It’s often cheaper to buy fastfood than healthy food
It is a fair point, being obese and poor can definitely be a a horrific feedback loop to get out of.
In developed countries anyways, you don’t really see it in places where food is scarce, of course.
I don’t know about that. A combo meal at McDonald’s is inching closer to 15$ in a lot of places. You can go down to the grocery store and get a good amount of food for that much. Healthy doesn’t necessarily mean only the expensive organic, free range, non GMO whatever foods are worth eating.
It’s more than just the monetary investment though. It’s time and energy spent creating healthy meals, that if you’re working 12-14 hr days just becomes too much to handle.
It takes roughly 5 min and 1$ to scramble up a few eggs. It doesn’t need to take an hour to prepare a decent affordable meal at home.
I’m about to eat my fourth or fifth McDonald’s free double cheeseburger so far of this month just because someone on the local baseball team got a double and they give away a free one in the app to anyone who claims it in the state the next day.
With promotions and deals (which are pretty much always going on) it’s actually tough to get cheaper than eating fast food a lot of the time.
That and food deserts. A lot of poor places in the US lack easy access to nutritious food.
If time is money, than fastfood and processed foods are way cheaper than healthy options that require preparing and cleaning of pots/pans etc
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I’d be surprised if that was actually true. I think what really matters is how much time and effort making your own food takes vs the speed and simplicity of buying fast food.
Price, time and effort can be minimized by making a large amount of the food in one guy that you eat for some days, but apparently some people hate eating the same food two (or more) days in a row, which, okay(?), I guess that’s one reason not to do it.
You can still lose weight if you eat unhealthy shit. Like I know people that eat McDonald’s everyday yet they ain’t fat. While you don’t get all the necessary nutrients from fast food being unhealthy but not overweight is still better than being fat.
being unhealthy but not overweight is still better than being fat.
Why do you say that? I guess that “unhealthy” isn’t very specific and could mean a lot of things. But health issues that are caused by malnutrition can certainly be worse than being fat. It just depends on the individual situation, I would think.
I got fat af when I was piss broke. When I could start to afford things other than carbs, the lbs starting going away.
I get there are people even more broke who can’t even afford rice, but don’t assume that being fat and being poor run contrary to each other. Shit food is cheap.
Not really. The cheapest food is often loaded with fat and sugar
It’s easy to get. Healthy and nutritious food can be more costly, and being poor you have very limited amount of funds. It can take more effort to make and being poor, you might have much less time for yourself and have a physically or mentally pretty crushing job so less energy to prepare food. It might not be as satisfying for the brain as unhealthy food, and being poor thing might suck balls so you might not want to give that up and just want something good in your life that makes you a bit happier, even if it is not great for your body.
Last part is true for beer related weight gain too. And lot of it goes for having active and healthy lifestyle.
This.
Also, food deserts are a thing. Poor communities often don’t have access to good food, at all.
It’s expensive to be poor, and in this case the price is in one’s health.
No, it makes you fat on a nice white carb and grease diet. Let’s be realistic, we have calorie sufficiency in the developed world, it’s malnutrition in the face of excess calories that is the problem.
Yeah, no.
First: eating strictly healthy is more expensive than eating trash.
Second: Time. Poor people tend to have less of it available, which means that it’s harder to cook meals at home (which, in theory, should be cheaper to eat healthy). That same lake of time also makes exercise challenging.
Until you get to the point of poverty where you’re risking starvation, poor people are more likely to be overweight than people that are in better circumstances.
I feel like way too much emphasis is put on cost. It’s really easy to find cheap stuff to eat that is healthy. It’s almost all of the second point: it just takes time and effort.
If you want to eat quick with little effort, it’s cheaper to eat unhealthy. Which is ultimately the problem. But if you put in the time to cook for yourself, it isn’t. It’s almost more expensive to eat unhealthy if you spend time to prepare and cook.
And I think too many people use this as an excuse to eat unhealthy. “Well, it’s too expensive, so I might as well not even try. Let me go get McDonald’s.”
But if you put in the time to cook for yourself, it isn’t
I already addressed that, and you have conveniently ignored it. Cooking for yourself takes time. Time is a commodity that poor people often don’t have nearly enough of. If you’re poor, you’re going to tend to have a longer commute to get to work, and you’re more likely to have more than one job that you have to juggle a schedule around. You’re more likely to live in a neighborhood where you don’t have ready access to grocery stores at all.
When I lived in Chicago, the last neighborhood I lived in was poor/working class. The closest real grocery store—not a corner store that had a couple of bananas and some slightly soft apples–was about two miles away. If I didn’t have a car, that would have been a pretty long walk, or a 30 minute bus ride with one transfer. Public transit from where I lived to where i worked? About an hour and a half one way, by bus, train, and then a 2nd bus. With an 8.5 hour day, that means that I’m away from home a minimum of 11.5 hours. If I can get up, grab coffee, get a shower, and be out the door in one hour, that’s 12.5 hours for my day so far. When I get home, I still have daily cleaning, laundry, etc. Best case scenario, if I don’t want to get anything else done in a day, that’s 3.5 hours at the end of the day before I have to be asleep. If I’d had a second job instead of coming straight home, well, there goes sleep and any time to do general daily housework. I’m certainly not going to have time to go to the gym, or take an hour run in the morning.
I made gyudon for myself tonight; it took about an hour and a half between prep time, cooking, and clean up, give or take. I used top round (it was cheap at Costco, and is very lean). Between all the ingredients I used–the top round roast, onions, rice, sake, soy sauce, hondashi, togarashi, ginger, and eggs–I probably spent about as much as a super-sized meal at McDonals, but it took me 85 minutes more time. And that’s a pretty simple meal.
you have conveniently ignored it. Cooking for yourself takes time.
You read only the first 2 sentences of my post, and accused me of ignoring something that I explicitly addressed and agreed with in the third. You could have saved yourself all of that time writing if you had just not, hypocritically, ignored most of my post.
Sure healthier might be more expensive, but eating less energy isn’t more expensive.
If you consume less energy, but end up malnourished because you weren’t getting enough micronutrients, then you haven’t really come out ahead, have you? Rickets and scurvy ain’t cool.
Are there lots of nutrients in cheap food?
It’s incredibly easy to avoid scurvy.
So here’s the kicker that SO many people forget to consider:
Jobs that pay shit in the U.S., and/or have garbage benefits, are often also the ones that make you move around an extraordinary amount, or have you on your feet for 8-10 hours with a 50/50 chance of being allowed to sit down for 15 minutes.
Both of the activities above illustrate one incredibly important unseen factor: Energy. Use more, eat more, spend more.
Do the math.
Moreover, in these highly stressful positions eating generates the elusive dopamine. Which combined with 15 minutes to shove food down your throat often means sugar, grease, and salt.
I think the other posters point is that ultimately it’s calories in, calories out. If you are getting fat, then eat fewer calories, which can be done by just eating less of the same exact thing you are currently eating.
