Is obesity linked to poverty?

Poverty is not the cause of obesity.

A few days ago, I read an article explaining why low income Mediterranean people have a rate of obesity much higher than the richer ones. I am not going to deny this fact, but I reject the reason that the author presented for this correlation.

He said that poorest people cannot afford to buy the products that might allow them to follow a Mediterranean Diet. This is a complete fallacy and a simple and easy personal deduction. Far from being a based conclusion, it is just an irresponsible opinion. I can show you that with the same amount of money spent in manufactured and junk food, you can feed more than fifty per cent people in the traditional Mediterranean Diet.

From my point of view, the reason is not just one. There are at least two. One is a low culture and the other one, laziness. It is very easy to live on junk food, bags of chips, manufactured omelets, pizzas and “paellas”, cans of industrial food, heaps of sweets and many others wrapped bakery products, French fries, chips or crisps, saturated and trans fat fried pop corn, sausages, lots of sodas, refined bread, and many other health “killers”. You don’t have to prepare the food, not even wash the dishes. Just throw away the wrapping, packaging, bottling, canning, including the paper cups and plates.

The lack of culture has two faces. The first one, that you live in the ignorance that you are losing your life. The second one, it is the incapacity to choose the right food and to prepare them in a healthy way. Mediterranean Diet is not based on a lot of sophisticated and very expensive products that the last years marketing have presented us. It is based on a very simple and humble set of products that have to be adequately chosen, prepared with love and time and consumed in family, not in front of a television set.

I could add some other social reasons to complete the link between “poverty” and obesity. Nevertheless, today I will add only one more. It is that more educated, not “richer” people, practice more physical exercise.