Nutritional inequality: 91% due to demand, only 9% due to availability (food deserts)

[Axulus]

We study the causes of “nutritional inequality”: why the wealthy tend to eat more healthfully than the poor in the U.S. Using two event study designs exploiting entry of new supermarkets and households’ moves to healthier neighborhoods, we reject that neighborhood environments have economically meaningful effects on healthy eating. Using a structural demand model, we find that exposing low-income households to the same food availability and prices experienced by high-income households would reduce nutritional inequality by only 9%, while the remaining 91% is driven by differences in demand. In turn, these income-related demand differences are partially explained by education, nutrition knowledge, and regional preferences. These findings contrast with discussions of nutritional inequality that emphasize supply-side issues such as food deserts.

https://web.stanford.edu/~diamondr/AllcottDiamondDube_FoodDeserts.pdf

So "food deserts" actually explain very little of lower income households eating habits.

 

[Trausti]

This can't be correct. It's my understanding that people lack individual agency and are instead victims of invisible structural oppression. Can't blame people for their own choices, ya know.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

This can't be correct... it is from the liberal collegiate institutions which aren't to be trusted.

 

[barbos]

So they confirmed that people who can't control themselves tend to be poor.

 

[Frikki]

So they confirmed that people who can't control themselves tend to be poor.

Yes like Russia all that natural wealth, still a shithole becaus you can´t resist voting in incompetent leaders.

 

[untermensche]

...we find that exposing low-income households to the same food availability and prices experienced by high-income households would reduce nutritional inequality by only 9%...

So they offered expensive food to people who never heard of it?

What does this prove exactly?

 

[repoman]

I wonder if there is a stress and insecurity issue involved.

I have seen events of home care workers (not much income and deal with sad isolated situations) and the people are fucking gross with how much they eat and have a desperate feel about them. It is a very tough job.

Maybe they are trying to get serotonin or other chemical levels up via food. Levels that primate in secure social positions have in surplus.

 

[untermensche]

I wonder if there is a stress and insecurity issue involved.

I have seen events of home care workers (not much income and deal with sad isolated situations) and the people are fucking gross with how much they eat and have a desperate feel about them. It is a very tough job.

Maybe they are trying to get serotonin or other chemical levels up via food. Levels that primate in secure social positions have in surplus.

There is addiction to the foods they have been eating for decades involved.

Carefully planned addiction, like cigarettes.

Doing everything short of killing people to increase the addiction.

 

[Juma]

This can't be correct. It's my understanding that people lack individual agency and are instead victims of invisible structural oppression. Can't blame people for their own choices, ya know.

Education and nutrition knowledge are structural factors.

 

[Axulus]

...we find that exposing low-income households to the same food availability and prices experienced by high-income households would reduce nutritional inequality by only 9%...

So they offered expensive food to people who never heard of it?

What does this prove exactly?

It shows the idea of "food deserts", or lack of fresh food availability, has very little effect on explaining nutritional inequality. There has been a lot of discussion about fresh food not being for sale in poorer neighborhoods as a reason to explain poorer eating habits. In other words, a supply side issue. The bigger factor is far more the demand side issue.

Price is a factor in the demand side but not the only one and may not necessarily be the primary one either. Preferences are also another factor.

 

[laughing dog]

The authors indicate that that demand explains about 91% of "nutritional inequality which "In turn, these income-related demand differences are partially explained by education, nutrition knowledge, and regional preferences. "
IMO, diet preferences are mostly habit-formed. It takes time to establish such habits. The results of this paper are based on two "event" studies, when new stores with healthy food opened up in the areas. It is not surprising that their openings did not change eating patterns in the short run (one year).

So, I think this paper may be onto something, but the results are not terribly convincing.

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

It isn't the food deserts, that is right. It is what you can buy with your money. There are rational conscious choices people make that actually do lead to this inequality.

When you have to consider even the cost of gas when making your shopping trip, you have to then make as few trips as possible. You must then purchase more durable foods.

The Five Stupidest Habits you Develop Growing Up Poor

Forget about fresh produce or fresh baked goods or fresh anything. Canned vegetables are as cheap as a gang tattoo, and every poor person I knew (including myself) had them as a staple of their diet. Fruit was the same way. Canned peaches could be split between three kids for half the cost of fresh ones, and at the end you had the extra surprise of pure, liquefied sugar to push you into full-blown hyperglycemia.

If it wasn't canned, it was frozen. TV dinners, pot pies, chicken nuggets ... meals that can be frozen forever, and preparation isn't more complicated than "Remove from box. Nuke. Eat." Because of that, by week two, half of everything we bought would be freezer burned. Just like with the canned food, you grow up thinking that this is the way it's supposed to taste. It's not that you grow to like it, necessarily, but you do grow to expect it.

Once You Escape ...

To this day, my kids won't eat fresh green beans. There's such a huge difference in texture and taste compared to the canned version that they're honestly like two different foods. None of us will eat homemade macaroni and cheese. If it doesn't come out of a box, it tastes weird. And the list is a mile long. We've eaten these things for so long, we've grown to prefer them to the fresh version.

People who have never been poor love to point out overweight people in the ghetto and sarcastically exclaim, "Yeah, it really looks like she's starving!" And they have no idea that the reason many of them have weight problems is because everything they're putting into their bodies is dirt-cheap, processed bullshit. Grab a TV dinner and look at the nutritional information.

