Much like the some of the people in the Magic Pill in AU, perhaps our Rural people are drinking lots of Sugary beverages?
My favorite part about this article is this paragraph from some expert.
No matter where people live, the key to preventing and reducing obesity comes down to healthy eating and regular exercise, said Ashlesha Datar, a researcher at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles who wasn’t involved in the studies.
Useless sound/text bites, our specialty! Unfortunately, that person’s definition of “healthy” is quite different from mine.
lets see, rural areas in US means large areas that grow huge amounts of corn, wheat, and soy.
Now I realize that most of that goes to manufacturing which is widely distributed, but it’s also a good bet that when a communities livelihood depends on a product, the residents of that community tend to have positive feelings towards that product.
Could part of the problem be that it’s a lot harder to convince people in the corn belt that the product they are growing is making everyone fat.
It’s just a feeling I get as someone raised in a city but now lives in a rural area.
I would also suspect that by “rural area” they are (by modern-day deductive inference) meaning “food desert”: Not a lot of healthy commercial food buying options. People in those situations very often invest their food dollars on shelf-stable foods, like snack-things, preservative-laden breads/grains, soda, etc because–unlike those in more populated areas–they have to go out of their way (read: “travel more than 15min”) to buy food, so they go for things that last, and don’t require much by way of refrigeration (aka “fresh veg and decent meats”). Their diets are centered on shelf-stable starches, dried pastas, and other long-lived carbs…
I don’t know… the travel 15 minutes thing gets to be normal. You don’t think much of it. Or like me traveling 30 minutes or more to work is nothing. I even went back a second time last night for my husband’s prescription.
I’m sure there are some that have to travel even further than that for supermarkets, but I don’t know anyone that would bat an lash at making a 15 minute trip into town for the grocery store.
Though when you factor poverty areas into it (and there are a lot in rural areas) where they don’t have reliable transportation and can only afford cheap food, then yeah, I get that.
I think this is a big part of it, yes. Having grown up in a rural area and now having returned to living in one, the travel time is a barrier. The other is cost. Rural areas have larger segments of the population with lower incomes, food subsidized and families look for ways to make their food dollars last. Local stores’ fresh veggies, fruits and meats are much more expensive, encouraging use of those shelf stable, highly processed foods. In my area, I can drive about 45 - 60 miles and find larger stores with more availability, but many can’t afford to increase their fuel expenses either.
I agree about the availability of food, and I think it’s also a cultural/attitude thing.
Not blaming them at all, it’s the collective environment. I have family in rural Indiana. When my father-in-law developed bladder cancer, he changed his diet to eliminate alcohol and simple carbohydrates at the urging of my sister-in-law. This was a bid to save his life, and yet he was teased for it by his lifelong friends. They weren’t insulting about it, they loved him too. But the natural response to something “different” in that area is to mistrust it. I’ve known them all for a very long time, and I’ve always noticed a knee-jerk reaction to anything that doesn’t sound conventional. It’s changing, but very slowly. I loved my father-in-law quite a lot, and I think his diet change gave us extra time with him.
Access to good food does also bring access to information about why to preferentially eat good food, too, I believe. I have a Whole Foods within walking distance. Meanwhile, they pretty much all have to shop at Walmart for their groceries. The irony of it is that they are so much closer to the land. They hunt and fish, and they garden also. Why they are so much more trusting of industrial foods is hard to understand.
None of my in-laws or their friends is particularly poor either, they do quite well in general.
I think the poverty aspect is the over-all unspoken modifier in this equation. No, to “us” driving more than 15min seems like a non-issue. But that may be 15min to a convenience store filled primarily with price-inflated quiki-carbage. It could be that to get to decent food–even a “big-box” solution–it requires a 30-40min trip. At this point, the whole transportation issue comes into play, among other things. I think there’s a lot more going on in this paradigm than merely “rural folx don’t take care of themselves”…
My Mom’s theory is that this is a cultural leftover from the days when “Farmer” meant someone who was out actually tilling fields and picking potatoes - the size of the family meals was proportionate to the amount of physical labor being done. Now, as a cultural continuity, the size of the meal is the same but the activity level isn’t. Add the change in the quality of the diet to the lack of change in quantity …
I think that’s another BIG factor.
