Poor and overweight: A connection?

[image]

Tyann Taylor is a single mother in Brooklyn Park, whose neat home belies the fact she has five children, including a set of twins.

Taylor works as a certified nursing assistant making $10.50 an hour and doesn't own a car. Her food stamps vary from $300-$500 a month. While her children ask for fresh fruit, she says she can't afford it very often.

[image]

"I would love for them to have more fruit with every meal, fruit for a snack. But it's hard to do that because it's expensive," Taylor says. "That hurts my heart when I know that ... my kids are not eating healthy, because I can't afford to give them what they need."

Taylor lives paycheck to paycheck. Stretching her budget means buying cheaper food that's often higher in fat and calories. At times, she's had to go to a food shelf to supplement her groceries.

But the food the public donates to food shelves isn't always the healthiest either. Consider employee food drives, where donated items include boxes of macaroni and cheese and dehydrated potato flakes.

Those boxes end up at food shelves like one in Minneapolis, called Waite House. Director Kay Harvey says the kinds of donations vary wildly from week to week. During one holiday season, the food shelf got more than 200 cans of pumpkin pie filling.

[image]

"It's hard to educate people about donating because they're doing it out of the goodness of their heart, and they want to give the most they can in a bag. Five things of macaroni and cheese go a lot further than one thing of rice or Prego or something," says Harvey.

Harvey says it's better to donate whole meals with protein, such as canned white meat chicken and vegetables. She says many food shelves also would be happy to receive money as a donation, because then they can buy healthier but more perishable items such as meat, eggs and fruit.

"Low-income people have the toughest decisions to make regarding what they can buy with the limited resources that they have," says Dr. Michael Gonzalez-Campoy, who runs the Minnesota Center for Obesity, Metabolism, and Endocrinology in Eagan. "Sometimes healthy food is not a part of that equation."

Gonzalez-Campoy says no matter the income level, healthier eating doesn't have to be all or nothing; it can be done in little steps. He says at the very least, parents should give their children vitamins, try to limit high-calorie foods, and add fruits and vegetables when affordable.

In the past 20 years, the gap between affordable, healthy food and non-healthy food has widened, according to Adam Drewnowski of the University of Washington. Drewnowski is a national expert on the link between income and weight. He says society needs to take a different approach to helping those with low-incomes eat healthier.

[image]

"[We need] changes in the food assistance programs, maybe marketing subsidies for vegetables and fruit, ways to level the playing field a bit so that everyone has access to healthy, nutritious foods. And right now, there are whole segments of the population that do not," Drewnowski says.

Back at Tyann Taylor's house on a weekday afternoon, she sits talking to us on her living room couch. Her 6-year-old daughter is home from school. The girl approaches asking if she can have a snack -- chips.

"Can I have more chips?" the girl asks.

"See?" says Taylor. "I want her to have an apple or orange instead of chips for a snack."

The little girl goes to the kitchen an opens up some potato chips. Her mom worries about her daughter's future.

"She's a beautiful girl, but she's big for her age, she's only 6. I don't want her to be overweight. I don't want that burden on her," says Taylor.

Last week, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that the percentage of overweight adolescents age 15-17 is about 50 percent higher in poor families, as opposed to families with higher incomes.