[...] over-indulgences. Check out some empirical evidence from some of the experts at The Simple Dollar, Get Rich Slowly and Frugal Dad. Frugal Dad tackles another very key aspect of practicing temperance – contentment. [...]

-People go on government assistance and in most states, that controls what you can and can’t buy. Premium foods are not available in many states on their assistance programs, leading to a less healthy lifestyle.

-Stress is high for poor people, which leads to weight gain.

-Poor people don’t have the money to spend on gyms.

-The poor tend to be undereducated, and being educated about what foods are good and which are bad is part of that. Some people probably don’t even understand their caloric intake vs. caloric burn.

-Next time you fix a healthy meal, calculate the cost of it. Chances are, it cost 2 to 10 times what an unhealthy meal would have cost. Healthy foods are more expensive, there’s no doubt about that. Fix a meal representing all the food groups, then compare that to a $2 microwave dinner or a can of Ravioli, which is what poor people buy because they can’t afford the fresh foods.

-Ever heard of the “freshman 15″ when entering college? I gained some weight through college because I survived on a part-time job while I was going to school full-time. When I was in college, there was NO way I could have afforded a nice healthy meal every day or even once a week. That was way out of my price range. Thankfully, now that I have a good job, I can afford healthy foods and I have lost most of the weight. I most definitely attribute most of the weight gain to simply not being able to afford healthy foods. I remember scarfing down food when we would have parties at work or church pot-luck dinners because there was no telling when the next time would be that I would have meat and vegetables.

You people really shouldn’t be so quick to judge.

Furthermore, the study does not seem to account for socio-economic factors, it is a simplistic study. It is true that lower-income people have a more positive correlation to BMI/obesity in Western societies.

This article also shows how diabetes, a disease associated to high carbohydrate diets, is linked to lower income. The reason for this is that people with lower income often seek less-expensive, more calorie-dense foods which are not as healthy and are low in fiber.

It would be much more informative to compare net worth vs. BMI for people with similar jobs, education, race, marital status. The only way to tell how much body mass matters is to make body mass the only variable in the comparison.

Social science can’t necessarily find cause and effect, but it CAN do better than that chart.

For whatever it’s worth, I’m not in the age cohort of that graph (5 years too young) but my BMI has been in the “obese” category all my life–and my net worth is nearly three times that of the median value for the “normal” grouping.

-Among cultural/ethnic groups that historically have had lower socioeconomic status, cooking methods like deep-frying became widely used because they made the cheapest cuts of meat, like chicken feet, more palatable.

-People with lower incomes may have to work more hours, increasing their reliance on fast food rather than healthier home-cooked meals.

-The produce at grocery stores in low-income areas is, to put it bluntly, skeezy. Organic produce and gym memberships are upper-middle-class priviledges.

Also, I wanted to say that Damon Darlin is the man.

The poor basically can’t get enough food to even stop being underweight.

I believe that for some people, obesity is a physical manifestation of mental defect, and I’m not talking about Prader-Willi syndrome or any other hypothalamus disorder. Three of the seven deadly sins connotate fatness. But anyway, that’s all a can of worms I’m not about to delve into, but maybe someone will read your blog, see this comment, and perform research that leads them to a Nobel Prize

[...] Save Money If you think about the food you eat when you’re in a pinch, you often pay for the price of convenience. You can spend 2-3 times what you’d normally pay for the same items. Another common theme among quick and easy foods is they’re not very healthy. As JD talks about today there are definite costs of being overweight, tens of thousands of dollars over a lifetime. [...]