There is such a gap between how poor and rich children interact with
food that carries over to rest of their lives, it complicates our
understanding of why here in the United States, contrary
to international trends, poor people are far more prone to obesity
than their wealthier counterparts. Many have posited that it's not how
much poorer households are eating, but what they are eating that has
caused this trend. And there is plenty of reason to believe there is
truth to this—studies have shown,
after all, that lower income families choose substantially less healthy
foods than others. The harms of unhealthier diets, however, are all the
more nefarious when they're coupled with a fractured ability to
regulate eating.
But
the fact that the patterns exists steepens what we already know to be
an uphill climb for those born into poverty in the United States. The
tentacles of poverty touch many different aspects of people's lives.
Food is a particularly apt example—food inequality, whereby America's
wealthiest people eat well, while the country's poorest eat, poorly, is not only real, but worsening—but it's hardly the only one. Poverty has, for instance, been shown
to shackle those who are born into it, severely limiting their ability
to succeed in society—socially, academically, and financially.
Increasingly,
it seems the key to breaking the cycle of poverty might lie in
understanding that the gap begins to grow at a very early age, cementing
itself in ways that make it very difficult to untangle. And there are
few things as stark as the difference between how poor and rich kids
develop relationships with food.
