinking of? It’s generally much cheaper. Ops post makes no sense. Poverty is not inversely proportional to weight at all
That and food deserts. A lot of poor places in the US lack easy access to nutritious food.
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You can still lose weight if you eat unhealthy shit. Like I know people that eat McDonald’s everyday yet they ain’t fat. While you don’t get all the necessary nutrients from fast food being unhealthy but not overweight is still better than being fat.
being unhealthy but not overweight is still better than being fat.
Why do you say that? I guess that “unhealthy” isn’t very specific and could mean a lot of things. But health issues that are caused by malnutrition can certainly be worse than being fat. It just depends on the individual situation, I would think.
I’d be surprised if that was actually true. I think what really matters is how much time and effort making your own food takes vs the speed and simplicity of buying fast food.
Price, time and effort can be minimized by making a large amount of the food in one guy that you eat for some days, but apparently some people hate eating the same food two (or more) days in a row, which, okay(?), I guess that’s one reason not to do it.
I got fat af when I was piss broke. When I could start to afford things other than carbs, the lbs starting going away.
I get there are people even more broke who can’t even afford rice, but don’t assume that being fat and being poor run contrary to each other. Shit food is cheap.
Not really. The cheapest food is often loaded with fat and sugar
Poverty is strongly correlated with obesity.
It’s easy to get. Healthy and nutritious food can be more costly, and being poor you have very limited amount of funds. It can take more effort to make and being poor, you might have much less time for yourself and have a physically or mentally pretty crushing job so less energy to prepare food. It might not be as satisfying for the brain as unhealthy food, and being poor thing might suck balls so you might not want to give that up and just want something good in your life that makes you a bit happier, even if it is not great for your body.
Last part is true for beer related weight gain too. And lot of it goes for having active and healthy lifestyle.
This.
Also, food deserts are a thing. Poor communities often don’t have access to good food, at all.
It’s expensive to be poor, and in this case the price is in one’s health.
No, it makes you fat on a nice white carb and grease diet. Let’s be realistic, we have calorie sufficiency in the developed world, it’s malnutrition in the face of excess calories that is the problem.
Yeah, no.
First: eating strictly healthy is more expensive than eating trash.
Second: Time. Poor people tend to have less of it available, which means that it’s harder to cook meals at home (which, in theory, should be cheaper to eat healthy). That same lake of time also makes exercise challenging.
Until you get to the point of poverty where you’re risking starvation, poor people are more likely to be overweight than people that are in better circumstances.
Sure healthier might be more expensive, but eating less energy isn’t more expensive.
If you consume less energy, but end up malnourished because you weren’t getting enough micronutrients, then you haven’t really come out ahead, have you? Rickets and scurvy ain’t cool.
Are there lots of nutrients in cheap food?
It’s incredibly easy to avoid scurvy.
Lots of calories from fats. Generally poor in micronutrients. There’s very good reasons that you’re supposed to eat lots of leafy vegetables. Multivitamins may stave off the worst effects of malnutrition, but the bioavailability of multivitamins is generally poor, e.g. you can take 100x the necessary daily amount of D3, and still have low levels of vitamin D if you aren’t getting enough time outside in sunlight.
You don’t have to eat perfectly all the time to avoid malnutrition, but if your diet is consistently high in fats and simple carbs–which is what really cheap food tends to be–you’re probably going to have chronic deficiencies.
So generally just decreasing food intake if you eat primarily bad food isn’t any more dangerous, because 0 nutrients - 0 nutrients is still 0 nutrients.
So here’s the kicker that SO many people forget to consider:
Jobs that pay shit in the U.S., and/or have garbage benefits, are often also the ones that make you move around an extraordinary amount, or have you on your feet for 8-10 hours with a 50/50 chance of being allowed to sit down for 15 minutes.
Both of the activities above illustrate one incredibly important unseen factor: Energy. Use more, eat more, spend more.
Do the math.
Moreover, in these highly stressful positions eating generates the elusive dopamine. Which combined with 15 minutes to shove food down your throat often means sugar, grease, and salt.
But if one gets fat then they obviously have excess energy.
And they also have access to aspects of being overweight that makes them more tired and less likely to enjoy activities, and more likely to get less nightly rest.
Basically, while less calories in than out is the way to go, it is rarely that simple for nearly everyone.
I think the other posters point is that ultimately it’s calories in, calories out. If you are getting fat, then eat fewer calories, which can be done by just eating less of the same exact thing you are currently eating.
Yeah, of course that’s the point. Mine is that not all calories are made equal and more expensive options, aside from obvious options, tend to fill more for [caloric] less, and provide additional nutrients that supplement the body in a way that supports a healthier lifestyle.
I feel like way too much emphasis is put on cost. It’s really easy to find cheap stuff to eat that is healthy. It’s almost all of the second point: it just takes time and effort.
If you want to eat quick with little effort, it’s cheaper to eat unhealthy. Which is ultimately the problem. But if you put in the time to cook for yourself, it isn’t. It’s almost more expensive to eat unhealthy if you spend time to prepare and cook.
