This is true no matter your economic placement.
It does make a difference. There are countless studies on healthy food access/price and availability of safe public space. The clear consensus is that there is a clear correlation between the income and how much resources are available for a personal use to improve health.
How is it unreasonable to expect someone to take care of themself? Why not put them all in a prison somewhere so they can be fed, clothed, housed, and have an alotted 1 hour a day to exercise? Seriously?
It is unreasonable if you make it impossible to eat healthy. I worked with inner-city populations whose only accessible sources of food were McDonald's and a Gas Station and the school cafeteria food was no better. What do you suggest a teen/young adult should do if he doesn't own a car and there is no other place to eat in the area?
Why do you take one thing I said and exaggerate it to make it ridiculous? Nobody is talking about prisons or personal caretaker. But maybe if we subsidized healthy local grown foods and farmer markets instead of corn and oil it would have better effects on the health. Maybe if we didn't build a suburban sprawl nightmare where to get from one side of neighborhood to another would take you a day if you don't have a car and willing to trespass. Maybe we invested into European-style (hell... the rest of the developed countries-style) integrated (not income-segregated) communities with people living on top of local grocery stores and having easy access to safe public space and public transportation we wouldn't see healthcare costs pilling up and lazy "sloth" patients not willing to take care of themselves? Designing our environment in a smart manner to make healthy choices a more convenient default options (streets easy to walk on and get to places and not driving-mandatory) is not putting people in prisons or providing them with a nanny-state caregivers. It is just common sense that has been employed by urban planners for thousands of years and even in the US until 1950's. Maybe trying to give everyone the largest house they can afford while allowing giant real-estate developers to write the new rules of urban/suburban living was not such a good idea?
When I was on food stamps, my kids still ate healthy. They had meat, vegetables, and homemade snacks. Nothing cheaper or healthier for daily amino acid intake than bean and rice tortillas. If you lay off the sodas and twinkies and bags of chips, all will be well. Perhaps cooking classes in high school... oh, wait.
In some of the work I do, majority of people I come across have no idea what "amino acids" are. I know you might think that since you were able to do it - so should others. But this mentality will get us nowhere. Most people don't really know what is good for them and what isn't. Hell, even most researchers are unsure about it still and there hundreds of different theories out there. Also, lets not forget that the FDA "pyramid" or "plate" used as guide and taught in school is funded by lobbyists and most researchers in the filed that I work with see it as deeply flawed. So the one source of information that may be taught in school is actually bad advice. Lastly, the food prices and access in different areas is very different. Where I work the cheapest food and most available by far is complete junk and larger stores/supermarkets are not within walking distance. This is a very common trend in the American inner-cities that has been studied in detail.
Look I was in a very deep poverty growing up and consider myself simply very lucky to get out. I was just in the right place in the right time to learn things I've learned and meet the right people to push me ahead. Most of the others I grew up with were much less fortunate. I know its tempting to think that I am somehow better than them but the reality is that I was just lucky. The decrease in social mobility and raise in income inequality in America suggests that in contemporary US who your parents will increasingly determine your fate. This is very unfortunate and very troubling to me.
The social engineering and taking over people's lives for them because they're too dumb to take care of themselves is a wrong attitude and does disservice to the poor. And to say that because someone is poor they are more likely to have an unfortunate genetic makeup? wow. I have no patience for elitest attitudes.
Wrong attitude is to assume that everything is in person's control and his circumstances can be overcame with hard work when most of the research clearly shows the opposite to be true. This notion of personal responsibility assumes that someone who is poor is poor because he/she is simply a loser. This idea propagated since 1980's has correlated with further income segregation and disintegration of the middle class in America. My attitude is to assume that they were just less fortunate than me to have faced tougher challenges in life than I did and clearly had less access to opportunity than me.
Regarding the genetics, what I've said was that minority populations who are increasingly likely to live in a worse conditions are also more likely to have propensity to diabetes, obesity, etc. I can link you to some literature if you don't believe me. If you still feel my statement is elitists but don't have a problem with other calling patients "sloth", you may need to do some serious soul-searching.
