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It's quite possible if you understand the sense of the word "hunger" they're using, which does not comport to one's usual understanding of the term.

Pretend I routinely consume 3000 calories a day of pizza and sugary drinks. The last week of the month, I run out of sugary drinks, and substitute water with my 2000 calories a day of pizza. I am, according to every instrument ever used to measure it, "food insecure" due to the persistent circumstances causing me to consume less than I had planned to. I may or may not feel any physiological response to lacking Coke for a week (hunger as natural people understand the term). I'm quite likely obese, much like I would be if I consistently consumed 3000 calories a day of organic orange juice, free range steaks, and arugula.

The refocusing of anti-poverty programs and rhetoric on food insecurity as opposed to our now deprecated understanding of hunger is due to two causes. One is that food insecurity is more conveniently measurable in a (mostly) scientific fashion. The other is that the US has, for all intents and purposes, eliminated Depression-style hunger. (Though it has not eliminated dysfunctional parents who prefer drugs to feeding their children, which complicates the issue, but if you run into "Hasn't eaten in 3 days" your money should be on "child abuse" rather than "lamentable circumstances.")

Incidentally, if you're wondering "How does one define 'food security'?", you administer surveys, score them, and compare the scores to threshholds.

For example, here is a 9 question survey for children: http://www.ers.usda.gov/media/476115/youth2006.pdf

Typical question: "[In the last 30 days, d]id your meals only include a few kinds of cheap foods because your family was running out of money to buy food?"

Choices are "A lot", "Sometimes", "Never." Score 1 point if the answer isn't Never. If you score 2+ points on this out of 9, you're food insecure.

This is how you get headlines like "1 in 6 Americans doesn't know where their next meal is coming from."

I agree wholeheartedly.

The anecdotes they cite don't encourage much sympathy from me either. Three declined credit cards and a loan from a relative for $8.11 in fried chicken. Or the home health-aide who buys ready made food from the grocery store, because "You can’t go all the way home and cook." I'm pretty sure you could have packed a PB&J or Ham and cheese sandwich; for less than the grocery store would have charged. Heck, you could eat a cold slice of pizza.

Or notice, "When the food stamps come in, she splurges on her monthly supply of produce, including a bag of organic grapes and a bag of apples." The organic fruits and vegetables are more expensive around here. Regular golden delicious apples are something like $1.49/lb, whereas the organic are $1.99/lb. If you were watching every penny, you would have not picked the bag of organic grapes; you would have gotten a regular bag of grapes.

I also don't buy that the, (paraphrased) "Oh we can't eat cheaply and healthy, because all that are available are processed foods." You won't go hungry if you eat processed foods, and they are not actually expensive if you are living in a home with electricity. If you're homeless, there are greater logistical challenges like finding a way to refrigerate food or even heat it up; but those are not the people described in this article.

I exactly agree. But the reality of our free market laissez-faire policies mixed with increasingly effective, data driven marketing, results in a portion of the population who we are essentially leaving hung out to dry. They do not have your intellect and understanding of expenses as well as the prior knowledge to avoid and deal with addictive food additives and sophisticated merchandizing techniques. Just to name a few of the issues at play here. Its a shame that you cannot understand and have some sympathy for them.

When are the smart people of this country going to start taking some responsibility for the rest of the US?

> When are the smart people of this country going to start taking some responsibility for the rest of the US?

When the country starts listening to them.

I should have stated that a bit better. I meant that many of these situations involving people making poor financial choices have to do with very smart people using their intelligence and hard work to influence them into those choices.

So in effect, the country is listening to them and that is what is causing them to do things like take out payday loans and buy drive through meals when they can't afford it.

People may not be homo economicus, but in general I believe them to be mostly rational actors who know what their own best interest is. When you exclude the drugged out parents that other posters have mentioned, and focus on the parents in this story who are generally trying to take care of their kids; I expect they are making mostly rational decisions about how they value their time and resources [e.g., it is worth the extra money to save time and go to a grocery store, because they won't actually be starving].

This goes back to changing the definition of what you're trying to fight from "hunger" to "food insecurity". If these people were truly "hungry" vs. "food insecure", I expect they would make markedly different choices to ensure their children weren't actually hungry.

