Poverty and Health

I keep on getting confused with some of the rhetoric I hear about the place about poverty and healthy life style. So, first of all, I'll explain some ways in which poverty obviously does impact upon one's ability to have a healthy lifestyle. Firstly, access to healthcare. In the US healthcare actually costs money. In the UK healthcare is free at the point of demand for most services but there are still costs to obtaining healthcare, such as travel expenses and topping up NHS care from the private sector. Housing is another big thing. Housing which is cold or damp or contaminated with toxins is cheaper and likely to cause health problems. There's also the problem of work hazards, as if you are poorer you have less opportunity to avoid dangerous work environments or demand appropriate health and safety practice.

With that on board, I want to talk more specifically about areas of health which are usually closely related in public dialogue: diet and fitness. Poverty is associated poor diet, or at least this is what I have heard from t'internets. There are some possible good reasons for this. The first is accommodation. If you are living in very poor quality accommodation you may not have any cooking facilities. You may not have a fridge or a freezer. This makes it very difficult to eat anything which requires cooking or cool storage. Crisps, biscuits, take-aways can be eaten in these circumstances. This leads to another of the 'can't afford to be poor' situations, because these types of food are more expensive than home cooked food, so buying some cooking equipment would work out cheaper in the long run, but if there's nothing left of the pay cheque each week there's no way you can make that investment.

Another issue, which I suspect is more of an issue in the US, is time poverty. I get the impression that because of differences in the tax and benefit system, single parents working three jobs to make ends meet is more common in the US. If you're time poor and get home exhausted, it's much harder to cook. Similarly, if one has not been taught to cook before leaving home, the risk of experimenting with an unfamiliar recipe to gain the skills and confidence to cook, is too much if you will have to go without dinner if the cooking goes wrong.

Access to shops is something I've heard a lot about. Mainstream supermarkets aren't so keen to open in council estates and even when they do they tend to open smaller shops with higher prices and more restricted range. I get that. The thing that confuses me is that in the past when I've talked about eating more vegetables and wholemeal bread I've heard people say that they'd like to but they don't have an organic store near them or the organic store is so expensive. There definitely seems to be a big meme, at least of LJ, that eating healthy food requires access to an organic shop. This completely flummoxes me. I eat a pretty healthy diet, and it is almost entirely bought from Tesco. Do US supermarkets not sell vegetables or wholemeal bread? Does the US allow such noxious chemicals to be sprayed on their crops that it's really better to eat ready meals than non-organic veg? Please explain because every time I ask I'm told that I'm an evil privileged middle-class vegan who should STFU.

On a related not, what's the deal with the whole "I can't exercise because I can't afford to join a gym" meme. I can see the advantages of belonging to a gym for some people. If you want to build particular muscles or train for a particular activity then the gym can provide expert advise and machinery. If, on the other hand, you just want to improve your general level of fitness, you can get most of the benefits of the gym for free. You could turn on the radio and dance around your apartment for half an hour. You could run up and down the stairs, if you have stairs. You could even just make small lifestyle changes to be a bit more active: walk rather than drive on short errands, take the stairs, get off the subway a stop early and walk the rest. These things aren't going to get you ready to run a marathon but they will get you a bit fitter and healthier. Of course, as with preparing food, time poverty will put a big spanner in the works.

A thing I've noticed in common between both diet and exercise is that in both these cases unnecessary purchases have become necessary in the mind of the public. I'm increasingly coming to think that this is a central feature of consumerist capitalism. Activities which don't require much stuff, such as sex, or are initially carved out as a space separate from consumerism, are very quickly colonised with consumer goods, the purchase of which we are convinced is essential to the activity. A healthy lifestyle is relatively cheap and easy if one is not impeded by the issues I've mentioned above: less salt, sugar, fat, alcohol, caffeine, nicotine; more vegetables, fruit, complex carbohydrates, movement, water. However there is a multi billion dollar industry trying to sell us the 'secret' to all this. At its best it's just a waste of money and resources to, for example, drive to a gym, walk on a tread mill, and drive home. At its worst, the effort to make profit from those who can afford it requires convincing those who can't that they therefore can't afford to participate in activities which shouldn't cost anything.