NPR Claims Lazy Morbidly Obese Cretin Starving Because of “Bad Economy”
The above two desperately poor people are Gloria Nunez and her daughter Angelica Hernandez, who is only 19. NPR says the economy is so bad these two people are having to cut meat out of their diet and skip meals.
No really, that’s what they’re claiming:
A generation ago, the livelihood of Gloria Nunez’s family was built on cars.
Her father worked at General Motors for 45 years before retiring. Her mother taught driver’s education. Nunez and her six siblings grew up middle class.
Things have changed considerably for this Ohio family.
Nunez’s van broke down last fall. Now, her 19-year-old daughter has no reliable transportation out of their subsidized housing complex in Fostoria, 40 miles south of Toledo, to look for a job.
Nunez and most of her siblings and their spouses are unemployed and rely on government assistance and food stamps. Some have part-time jobs, but working is made more difficult with no car or public transportation.
So her father worked and she doesn’t, and never has but it’s the economy that’s hurting her. Her father managed to work but none of her siblings have jobs, her daughter who has a different last name than her (and grew up seeing her mother never work) has no job. But it’s the gas prices going up in the last year and a half that’s hurting them. Right.
Nunez, 40, has never worked and has no high school degree. She says a car accident 17 years ago left her depressed and disabled, incapable of getting a job. Instead, she and her daughter, Angelica Hernandez, survive on a $637 Social Security check and $102 in food stamps.
Hernandez received her high school diploma and has had several jobs in recent years. But now, because fewer restaurants and stores are hiring, she says she finds it hard to find a job. Even if she could, she says it’s particularly hard to imagine how she’ll keep it. She says she needs someone to give her a lift just to get to an interview. And with gas prices so high, she’s not sure she could afford to pay someone to drive her to work every day.
People tell Nunez her daughter could get more money in public assistance if she had a child.
“A lot of people have told me, ‘Why don’t your daughter have a kid?’”
They both reject that as a plan.
“I’m trying to get a job,” Hernandez says. “I just can’t get a job.”
Hernandez says she’s trying to get training to be a nurse’s assistant, but without her own set of wheels or enough money to pay others for gas, it hasn’t been easy.
Huh. Hernandez had a job but doesn’t work there anymore. What’s that mean? Hmmm.
Putting all that aside, let’s say you just take their word for it that they can’t work. So, if I may be indelicate for a second, how do they manage to remain so, shall we say, rubinesque?
Couldn’t they use to eat less? And frankly I’ve been poor and I did not, at 19, look like that. These people probably go over 350 each, closer to 400 I’d say. To maintain that weight and not lose any walking everywhere, which is what they claim they do, they’d have to eat five or six times a day. They have no car but they buy groceries, they’re active enough to lose weight but they’re morbidly obese and we’re supposed to feel sorry for them?
Nice try NPR but if you want sympathy from me you’re going to need to trot out somebody who actually skips meals. And if this is the best sob story you have, a couple of obese people having to eat less than the 40,000 calories a day they’re used to, then maybe the economy isn’t really all that bad, huh?
h/t Gateway Pundit
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on July 18th, 2008 at 5:03 pm
Oh my gosh. How sad and pathetic.
Some have part-time jobs, but working is made more difficult with no car or public transportation.
I’d have to guess that working is also made more difficult by the huge rolls of fat hanging off the poor women’s limbs. Sheez.. Forget working! I’d guess breathing, walking and sleeping are all made more difficult as well.
I feel almost as bad for them as I did for that couple who owned the $400K house who said they couldn’t afford health insurance a few months ago.
on July 18th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
“She says she needs someone to give her a lift just to get to an interview. ”
Yeah, a forklift.
on July 18th, 2008 at 6:08 pm
Yeah, NPR dropped the ball on this one. I haven’t seen anyone feel sorry for these two, uh rotund, women anywhere. It’s almost like NPR fed the right this story.
on July 18th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
You couldn’t make this up: the ad next to the story on the NPR site is for Weight Watchers! Awesome.
on July 22nd, 2008 at 3:44 am
I completely agree. NPR did drop the ball on this one. My parents were Enron casualties. Enron took everything my middle aged parents were working for their entire lives. But they didn’t sit back and wait for the world to take care of them while they did nothing but eat all day. We got a job (even though it took years to find a great one because who wants to hire a 53 year old man) and took care of our OWN business!
on August 16th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
People who refuse to take care of their health are more likely to make others (taxpayers or anyone else) responsible for any number of other things for which they choose not to take responsibility.
Whether it is a food addiction or drug addiction, this is the mentality: “Shame on you” for pointing out the obvious and “please help me, I can’t help myself” when I keep going to the same addiction as my solution.
on April 14th, 2009 at 10:21 pm
Food addiction is the number one cause of overweight, all the way from small overweight, to extreme morbid obesity. (Not the only cause, but the number one cause.)
This type of addiction in turn has several possible causes, but the result is certainly bizarre perceptions and behaviours around food, even being in complete denial of overeating, and in fact having amnesia for overeating (including the nausea that accompanies that).
It really has little or nothing to do with willpower because the whole incredible array of thoughts and behaviour is mediated entirely unconsciously.
This isn’t to say there is no answer, because there certainly is with modern therapies like BMSA, but that’s not going to happen when we hang onto some kind of blame game or keep giving out diet programs (which simply don’t work for anyone).
When lean people are poor, they do tend to lose weight because they sacrifice food in order to survive. