Most people think that poor people are fat/obese because they like to eat junk/unhealthy food where as I think it's because they don't have easy access to healthy food, i.e. fruits and vegetables. Now a new study confirms that grocery stores in lower income black neighboorhoods offer fewer healthy foods than stores in more affluent areas. The poorer neighborhoods tend to have more "mom and pop" stores which don't have the space nor the relationship with distributors to get a large variety of goods and therefore provide fewer choices to their customers. Furthermore, the lack of private transportations makes it difficult for poor people to leave their neighborhoods in search of healthy food.
Last month, researchers from USC and UCLA and another local advocacy group, Community Health Councils Inc., added numbers to the pictures. Their survey, published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, compared grocery stores in affluent, mostly white neighborhoods in West Los Angeles with those in low-income, predominantly black neighborhoods in South L.A., Inglewood and North Long Beach.
In West L.A., 80% of the stores carried skim milk, compared with 38% in South L.A., where some didn't carry milk at all. West L.A. stores stocked, on average, 26 types of fruit and 38 kinds of vegetables, twice the variety found in South L.A. stores. In West L.A., 33% of the stores had a diabetic food section, compared with just 4% in South L.A. stores. Yet African Americans are twice as likely as whites to suffer from diabetes.
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According to the Urban & Environmental Policy Institute at Occidental College, the ratio of major grocery stores to population in South L.A. remains at pre-1992 levels of one for every 42,000 people, compared with one for every 24,000 people in Los Angeles County overall.
Cleary, large corporations could make so much money if only they were willing to take risk and open grocery stores in these neighborhoods.