Just thinking you’re poor makes you more likely to eat unhealthy foods, study says

A commonly accepted view among many politicians and policymakers is that the rates of obesity are disproportionately high among people with lower income and less education.

The belief has led to concerted efforts to end “food deserts” in inner cities, restrict what kinds of food people on food stamps can buy and educate children about the importance of eating healthy.

But a recent study suggests that the link between socioeconomic status and unhealthy food choices goes beyond the availability of healthy foods and is actually mental.

In the academic journal “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,” researchers from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore detailed four experiments that all show a correlation between how people rate their socioeconomic status and what they decided to eat.

Before each experiment, the researches had participants rate their status relative to either a wealthy and well-educated person or a poor and uneducated person. Across the board, people rated themselves lower than the wealthy person but higher than the poor person.

Then, the academics asked groups to pick foods from a hypothetical buffet, ascribe positive and negative adjectives to certain foods, choose a snack to eat while watching a movie or eat a bowl of noodles until they were full.

In each experiment, the group that was asked to compare itself to the wealthy person made the more unhealthy diet choices, picking high-calorie foods at the buffet, linking positive adjectives with high-calorie foods, selecting unhealthy snacks and eating more before deciding they were full.

“These findings suggest that psychological and physiological systems regulating appetite may also be sensitive to subjective feelings of deprivation for critical nonfood resources (e.g., social standing),” the researchers wrote. “Importantly, efforts to mitigate the socioeconomic gradient in obesity may also need to address the psychological experience of low social status.”

In other words, merely providing access to healthy foods might not be enough to combat obesity among people living in poverty.

This story was originally published December 28, 2016 at 6:50 PM with the headline "Just thinking you’re poor makes you more likely to eat unhealthy foods, study says."