While we often discuss obesity in relation to poverty in America, a new study finds that it is still a largely upper and middle class problem, as poor people are still largely undernourished and underweight.
Reuters reports that there have been concerns in recent years about the increased number of issues related to obesity (such as diabetes and heart disease) in lower income countries; however, there is a significant social divide, as it is largely the better educated, wealthier people who are battling weight gain as the poor remain thin.
Researchers studied body mass index among 547, 000 women from low to mid-income countries in Asia, Africa and South America and found that though the number of overweight women increased yearly, income had a great bearing on who was gaining weight.
This causes two uniquely different challenges public health challenges in these countries, according to S.V. Subramanian, a professor of population health and geography at Harvard University in Boston: encouraging one group to curb their eating habits and finding ways to make proper nourishment affordable to the other.
