Your income and social status are written all over your body, Adam Drewnowski says.
Drewnowski is an epidemiologist. He directs the Center for Obesity Research at the University of Washington in Seattle, and he lectures frequently. "I can pretty much guess the income of an audience by the number of obese women in the room," he says.
"If one-third of my audience is obese, I don't think, 'Oh, my God, these are people with weak willpower or who made bad choices.' I say, 'These are women who do not make more than $40,000 a year.'"
One such low-income woman, Michelle Miller, is in a jam these days. A tough-minded single mother, she, her two teenage kids and their two dogs now live in a converted garage at her childhood home in Vancouver, Wash.
Making $1,000 a month managing a recording artist and living with Mom and Dad is not what she'd imagined when she and her husband split up seven years ago. But with no real training, she's had to reinvent herself each time a job -- in restaurants, in the Oregon Legislature and managing political campaigns -- has ended.
Living with her parents helps her get by, but money is still tight.
Miller blames food costs for her 100-pound weight gain. Before the divorce, she says, weight wasn't a problem. Her husband worked, and she home-schooled the children. She shopped at the high-end Whole Foods Market for $4-a-loaf whole-grain bread and lean organic meat.
Divorced, her food budget shrank, and her waistline expanded. Today Miller shops at thrifty WinCo grocery stores for $1-a-loaf bread, potatoes, rice, ramen and macaroni to stretch the meat she buys on sale.
Poor women pack on pounds
Several studies, including Drewnowski's, show that poorer Americans are more likely to be obese than those who are wealthier. But when you look deeper into these studies, University of California, Davis, nutritionist Marilyn Townsend says, the difference is mostly among women: Poor women are much, much more prone to obesity than their wealthier counterparts.
The discrepancy between men and women isn't well understood. The drive for status may be what keeps wealthier women thinner, suggests Townsend, who specializes in behavioral change and works with other researchers, including Drewnowski.
Often, the obese are blamed for being morally weak, says a 2010 study in the International Journal of Obesity.
"People say things like, 'Why don't they just make a cheap pot of lentil soup and live on it for a week?'" Drewnowski scoffs. "Obesity is not the result of excessive indulgence; it's a symptom of lower socioeconomic standing in this country."
Lower-cost diets that are high in fat and sugar and lower in nutrients are more often consumed by people with lower education and incomes, Drewnowski says in research to be published in November's American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
In smaller studies in Seattle, Drewnowski has found obesity as low as 6% in wealthy neighborhoods and as high as 30% in poor areas. (Obesity is a body mass index over 30; you can calculate your own body mass here.)
Drewnowski has even linked obesity to grocery stores: Customers of lower-cost Seattle supermarkets were up to 10 times more likely to be obese. As many as 40% of shoppers at cheaper grocery stores, such as Safeway, were overweight, compared with as few as 4% at stores such as Whole Foods.
"The minute you move to an area served by Wal-Mart -- because they place themselves in lower-income areas -- you will be surrounded by obesity," Drewnowski says.
The point is not that a particular store makes you fat or thin but that people who eat cheaply are prone to getting fat. Those who spend more generally are thinner.
There's "almost a straight-line correlation between wealth of the neighborhood and obesity among women," Drewnowski says. The federal poverty line today is $22,350 for a family of four -- that takes in 15.1% of Americans, the most since 1993.
There's more chances that being fat makes you poor.
