There are two factors here.
The first is that
childhood obesity appears to be declining.
This is obvious enough; when I was a child my parents gave me Kraft Mac&Cheese every single day for dinner. They didn't grow up in the kind of environment they found themselves in when raising children, and thus had no idea what they were doing. It was true for most of my peers. Now that my peers are having children, they do not feed their kids that garbage and start them early on whole oats, fresh fruits and vegetables, etc.
The other thing is that obesity is almost a code for poverty.
Obesity by state:
Poverty by state:
Though a few years old, it seems unlikely that the Feds are wrong in studying this:
NCBI wrote:How is poverty linked to obesity? It has been suggested that individuals who live in impoverished regions have poor access to fresh food. Poverty-dense areas are oftentimes called “food deserts,” implying diminished access to fresh food (7). However, 43% of households with incomes below the poverty line ($21,756) are food insecure (uncertain of having, or unable to acquire, sufficient food) (7). Accordingly, 14% of U.S. counties have more than 1 in 5 individuals use the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The county-wide utility of the program, as expected, correlates with county-wide poverty rates (r = 0.81) (7). Thus, in many poverty-dense regions, people are in hunger and unable to access affordable healthy food, even when funds avail. The double-edged sword of hunger and poor availability of healthy food is, however, unlikely to be the only reason as to why obesity tracks with poverty.
There is evidence of the association between sedentariness, poor health, obesity, diabetes, other metabolic diseases, and premature death (8). Sedentary individuals move 2 h per day less than active individuals and expend less energy, and they are thereby prone to obesity, chronic metabolic disease, and cardiovascular death (9). More than half of county-to-county variance in obesity can be accounted for by variance in sedentariness (Fig. 1B). Overall, the poorest counties have the greatest sedentariness (Fig. 1C) and obesity.
Several reasons may explain why people living in poor counties are less active. One reason may be that violence tracks with poverty, thereby preventing people from being active out-of-doors. Similarly, parks and sports facilities are less available to people living in poor counties (5), and people who live in poverty-dense regions may be less able to afford gym membership, sports clothing, and/or exercise equipment. There are multiple individual and environmental reasons to explain why poverty-dense counties may be more sedentary and bear greater obesity burdens. What is unknown is whether reversing poverty would reverse sedentariness and obesity. It is an urgent matter to address—both rates of childhood obesity and poverty are concomitantly on the rise (1,2).
The link between obesity, inactivity, and poverty may be too costly to ignore because obesity-associated chronic disease already accounts for 70% of U.S. health costs. For instance, counties with greatest rates of poverty have greatest diabetes rates too (Fig. 1D). In 2009, 27% of people living in the U.S. with annual household outcomes below $25,000 were uninsured (no private or government health insurance). This cohort represents, 15,483,000 people, ∼5 million with obesity and ∼1 million with diabetes (10). With expanded health care provision in the U.S., the potential incremental health care costs of diabetes alone for these individuals approximates $9 billion/year, or $9,000 per new diabetes patient/year (11). There are, however, additional economic factors that may impact the cost-return equation, for instance, 1) potential savings associated with diabetes prevention, 2) the opportunity to develop and deliver high-quality and low-cost diabetes care to poverty-dense communities, 3) the health cost savings associated with the prevention of diabetes complications in patients with diabetes, and 4) the potential lost tax revenues associated with disability (12). Add these figures to the health care costs of other chronic obesity-associated diagnoses such as hypertension, hyperlipidemia, sleep disorders, arthritis, cardiovascular disease, and asthma and the projected health care costs of poverty increase.
Halting U.S. diabesity epidemic and curtailing its health cost may necessitate addressing poverty.
This is, after all, common sense. If you are a kid with parents that work a lot (or aren't there) and can't afford some kind of day care or after school activity, you're going to go right for pop tarts to eat after school because they're cheap and taste good.
If you're in a place where the closest thing to a grocery store is a 7/11 instead of a Whole Foods (to take the other extreme) you're going to be eating a bunch of pizza because it's $5 for an entire pizza at 7/11 where the only produce they have might be some eggs from a questionable source.
But, connected with the basic education—I think that's largely done and it's going to take a generation or two to even out. I still fucking love Kraft Mac & Cheese, and I should fucking hate something I ate so much of. I have to remind myself not to spend a dollar to have that mixed with tuna and some string cheese to make it gooey—and instead spend the extra money to get beans and lean chicken and some other things to cook in a crockpot to serve with some kind of veg during the day. Still not great, but certainly better than what I was raised on.
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And then there's the other side to the coin. As mentioned, giant international corporations make a LOT of money from this junk. The fact that I still want to eat Mac & Cheese is a miracle of science. Food that you can eat but not get filled with is too. They need you to keep eating in order to up their profits. Even if you're eating carrots and hummus all the time, they're going to find a way to make it more addictive and more expensive to underline their profits.
Case in point, pay more for the pit removed from an avocado:
It's a big enough part of the economy that we should legitimately fret about what they'd do if everyone did get more woke about what they were eating.
I know someone that works for the FDA and they are virtually not allowed to control food and drugs any more because to put a new regulation on something would mean getting rid of two regulations about some other amount of foodstuff. They've been looking for ways to get around this, but even really old laws are written in such a way that declassifying something that we used to think about milk 100 years ago could mean that milk isn't, "milk," any more than "white paint" is legally milk. So they're on their hands waiting for a new administration while the companies go to work...
...And the house already wins, capitalism must be overthrown and so on and so forth.
Alis Volat Propriis; Tiocfaidh ár lá; Proletarier Aller Länder, Vereinigt Euch!