I don't buy it. Most of Europe has lower income than the US but the quality of their food is just vastly superior.
Just watch this video https://www.instagram.com/reel/CtzaSnGMIEN/?igshid=MzRlODBiN...
I suspect it's a combination of low quality food and not walking.
> I don't buy it. Most of Europe has lower income than the US but the quality of their food is just vastly superior.
I don't buy it either. I don't know about the Europe comparison, but there's plenty of high quality food available for low cost in the US. I notice many people just fill up with crappy box goods or fast food though.
Low income does not per se mean lower quality diet in the US. In fact, a healthy diet based on high quality food can be less expensive than a less health lower quality food based diet.
However sources of high quality inexpensive foods are not evenly distributed. Many a low income neighborhood does not have a grocery store that caries such things. Many only have convenience stores like 7-11. Often those neighborhoods also don't have good and affordable public transit making it had for many residents to get to a real grocery store.
And so there will be a tendency for lower income to result in a lower quality diet.
These places where people have food access limits inside of countries that mostly have pretty good distribution are called "food deserts", and they are not just in the US [1].
The problem is that the people in those areas simply don’t want real grocery stores. I’m not sure how you’d go about fixing that. Maybe, and I stress the maybe, a better home economics class? Ours was a joke, but it’s hard to actually teach kids how to cook (and other things) with a limited class time. Combining with lunchtime for those taking it might make sense.
My parents cooked but kids out there without that - it’s probably hard to turn it around. Laziness is a hard nut to crack, especially combined with ignorance.
A European coming to the US on a European salary would not thrive.