Obesity: A new study in Los Angeles refutes the theory that fast-food chains make the poor overweight. So the city should lift its ban on McDonald's and start letting Wal-Mart sell cheap, healthy groceries.
Ever since public-health data turned up the fact that low-income Americans have a weight problem, politically sensitive types have struggled to come up with explanations that avoid the stern, common-sense answer — that the poor do it to themselves.
It's said that healthy food such as fresh fruit and vegetables is too expensive, that the poor depend too much on fast-food outlets for their meals and that they have fewer local sources of cheap, healthy food.
There's some truth in that last of those arguments, but the inconvenient fact is that better-off people face mostly the same dietary temptations and, as a group, tend to be less obese.
The fast-food bugaboo, for instance, led the Los Angeles City Council last year to ban expansion by chains such as McDonald's in low-income, mostly minority South L.A.
Now comes a study by the Rand Corp., published in the journal Health Affairs, showing that the ban has no rational basis.
Rand researchers looked at the actual locations of fast-food outlets and found that South Los Angeles had relatively few of them, at 19 per 100,000 residents. They were much more highly concentrated, at 29 per 100,000 residents, on the city's affluent west side and, at 30 per 100,000, in Los Angeles County as a whole.
The study also analyzed a survey of 1,480 adults>>>
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