Will The Economy Fatten Us Up?

I subscribe to my health central on the internet and one of the recent articles posed the question: Will Americans put on recession pounds?

There is speculation among health experts that as we spend less on food while the economy is in a downturn we may pick up weight in the process. They point to a number of studies that link unhealthy eating and weight problems to low income. One place to cut expenses is on more costly items like fresh fruit, vegetables, whole grains and fish, and load up on starches, sugars and saturated fats.

Now that is an interesting proposition. This struck a chord within me as I remembered my childhood, and beginning life on my own. I recall as a child, that my parents were on a tight budget and I remember that many of the weekly meals consisted of the staples of meat and potatoes, and an ample supply of fillers, or starches to supplement the vegetables. We weren’t allowed to have a lot of sweets, because that was a luxury item.

I remember when I left home to attend College, Five of us pooled our resources and rented a house close to school. I worked at a grocery store at the time. In the morning when the store rotated the stock, we would have to get rid of the outdated bread and pastry. It would be loaded into a shopping cart and the employees could buy it for a few dollars a basket.

It was my mission to make sure that I was in line first, and to “Be the bread winner” for the house. When times were really tight, that became the groceries for the week, and we were glad to have it. Someone else would pick up the PBJ or lunch meat, and we thought we were rich.

Going out for dinner meant dining at one of the finer restaurants in the city named “Whytie Castilles”. I do not recall the exact spelling of the establishment, but I do remember the prices were within our budgets.

The research at the University of Washington in Seattle has highlighted the link between income and obesity. The obesity rate is 5 times more in the low-income zip codes around the area, and studies in California suggested that a 10 percent rise in poverty translates into about a 6 percent increase in obesity among adults.

In the past 10 years new diabetes cases have increased by around 90 percent and nine of the 10 states with the highest rates of new cases of diabetes were in the South, a region with huge pockets of poverty and glaring income disparities.

We already lead the world in obesity, and if more people fall on tough times, they will tend to eat as cheaply as they can.

Eileen Kennedy of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy commented that when your income is limited, the first area you address is having enough calories in your diet, and cheap sources of calories tend to be high in total fats and sugars.

So I am agreement that it is entirely possible that more we could conclude that poverty translates to obesity, but I also believe that it doesn’t have to be that way. There are other ways to supplement our diets, and remain in good health. We need to keep in mind during the tough times to balance diet, exercise and nutrition in order to maintain our health.

It is possible to eat healthy and still be affordable by remembering how things were back in the 1930s.

Consider affordable but nutrient-rich foods like ground beef, beans, milk, nuts, cheese, carrots, potatoes, canned tomatoes, soups, and rice, As an adjunct to those staples there is a wide range of nutritional supplements available online that can help pick up the slack.