Northerner
Admin (Retired)
- Relationship to Diabetes
- Type 1
The newish minister for public health probably thought she was being sympathetic with her comments about obesity and the poor. But she was really just revealing her prejudices.
Soubry told the Daily Telegraph that "it was 'heartbreaking' that many of the families who were at greatest risk of obesity were among the poorest in the country".
"A third of our children leave primary school overweight or obese... When I was at school you could tell the demography of children by how thin they were. You could see by looking at their eyes. They would be described as 'the skinny runts' because they were not getting the right food. When I go to my constituency, in fact when I walk around, you can almost now tell somebody's background by their weight... Obviously, not everybody who is overweight comes from deprived backgrounds but that's where the propensity lies".
So are the poor fatter than the rest? This page from The Poverty Site suggests that the relationship is more complex than that. The skinniest group is indeed the richest women, no doubt starving themselves in a desperate attempt to stay thin. (What's so healthy about that?) The next skinniest group, however, is the poorest men. The fattest group is the poorest women. So the poorest 20% of society contains the skinniest men and the fattest women. What can we conclude from this? Not a lot.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/rob-lyons/obesity-anna-soubry-is-wrong_b_2536680.html
Soubry told the Daily Telegraph that "it was 'heartbreaking' that many of the families who were at greatest risk of obesity were among the poorest in the country".
"A third of our children leave primary school overweight or obese... When I was at school you could tell the demography of children by how thin they were. You could see by looking at their eyes. They would be described as 'the skinny runts' because they were not getting the right food. When I go to my constituency, in fact when I walk around, you can almost now tell somebody's background by their weight... Obviously, not everybody who is overweight comes from deprived backgrounds but that's where the propensity lies".
So are the poor fatter than the rest? This page from The Poverty Site suggests that the relationship is more complex than that. The skinniest group is indeed the richest women, no doubt starving themselves in a desperate attempt to stay thin. (What's so healthy about that?) The next skinniest group, however, is the poorest men. The fattest group is the poorest women. So the poorest 20% of society contains the skinniest men and the fattest women. What can we conclude from this? Not a lot.
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/rob-lyons/obesity-anna-soubry-is-wrong_b_2536680.html