Hey – happy Sunday! This is the penultimate installment in my series on obesity. For a review of what we have covered so far, please see the previous two posts.

The data for this week were yet again sourced from the CDC BRFSS.

As I said in the title of this post, obesity is a class issue. I have 3 graphs to prove my point.

The first graph shows obesity by race with % obese on the Y-axis and time on the X-axis. See below:

The next graph shows obesity by education with % obese on the Y-axis and time on the X-axis. See below:

The third graph shows obesity by income with % obese on the Y-axis and time on the X-axis. See below:

As can very clearly be seen, obesity is a class issue. White, college educated, middle class Americans are far less obese than Americans of other races, with less education, and with less wealth.

This is likely to do with 2 factors: food quality and stress.

Food quality is an important factor in weight management. If you have access to fresh fruits and vegetables, fresh meat, and healthy snacks, you are less likely to overeat than if you are poor and only have access to processed foods. This inequality makes the first factor we identified for causing obesity – the prevalence of highly-processed foods – even worse.

The second factor is stress. Poor people and people of color are more likely to experience stress than middle class whites, and as mentioned before, stress makes obesity more likely.

Any solution to the obesity epidemic will have to address the class issues inherent to the conversation about obesity. A class-neutral solution will not work.

Thanks for reading and I’ll see you next Sunday for the final part of this series.