And I think too many people use this as an excuse to eat unhealthy. “Well, it’s too expensive, so I might as well not even try. Let me go get McDonald’s.”
But if you put in the time to cook for yourself, it isn’t
I already addressed that, and you have conveniently ignored it. Cooking for yourself takes time. Time is a commodity that poor people often don’t have nearly enough of. If you’re poor, you’re going to tend to have a longer commute to get to work, and you’re more likely to have more than one job that you have to juggle a schedule around. You’re more likely to live in a neighborhood where you don’t have ready access to grocery stores at all.
When I lived in Chicago, the last neighborhood I lived in was poor/working class. The closest real grocery store—not a corner store that had a couple of bananas and some slightly soft apples–was about two miles away. If I didn’t have a car, that would have been a pretty long walk, or a 30 minute bus ride with one transfer. Public transit from where I lived to where i worked? About an hour and a half one way, by bus, train, and then a 2nd bus. With an 8.5 hour day, that means that I’m away from home a minimum of 11.5 hours. If I can get up, grab coffee, get a shower, and be out the door in one hour, that’s 12.5 hours for my day so far. When I get home, I still have daily cleaning, laundry, etc. Best case scenario, if I don’t want to get anything else done in a day, that’s 3.5 hours at the end of the day before I have to be asleep. If I’d had a second job instead of coming straight home, well, there goes sleep and any time to do general daily housework. I’m certainly not going to have time to go to the gym, or take an hour run in the morning.
I made gyudon for myself tonight; it took about an hour and a half between prep time, cooking, and clean up, give or take. I used top round (it was cheap at Costco, and is very lean). Between all the ingredients I used–the top round roast, onions, rice, sake, soy sauce, hondashi, togarashi, ginger, and eggs–I probably spent about as much as a super-sized meal at McDonals, but it took me 85 minutes more time. And that’s a pretty simple meal.
you have conveniently ignored it. Cooking for yourself takes time.
You read only the first 2 sentences of my post, and accused me of ignoring something that I explicitly addressed and agreed with in the third. You could have saved yourself all of that time writing if you had just not, hypocritically, ignored most of my post.
I think that you’re talking around the problem.
There simply isn’t time for most poor people to spend much, if any, time cooking, because they often have so many other demands on their time. It’s not an excuse to eat unhealthy food, they just don’t have the realistic option to do otherwise.
I think that you’re talking around the problem.
You led with “it’s too expensive.” This was your primary point. Now, in multiple points, you focused on time. A point I’ve explicitly agreed with now twice (and now, twice, you’ve attempted to argue that I’m not making this point. I’m quite dumbfounded by this, actually).
It’s you who originally talking around the problem by focusing on price. I challenged your primary point because I believe (as I’ve seen it myself) people use it to justify their laziness. And I’m not talking about not having time or being exhausted, but simply throwing their hands up claiming it’s too expensive to eat healthy, and using that as an excuse to eat like absolute shit.
“Expense” isn’t just money. Everything has a price. Everything. Some things cost more than a person can afford.
Except from the context we both realize that this is not what you meant, because you clearly separated out expense and time into two separate categories. If you meant expense to cover both time and what most people mean when they colloquially use the term expense, why did you repeat it?
We both know what you meant. Why are you trying to pretend otherwise?
Not really true, in fact starvation is so rare that for the first time in human history more people are dying of obesity related maladies than of starvation or deficiency of some kind.
The poor have never been so well fattened up in history, we’ve some the fuck how overcorrected, they’re not failing to find bread anymore, they’re taking to well note that the twinkies are cheaper for the calorie and more available at quantity for a standard sized family.
But, the poor people are the fattest ones.
OP is stuck in the XIXth century (which is valid, I’m not century shaming!).
Depends on what you call poor.
Yeah, probably taking America poor, not Africa poor.
You have to be really poor to lose weight because of it. Cheaper food is usually high in calories and low in nutrition.
I remember detoxing from alcohol and I could not even stand the smell of food for days and weeks. I felt like it will always be like that and I would never be able to eat more than 3 spoons a day. It felt like I would never have problems with my weight again.
So my weight loss tip is to just become an alcoholic and then stop drinking alcohol, you’ll lose a crapton of weight, problem solved!
most poor people have higher BMIs than wealthy people on average. Poverty is far more likey to make you fat…in USA anyway
Not really, because it’s easier to get high carb crap food. Most of what food shelves have that isn’t produce is carbs and sugar.
I’m diabetic and cannot get the ozempic I am prescribed with because there isn’t enough because of people that want to lose a few kg
Extreme poverty definitely, but if you’re just below the poverty line then sugary foods are typically still cheap enough to buy.
I’ve had this experience; the poverty, not ozempic. I didn’t have a job first year of college and basically starved. My BMI was under 18. Everyone said my eyes looked sunken.
I takes abject poverty to lose weight though. Carbs are cheap and highly addicting. Poverty often brings a high bmi but poor nutrition.
Self loathing works great too