The children, also being maybe not rational actors, but not stupid; would also make different choices. If the boy were starving he probably wouldn't have skipped the free breakfast to hold out for chicken nuggets, tater tots, and hot dogs.

> People may not be homo economicus, but in general I believe them to be mostly rational actors who know what their own best interest is.

Could you provide some more thoughts on this (or supporting research)? I'm truly curious, because to me it seems so... alien to be able to hold such a view in light of reality, and I'd like to assume you've thought this through.

What I mean is, my experience (and knowledge) overwhelmingly support the idea that humans are largely not rational actors, and in fact the degree to which one is a 'rational' actor is mostly a result of an upbringing that emphasizes this.

I do pretty well in life, and I consider myself far from rational.

But to get where I am, I see it as essential that I had wonderful parents, a safe environment to experiment and explore in, the ability to conform to common norms (hell, to even be aware of them), the ability to keep my impulses from controlling me too much, and the friends I found largely through college who can help me when I make my less rational choices or when I am in my less rational 'moods'. I also had parents who were raised with a good sense of health and the time to think and read about this.

I guess fundamentally I don't see why you would separate 'drugged up' parents from the rest of them, when in reality there's a continuum of 'fucked up' along which lives are lived and in which lives are created. Parents who were not raised to eat well or exercise are likely to not raise their children to eat well or exercise.

To use an extreme example that I think applies to varying to degrees to all of us: if humans were rational beings, we wouldn't have children of alcoholics become alcoholics and subject their own kids to the suffering they themselves suffered through! Either that, or those children-of-alcoholics are just assholes. And I find that hard to believe.

> People may not be homo economicus, but in general I believe them to be mostly rational actors who know what their own best interest is.

You do know that what you just said is "People may not be homo economicus, but in general I believe them to be mostly <definition of homo economicus>", right?

In any case, research in the social sciences (economics, sure, but also psychology and a number of other related fields) has established quite clearly that people are not rational actors and that, in particular, even with all of the information presented to rationally analyze and unambiguously determine their best interest, in simple, clear-cut cases -- a much easier situation than most people find themselves in in their day to day lives -- they very often fail to correctly determine that interest, and even when they intellectually determine it fail to act on it, contrary to the rational actor model.

Rational choice theory may often be a useful baseline to start from when explaining human behavior, but people, in general, are clearly not rational actors.

So maybe it would be better phrased as, people will act rationally given their own optimization function that I may or may not agree with. There is the concept of Bounded rationality, in that I am going to make rational decisions given the information I have, and how much cognitive resources I am willing to spend on it. I may not make an optimal decision, but I can make one that is good enough.

Also, someone can rationally choose to do something that I don't agree with, because they have very different preferences than I do; and thus would optimize for those.

Even the same person can make very different decisions at different points. When I was younger, I was more likely to drink a lot. My preference was to have a social lubricant, even if that was bad for brain cells and my liver. You could say that it wasn't a rational decision, but I wouldn't have engaged in the behavior if there was zero benefit.

This ignores marketing and other pricing and sales techniques specifically designed to trick someone into thinking a choice is in their best interest when it is not. One could simple look at politics for plenty of easy to understand examples.

Also, many products are shaped and designed over time to be as addictive as possible. Video games, television, soda, fast food, facebook, tobacco etc etc. All of these things are generally outside of a persons best interest beyond light moderate use. The are specifically designed and adjusted over time to cause people to go well beyond that threshold of moderate use.

By simplifying the situation to "rational actors" you are doing exactly as I described. Refusing to take responsibility for those who are less able to deal with the forces and influences I described above.

> By simplifying the situation to "rational actors" you are doing exactly as I described. Refusing to take responsibility for those who are less able to deal with the forces and influences I described above.

I think that it is condescending to assume that people are unable to make their own choices. Why should you impose upon people that Facebook or soda is not "in their best interests." If I want to drink 6 cans of Coke Zero a day (and I actually do), it isn't your place to tell me that I should switch to water.

Thinking it is condescending is once again refusing to take responsibility. Its one thing to allow someone to drink 6 cans of Coke Zero a day, its another to actively manipulate someone into doing so. By saying, "Everyone is just as smart as me" what you are actually doing is removing the responsibility of being more capable.