Fresh food is expensive and takes forever to prepare. It goes bad quickly, so it requires multiple trips to the grocery store per week, which is something most impoverished people can't do. And since all of those time-saving frozen meals are high in salt and fat, they take up residence in the expanding asses of the people who can't afford anything else.

When you finally get to the point where you can afford those grocery trips and fresh ingredients and have the time to prepare them, your taste buds freak the fuck out. They're not used to it. Vegetables are supposed to be squishy, aren't they? Is chicken supposed to have this texture?

No, it's not like you're eating food for the first time, staring at asparagus in wide-eyed bewilderment, not knowing whether to put it in your mouth or rub it on your skin until it absorbs right into your body. But a lot of this new stuff sucks by comparison because it's not what you've been trained to eat -- the flavors and textures are all wrong, and there's a real temptation to keep eating the same shit until it stops your heart at age 43.

 

[repoman]

Hmm, sugary foods (neglecting salty and fatty foods for now) make a person deposit fat and then have low blood sugar later and eat more. It is not as simple as calories and out.

The only way for that to work is if you had two bundles of food with equal calories for the day - one sensible and one junk food and had a person given healthy one day and junk another. But the trick would be that for the next 24 hours the junk food diet would have no access to more calories after gorging as their whipsaw blood sugar levels pushed their cravings to the breaking point. Not enough time to open the fat burning lock after all that insulin producing sugar.

It is the wrong kind of food for humans to have constant access to. It is a rebellion against nature.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

...we find that exposing low-income households to the same food availability and prices experienced by high-income households would reduce nutritional inequality by only 9%...

So they offered expensive food to people who never heard of it?

What does this prove exactly?

Good food isn't always expensive. It just takes more work to prepare than the processed junk.

 

[Jason Harvestdancer]

...we find that exposing low-income households to the same food availability and prices experienced by high-income households would reduce nutritional inequality by only 9%...

So they offered expensive food to people who never heard of it?

What does this prove exactly?

Good food isn't always expensive. It just takes more work to prepare than the processed junk.

The processed junk also has a longer shelf life, which is a factor that people have to consider.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

I wonder if there is a stress and insecurity issue involved.

I have seen events of home care workers (not much income and deal with sad isolated situations) and the people are fucking gross with how much they eat and have a desperate feel about them. It is a very tough job.

Maybe they are trying to get serotonin or other chemical levels up via food. Levels that primate in secure social positions have in surplus.

There is addiction to the foods they have been eating for decades involved.

Carefully planned addiction, like cigarettes.

Doing everything short of killing people to increase the addiction.

Aren't people responsible for anything? It's always faceless evil business in your world.

 

[untermensche]

I wonder if there is a stress and insecurity issue involved.

I have seen events of home care workers (not much income and deal with sad isolated situations) and the people are fucking gross with how much they eat and have a desperate feel about them. It is a very tough job.

Maybe they are trying to get serotonin or other chemical levels up via food. Levels that primate in secure social positions have in surplus.

There is addiction to the foods they have been eating for decades involved.

Carefully planned addiction, like cigarettes.

Doing everything short of killing people to increase the addiction.

Aren't people responsible for anything? It's always faceless evil business in your world.

Yes. Exactly.

Let's hold all those assholes who poisoned the food supply deliberately for profit responsible.

Food determines your next generation. That and education.

We should be caring most about those two things and making sure as many as possible are getting the best possible. It should not be a game for profit.

This should be thought of as national security. Real national security.

 

[Underseer]

We study the causes of “nutritional inequality”: why the wealthy tend to eat more healthfully than the poor in the U.S. Using two event study designs exploiting entry of new supermarkets and households’ moves to healthier neighborhoods, we reject that neighborhood environments have economically meaningful effects on healthy eating. Using a structural demand model, we find that exposing low-income households to the same food availability and prices experienced by high-income households would reduce nutritional inequality by only 9%, while the remaining 91% is driven by differences in demand. In turn, these income-related demand differences are partially explained by education, nutrition knowledge, and regional preferences. These findings contrast with discussions of nutritional inequality that emphasize supply-side issues such as food deserts.

https://web.stanford.edu/~diamondr/AllcottDiamondDube_FoodDeserts.pdf

So "food deserts" actually explain very little of lower income households eating habits.

Wow, so poverty is caused by people making bad decisions?

OK, so when Republicans pass laws that transfer massive amounts of money from the middle class to the wealthy, and large numbers of middle class families become poor, what is the mechanism by which larger numbers of middle class families start making less good decisions?

Oh, and also: cherry picking fallacy.

 

[repoman]

Looking at a Welch's 100% grape juice bottle. It "helps support a healthy heart" as described on the label. And don't you EVER question this!

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

I think poor people tend to eat to a greater extent, high fat and cheaper foods. As Jason points out, canned foods would be cheaper. It could become a preference after getting used to it. Higher fat content because when you have sparser food intake the body will crave fatty foods. Most health food stores do not take govt cards or whatever either...big supermarkets do.

My own personal experience from youth...my mother was constantly sick in bed and did not often make big expensive dinners. WIC was an excellent program for nutrition. So was free lunch at school.

Food stamps could be used with grocery stores, not health food stores. We focused on canned foods because they were cheaper. A rotissiere chicken was a treat. My mother didnt have enough cash for rent, bills, laundry, etc, especially after Republicans cut funds. My mother had me walk to stores with food stamps to buy candy and cheap stuff like for a quarter to get change for laundry. After going to several convenience stores and having enough quarters, i would then go walk to laundromat with bags of laundry slung over my shoulder...always my right shoulder. I think this is why one of my legs is longer than the other.