While both poor and rich families increase their spending on home fuel in
winter, rich families also spend more on clothing and food served in the home
during the cold season.
The poor, on the other hand, who spend less on clothing and less on food at
home, end up eating 10 percent fewer calories in the winter, according to the
report in the American Journal of Public Health.
“Our results suggest that poor American families face stark choices
in cold weather … and that poor parents are only imperfectly able to
protect their children from cold-weather resource shocks,” say Jayanta
Bhattacharya, M.D., Ph.D., of Stanford Medical School and colleagues.
Poor families did not experience any significant loss of vitamins and minerals
or overall diet quality compared with richer families, although poor families
had worse diets to begin with, according to the researchers.
Bhattacharya and colleagues uncovered the “heat or eat” dilemma
after combining records of monthly average temperatures with information
from two large nationwide databases that included information on nutrition
and consumer
expenses from 1980 to 1998.
The researchers found that poor families spent an average of $9 less per month
on food for the home with a 10-degree drop in temperature. By comparison, rich
families increased their home food spending by $11 per month when the temperature
dropped.
“Poor families reduced food expenditures by roughly the same amount
as their increase in fuel expenditures,” Bhattacharya explains.
The researchers say that it is unclear whether the 10 percent
calorie reduction experienced by the poor is really “an unmitigated disaster,” in
light of the country’s obesity epidemic and the stability of other
nutritional indicators like vitamin and mineral intake.
“Even if calorie intake declines might be viewed favorably, seasonal
cycles in calorie intake, which is what our results imply, may not have the
same positive or even desirable health consequences as might caloric restriction
among the obese,” the researchers say.
The study was supported by the Joint Center for Poverty Research and the Institute
for Research on Poverty.
