![]() ![]() Warren Buffett, one of the world’s richest people, says he “eats like a 6-year-old,” meaning lots of Oreos and Cokes every day. Trump even made a commercial for McDonald’s in 2002 extolling the virtues of their hamburgers. ![]() There are rich and famous people, including President Donald Trump, who trumpet their love of fast food. The fact that everyone eats fast food perhaps should not actually be that surprising. In other words, the guilty pleasure of fast food is shared across the income spectrum, from rich to poor, with an overwhelming majority of every group reporting having indulged at least once over a nonconsecutive three-week period. And the poor are only a little more likely to eat fast food than the rich. What we found surprised us: Poor people were actually less likely to eat fast food - and ate it less frequently - than those in the middle class. Our research, recently published in the journal Economics & Human Biology, examined this assumption by looking at who eats fast food using a large sample of random Americans. “The ‘fact’ that junk food is cheaper than real food has become a reflexive part of how we explain why so many Americans are overweight, particularly those with lower incomes.” Food journalist Mark Bittman summed up the sentiment succinctly in a column in 2011: That assumption has led some local governments to try to ban fast food restaurants from certain low-income areas. More broadly, it’s seen as a key factor in the growing obesity epidemic in the US and throughout the world.Īnd because the hamburgers, milkshakes, and fried chicken sold at fast food franchises are relatively inexpensive, there’s an assumption that poor people eat more than other socioeconomic groups. As nutrition experts point out, it typically has excessive amounts of fat, salt, and calories per serving. Fast food is frequently blamed for damaging our health. ![]()
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