This Alarming Study Will Make You Rethink What You Feed Your Children
The news: You'll never look at strained carrots the same way again. A study from the University of Buffalo School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences has found that children of the "1%" are eating far better than their low-income peers. Unfortunately, the gap in quality is far greater than the difference between organic foodstuffs and their corner-store counterparts.
Specifically, the researchers noted that poor households fed babies with foods containing far more sugars, up to and including candy, ice cream and soda.
"We found that differences in dietary habits start very early," lead author Xiaozhong Wen told the Washington Post. "The extent to which lower socioeconomic classes are associated with unhealthy infant dietary patterns is substantial."
In other words, poor infants tend to have drastically inferior diets, which can translate to years, or even decades, of poor diet and health problems.
This poses a serious health crisis. As the Washington Post noted, "the immediate danger resulting from poor infant diets is early weight gain and stunted growth."
More important, these poor dietary habits follow low-income infants for the rest of their lives. Earlier this year, Harvard University study found that the diets of the wealthy have improved in quality and health consciousness over the past decade, while those of the poor have declined sharply.
According to Frank Hu, lead author of the Harvard study, this is unacceptable. He told the Atlantic that this disparity "presents a serious challenge to our society as a whole," and that "after the financial crisis, the top one percent is doing very well — actually doing better, but the people in low socioeconomic groups are doing worse."
To put it simply: From birth, rich people eat well and become healthier. Poor people eat junk and become obese and unhealthy.