There are 10 people trapped on an island. You are the only one who knows how to make a boat. Are you responsible to help the other 9 people get off the island? Or are they just "rational actors" that should have know to learn to make a boat and therefore none of your responsibility?

You are letting a mental trick you use in your head to deal with the inequality in the world to control your entire view of the world.

The organic grapes struck me as odd, too, until I remembered that organic grapes were actually cheaper than regular last time I was at the store.

> Doesn't calorie intake directly correlate with gaining weight?

No, calories surplus does. Poor nutritional balance can lead to low energy and make maintaining activity difficult (leading to a calorie surplus where with a more balanced diet the same person would act in a way which would produce calorie balance or deficit), and trigger a desire to eat driven by the body seeking to address deficits in particular nutrients even with a calorie surplus.

> I'm not intending to downplay the issues here, but I find it hard to follow the disconnect of people being overweight not having enough food to eat.

Nutrition is multidimensional and more than just calorie intake -- that seems to be the thing that you are missing.

True but people forget (or don't know) that calories from fat, protein and carbohydrate are not the same! The metabolic fate of these components explains why this is a fact and not, as stated on many links, a 'suggestion'.

Because junk food is cheaper. $1.75 pizza slices will fill you more than a $1.75 worth of Broccoli where I live. Fast food places are also closer to them than grocery stores because they are out in the suburban sprawl so they go to what is accessible, and often those places run promotions for 2 for 1 burgers or whatever. I guess the difference is during the Depression there weren't any food subsidies so everything was expensive.

Avg price for broccoli is $1.06 per pound[1], so you are getting around 1.75 pounds of broccoli. That's more filling than a 0.2 pound slice of pizza.

[1] http://www.ams.usda.gov/mnreports/fvwretail.pdf

I used my local rates which are $1.50-$3.00/lb for heads of Broccoli depending if organic or not. A pizza by the slice place here is huge NY style

The mean number of calories they eat is too high, but the variance is also too high. Some days they don't eat at all and other days they gorge.

Is the "paradox" explainable by the fact that satiety is not a true signal about nutritional needs being met? If you are forced to eat foods which provide more than enough calories/nutrients, but don't tell your body "Hey, that's enough!", then you could theoretically be gaining weight while remaining hungry.

It's a disconnect that's not unique to the families NG interviewed. Take the Pima native Americans in 1905, where the women, who were quite physically active, basically treated like beasts of burden, had a distressingly high obesity rate, though these families were given a limited ration from the government, mostly white flour and sugar, and not more than 2000 calories per person per day. You can find the same trend in 1928 with Sioux on a South Dakota Crow Creek Reservation--very high levels of obesity in coincidence with extreme poverty. In the early 1960s, MIT nutritionists calculated that Trinidadians were getting no more than 2000 calories per day, yet they were seeing an extreme obesity problem among the females.

Your (calories in = calories stored + calories used) basis for judging other human beings fails because these are not independent variables. Metabolic rate is not constant. If you feed your body few calories, your metabolism adjusts so as to use fewer calories and store more. If you skip some meals, your metabolism is receiving a signal that it had better use the absolute minimum and store the rest to be used in future food crises.

A high-carbohydrate meal causes insulin to be released, and insulin causes sugars in the bloodstream to be stored as fat. And then your blood sugar is low, and you're hungry again. Have you ever noticed the intense hunger that follows an hour or two after a carb binge?

Fat cells that are stimulated to grow (by insulin) scream loud for their share of the energy, just as a growing child's appetite is caused by hormonal messaging for growth and not the other way around. Fat cells scream loud, ensuring that they get their needs met even if the rest of you is weak, tired, and resorting to stealing energy from muscle, the brain, and other tissues. Also, preservatives, additives, and high-sodium foods can cause a person to retain water, which can add to weight independent of caloric intake.

