Tucker Carlson does Not Understand Poor Nutrition

Remember these commercials?

Of course you do. The idea is that acquiring good nutrition from a poor source would require absurd amounts of it to meet one's needs. And it makes perfect sense--you don't want to eat too much, you want to eat smart. You want good food that fills you up and makes you healthy.

So here is where Carlson got all this so wrong.

“All of us should be happy about one thing, and it’s that for the first time in human history you have a country whose poor people are fat. So this does show this sort of amazing abundance,” he opined. 

“What?” Faulkner gasped. 

“For the last however many millennia, poor people starved to death,” Carlson explained. “And this is a country that’s so rich, whose agriculture sector is so vibrant and at the cutting edge technologically, that our food is so cheap, poor people are fat! I mean, I don’t know. We shouldn’t take that for granted.” 

“The cheaper foods tend to have the more fattening and artificial ingredients,” Faulkner pointed out. 

“I just saying, up until about 20 minutes ago — historically speaking — people just wanted enough calories,” Carlson replied. “And we’ve certainly achieved that.”

Not that I'm knocking fat when I'm technically not slim, but is it really a win when people are seeking cheap, filling sources of food because they can't get at nourishing sources of food that might easily satisfy them and meet their nutritional needs? Should we ignore that the food poorer people eat is laden with sugars, starches, and fats that contribute to multiple metabolic disorders? That said products are often made to have long shelf-life,  but are therefore stuffed with unnatural chemicals that might not really be great for one's health?  Given some of the health drawbacks associated with being obese, it is definitely not better for the people who are less likely to have good, affordable health care to be obese because they live in a world that is calorie-rich but nutrition-poor. I think he is missing a very valid point about the nature of how poorer people have to keep themselves alive--which is to say, adapting to poorer health habits that contribute in no way to their longevity. In other words, we know Fat City has a poor life span. But here some rich guy who can afford to shop for food as he likes and at his leisure, is extolling the ramen-and-spam subsistence that makes for salty-blooded fat calves and hypertensive home-boundness. His pretence of abundance is a story, really, about people making as do as they can with less resources.

And he missed all of that.  I seriously do wonder when we let the ill-informed talk...