Price Disparities

In the work that I do now, which is research or research review with regard to obesity and chronic disease, the term health disparity is often used. In fact, many government and philanthropist organizations offer grants to research entities who will work to end these disparities. The term basically means a significant difference in quality of health and quality of health care between certain groups.

When looking at those who are OW(overweight) or obese, there is some difference in numbers based on race and income, but I do want to be very clear when I also say - there is NO group; eduction, income, gender, or race that has a majority of normal weight persons within its ranks. As a country the USA is over 66% OW/Obese - we are second to none.

There is one reason and one reason only that a person or a population is OW - they eat too much. There are dozens of reasons however, that they eat too much and some are based on disparities. (others are culture, emotional, environmental, education, etc )

I have seen this before I have said this before but because I am studying it more these days, it pushes my buttons significantly. I was at a local grocery store and the items I wanted to buy were just too much money. I was not at Wal-mart. I didn't buy the mushrooms, I didn't buy the 100 calorie snacks. The 100 calorie snacks which I can find for 2.50 if I am lucky, were being sold for over 3 dollars at this store, but what put me over the edge were two separate snack packs near the registers. The packages had 4-6 servings of honey buns or danish - each pack was 99 cents. One had 250 cals and the other 310, one had 8 grams of saturated fat, the other 10. What is a low income person going to do in those situations? I wanted to call Michelle Obama and tell her to get herself down to NC right now and DO SOMETHING!!

Ah - okay, that's all for today's rant...