In an older discussion on this issue, travisp shared this article: http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1199154 >Effects of Dietary Composition on Energy Expenditure During Weight-Loss Maintenance >The results of our study challenge the notion that a calorie is a calorie from a metabolic perspective. During isocaloric feeding following weight loss, REE was 67 kcal/d higher with the very low-carbohydrate diet compared with the low-fat diet. TEE differed by approximately 300 kcal/d between these 2 diets, an effect corresponding with the amount of energy typically expended in 1 hour of moderate-intensity physical activity >In conclusion, our study demonstrates that commonly consumed diets can affect metabolism and components of the metabolic syndrome in markedly different ways during weight-loss maintenance, independent of energy content. The low-fat diet produced changes in energy expenditure and serum leptin42- 44 that would predict weight regain. In addition, this conventionally recommended diet had unfavorable effects on most of the metabolic syndrome components studied herein. In contrast, the very low-carbohydrate diet had the most beneficial effects on energy expenditure and several metabolic syndrome components, but this restrictive regimen may increase cortisol excretion and CRP.

If you consider yourself a scientifically-minded, follow-the-research type, it's time to re-evaluate your (calories in = calories stored + calories used) hypothesis.

The disconnect is the difference between being hungry and actual starvation. We are so rich that most of our poorest can still get fat on the food they can acquire. The worst of our problems is no longer starvation, but bad nutrition. (to an extent, starvation still must exist somewhere but it is very much less common)

Starvation will always get more sympathy, and the dismissal of this is inappropriate.

Starvation is extremely tragic, and no one's dismissing that.

We do have a different problem here in America, but it's not simply that poor people are fat because they're just eating too many calories.

I've offered physiological explanations for the observed phenomenon that people can be obese on low-calorie diets.

It's troubling that America's "poor fat" are misled by the universal and government-touted notion that low fat is healthy and that carbs are a necessary nutrient.

This guy has caclulated cost per calorie for a variety of foods, with pretty pictures: http://www.mymoneyblog.com/what-does-200-calories-cost-the-e...

I've done calculations for some of my favorite foods, and found that no-sugar peanut butter, olive oil, mayo w/o canola or soy, no-nitrate bacon ends, roasted sunflower seeds, canned coconut cream, grass-fed butter, almond flour, and sour cream are all nutritious foods that are less than $.50 per 200 calories. These foods are satisfying, non-fattening, and make veggies taste great. But the poor aren't going to buy them because they've been told by the government to have 11 servings of carbs and to minimize fat intake. It's a problem that could be addressed.

I find it hard to believe that people can get fat on low calorie diets(http://www.cnn.com/2010/HEALTH/11/08/twinkie.diet.professor/).

Nutrition research is a mess and yes there does seem to be connections between types of food, insulin spikes and how likely calories will be stored as fat - but to gain weight you still need a calorie surplus.

I'd suspect the 'poor fat' is because of consuming a large amount of calories from unhealthy food combined with nearly zero exercise.

I referred to a JAMA article and you retort with CNN?

My point is that metabolism is quite adaptable, as it has had to be over thousands of years, and if blood sugar levels are not steady (i.e. bad food and/or skipped meals), it is able to minimize energy use to ENSURE there's a calorie surplus, so that some can be stored away.

You seem invested in maintaining your right to judge poor people's choices.

Wasn't meant to discount what you wrote, and obviously the paper you linked carries a lot more weight. There are just issues with self reporting and calorie consumption, plus I just have a hard time believing that someone on an actual low calorie diet can be extremely overweight, but this may just be my own bias. I don't have much outside of personal anecdotes.

Nutrition is complex and from what I've read (and what you linked) there is large variation among types of calories, but I haven't read anything suggesting this is more important than the number of calories themselves. My impression is that it does have an impact, but the volume of calories consumed is the determining factor.

YMMV

No. Have you ever noticed the "pot-bellies" of undernourished kids from all those poverty photos from Africa?

That's because they get the cheapest crap we can send/buy them - Rice.

It's not as simple as general thermodynamics. Kcal in and out is just half the equation.

We eat too much sugar today. Everything has so much damn sugar in it. All sorts of different varieties of carbs that eventually just become blood sugar and activating your insulin causing you to store it all as fat.

I think the distended stomachs are caused by actual starvation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwashiorkor

Though it's possible you're referencing something else.

Distended stomachs are caused by actual starvation and, no, those kids aren't fat in the slightest. The article is conflating hunger with poor nutrition. They're not three same thing.

It sounds like you're trying to fit the ideology of your diet to observations.