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Comment by moomin | Hacker News Reader

But that's missing the point. There's still plenty of places where it's hard to impossible to eat _healthily_ in the U.S. Yes, we've won the calorific scarcity battle, but regarding obesity as self-inflicted lacks nuance at best and victim blames the poor and disadvantaged at worst.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert#Barriers_and_propos...

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Places are food deserts primarily because the inhabitants choose not to pay for healthy food. Providing access to food does not change people's consumption choices:

http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/giving-people-ac...

(There are lots of natural experiments too - e.g., Jersey City, where I used to live, had lots of fat poor people and lots of svelte yuppies. Strangely, the poor didn't start eating Kale when the yuppies moved in.)

Assigning the label "victim blaming" to an idea does not prove it wrong.

education & available time are issues for the poor as well, not just availability.

You could easily verify that hypothesis with statistical analysis of obesity amongst people of varying levels of employment/busyness and education. Are you (or anyone here) aware of any such studies?

ATUS data is available that can provide a partial answer to this.

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.nr0.htm

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.t11.htm

This data can answer the question "are poor people busy in general". (The answer is no.) But it can't answer the question "are poor obese people busy", since it doesn't allow you to slice by both busyness and obesity jointly.

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