Another reason for obesity in children?

I missed Paul Krugman's column yesterday, but it's worth visiting anyway.

I've long believed that while the snake oil products that purport to deal with abdominal fat caused by overproduction of the stress hormone cortisol are just that, there is something to the notion that for many individuals, the body's response to stress is to produce cortisol with its resulting increase in fat storage. The fact that there are studies which bear this out, however, has had no effect on the conventional wisdom in the medical community and of course the diet industry, that (as Kate Harding says) if we'd just stop eating baby-flavored donuts and got off our lazy asses, we too could be as thin as supermodels.

From 1999 to 2002 the level of childhood obesity grew from 11% to 16% of children -- an increase of 45%¹. Certainly fast food is a factor, particularly when fast food is often more available than fresh foods in low-income neighborhoods. But does that account for most of the increase, or is the effect of consumption of low-nutrition, calorie dense food exacerbated by stress?

That's where we get back to Krugman's column:

“Poverty in early childhood poisons the brain.” That was the opening of an article in Saturday’s Financial Times, summarizing research presented last week at the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

As the article explained, neuroscientists have found that “many children growing up in very poor families with low social status experience unhealthy levels of stress hormones, which impair their neural development.” The effect is to impair language development and memory — and hence the ability to escape poverty — for the rest of the child’s life.

[snip]

In 2006, 17.4 percent of children in America lived below the poverty line, substantially more than in 1969. And even this measure probably understates the true depth of many children’s misery.

Living in or near poverty has always been a form of exile, of being cut off from the larger society. But the distance between the poor and the rest of us is much greater than it was 40 years ago, because most American incomes have risen in real terms while the official poverty line has not. To be poor in America today, even more than in the past, is to be an outcast in your own country. And that, the neuroscientists tell us, is what poisons a child’s brain.

America’s failure to make progress in reducing poverty, especially among children, should provoke a lot of soul-searching. Unfortunately, what it often seems to provoke instead is great creativity in making excuses.

Some of these excuses take the form of assertions that America’s poor really aren’t all that poor — a claim that always has me wondering whether those making it watched any TV during Hurricane Katrina, or for that matter have ever looked around them while visiting a major American city.

Mainly, however, excuses for poverty involve the assertion that the United States is a land of opportunity, a place where people can start out poor, work hard and become rich.

But the fact of the matter is that Horatio Alger stories are rare, and stories of people trapped by their parents’ poverty are all too common. According to one recent estimate, American children born to parents in the bottom fourth of the income distribution have almost a 50 percent chance of staying there — and almost a two-thirds chance of remaining stuck if they’re black.

That’s not surprising. Growing up in poverty puts you at a disadvantage at every step.

And if you combine an economic system where downward mobility is becoming more prevalent than upward, and where opportunities are decreasing rather than increasing, with the many other stresses of living in low-income communities, it's not an absurd stretch of the imagination to think of all that cortisol pumping through the bodies of these kids as well, adding obesity and society's loathing of fat people to the strikes they have against them. It isn't just the brain that poverty poisons.