observed this in myself: I gained _enormous_ amounts of weight
while living in a poor, working-class neighborhood, and promptly shed it once
I moved to a wealthy upper middle-class neighborhood. I've bounced back and
forth between poor areas and rich areas since then, and the pattern has so far
held up.

But, anecdotes not equivalent to data, etc etc.

In a upper-middle class neighborhood healthy diets practically come after you
with a baseball bat. It's steeped in the general consciousness of the area,
support by people who possess the freedom of finance, time, and effort to
think about such things, and it's supported by the merchants in the area.

The same is not true in poor neighborhoods, where fast is king to a population
of overworked and tired people. When you're holding down multiple jobs and
raising kids at thebelief, the main bottleneck of being poor is not access to
food - the market has solved that part remarkably well, and farming
improvements throughout the last century (Borlaug is perhaps rolling in his
grave) means that food in general is so cheap that everyone in a developed
country has access to it.

The main bottleneck of being poor is _time_.

A poor person spends considerably more time just to ensure survival than a
wealthy person, and has remarkably little "disposable" time remaining in a
day. Long, irregular hours, possibility of multiple jobs, lack of access to
speedy/on-demand transportation, lack of access to time-creating conveniences
(laundromat far way instead of laundry in the house, for example), all serve
to make time the rarest resource for the poor.

That's not an exhaustive list by the way, and I don't pretend to