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Honestly, there are many reasons… Poverty is a huge factor. Highly processed foods are usually the cheapest and most convenient option. And sometimes a soda can be cheaper to purchase than water. Also, school budgets are usually funded by property taxes, so areas in poverty have significantly degraded educational programs and facilities.
The poor education levels mean that people rarely learn about the impacts of high sugar diets on the body. People will feed their child a high sugar diet starting as early as a 2 years old. I’ve seen a document where a woman was feeding their toddler Mt dew out of a baby bottle…
Advertising techniques play a big role here too. Foods labeled as nutritious are actually just pumped full of sugar. Foods like yogurt, “bread”, granola bars, cereals, or anything with a sauce in it.
On top of all that, Americans have an extremely sedentary lifestyle. From sitting in cubicles to sitting in cars, then finally to the couch. The most walking people do is from the parking lot to the store/building they are going to.
I’d like to add that people think eating fat makes you fat, so there are a ton of products marketed as low fat but are full of sugar instead. In some cases the low fat product is worse for you than the regular one.
What’s crazy is that when I was a kid, the poor were generally healthier. Diets for poor people included a lot of beans and rice, and not much else, and rich people’s diets consisted of richer foods, with sauces, butter, etc… Poor people often worked labor intensive jobs which kept them fit, while rich people sat at desks and then lazed by the pool after work. Now poor people tend to eat fast food quite a bit more often than people with more money, and the upper class are generally more likely to engage in fitness routines.
Yeah that’s crazy. To me high sugar diets being the cause of obesity seems like common knowledge. It seems like these educational failings must be at some level intentional considering the US does better than other countries on education that have better obesity ratings and are also more impoverished to me. But I’m just going based on numbers I just looked up here. The added sugar in absolutely everything in North America seems like more of the culprit here to me. I live in Canada and our rating is about one in four where the US is close to 50 percent. I feel like we have similar issues with our food but that’s a significant difference in obesity. Our cities and towns are designed to be more walkable for sure, but we still don’t compare to places like Europe.
there was a study done in the 50s that pretty much decided US health policy for decades that said fat is bad and makes you fat. the reaction to this was for companies to remove fat from their products to claim it’s low fat but in order to maintain taste they replaced it with sugar. this proliferated all food products and being coupled with both parents working 40+ hours a week caused a lot of families to fill fridges with highly processed foods with “healthy” sugar/fat levels that could be prepared easily. tie in the fact that there’s no time to exercise with the fact that most Americans drive to destinations, it becomes easy to read articles that x is the cause of obesity that it took a long time to realize what the real problems are.