I grew up in the sub-rural midwest: we were a transitional community where agriculture and dairy farming were butted up against newer “bedroom” commuter communities that were the beginnings of suburbia. I grew up with all these 80-some-year-old German, Polish, and Irish farmers who would sit in the tavern at 3pm and have their lagers, herring, pickled eggs, and knockwurst while they talked about “the old country”. That kind of thing. We’d always marvel at these old guys who’d eat damn-near anything they wanted–typically tons of bacon, eggs, stuff simmered or poached in fat, butter, tallow or lard, and just live to Methuselah years, often outliving their wives (aka “Witwerbauer” or “Widower-Farmer”). How could they eat like that and live on?
I now strongly suspect that it was a combination of a whole-food, mostly keto diet, combined with ass-breaking work.
And I fault them not for their pilsner and pinochle afternoon reward… 
I live in a rural area. On one hand, yes, it’s a food desert. On the other hand, there’s various meat lockers.
I live in rural Arkansas and it is a food desert.
I picked up 3 bags of Shirataki noodles (filled with water) in Chicago to take home since nothing like that is available w/o a 1-1/2 or 2 hour drive.
TSA flagged it and pulled it out of my carry on bag. I was afraid they would toss it but they only wanted to wipe it down with the strip that goes into their machine to detect chemicals. They said it was flagged because it was a “dense protein”. I got to keep it.
Anyhoo… back to the subject at hand. Before we went keto and ate out a lot more, we were ticked off that EVERY SAUCE AT EVERY RESTAURANT was loaded with sugar. Savory was hard to find. Meals were 90% carbs - most fried.
Most everyone there is overweight unless genetics helps and then they were rail thin. Not much in between.
Carbs are cheap and addictive and people are poor. You can hardly push a basket at the local WalMart for all the motorized carts.
I felt like the writer of the article was looking to make it more complicated than it needs to be.
Rural generally means away from jobs and away from money. I live in a rather rural location and there isn’t a decent paying job for nearly 100 miles, maybe 30 if you’re willing to work for a little over minimum wage. Not a lot of income often means you buy cheap food. Cheap food is usually carbage. Potatoes. Corn. Wheat. Rice. Pasta. Bread. A person can buy a lot of those kinds of foods for not a whole lot of money. Sugar is cheap, too. When they only have so much cash, would they buy 50 pounds of potatoes or 1 pound of salmon? (It’ll be about the same price, or the salmon may be a little more.)
No need in making it more complicated than it really is. People have money to spend and they make the choices that seem best to them. When the money is small, maximizing quantity might be what they view as important. And it’ll fill them up. Doesn’t mean they’ll get fed. Lots of obese people with malnutrition out there…
Food desert by who’s definition, this is a totally made up condition by Health food nuts. Every community has food, some people choose to eat Doritos and slushies. Obesity in rural areas is probably a statisical aberration supported by do-gooder science, the same science spouted by the idiot behind the SAD diet. We need to stop using this terminology and just start calling it what it is.
My n=1 observation tells me that rural obesity is not an aberration of statistics. YMMV. Compared to a European city it is horrifying.
My definition of a “food desert” is limited fresh vegetables, most meats (and many vegetables) are breaded and fried and smothered in gravy or sweet sauces, typical restaurant meals 90% carbs. Side dishes are corn, potatoes, hush puppies and fried okra.
Basic groceries only w/o a 3-hr round trip drive, but that is because folks around here can’t afford fancy goat cheeses and Kerrygold butter. I don’t mind that part. I just miss the restaurants from Houston is all - such an amazing variety of cuisines!
I have lived in rural West TN, and I now live near a rather rural part of KY, but my community wouldn’t be considered rural. One thing I noticed living in more rural TN was that football ruled the community. Parents didn’t worry about their boys being big because they could play up in football. This mentality doesn’t change until adulthood. I live in a different kind of community now. We have a liberal arts college in town which changes the demographic. There are of course health-conscious thin rural Americans just like there are overweight unhealthy city-dwellers. When i lived in TN, it was common for kids to order sprite at a restaurant. Most of my friends’ children routinely order water here.
Good comments about making less money - I think the result is people eating more processed carbohydrates along with a lot of fat, and there are plenty of studies showing this to be a bad combination.
That makes perfect sense. Now, “rural” less often means a lot of hard physcial work, and I think dietary knowledge takes longer to penetrate the population.
A agree here too. Compare the people of Boston to those in the countryside of Mississippi or Arkansas. Big difference.
It’s also true that a higher percentage of younger people are affected by the obesity epidemic, versus older. I think it’s because to some extent the habits of older people stem from times before the “dietary guidelines” of the past 40 years were put in place.
The rural-urban obesity disparity was found among adults age 20–39 but not for adults age 40–59 or 60–75. Younger adults in rural areas may be more susceptible to weight gain due to changes in the environment over the past 30 years. --Quoted from: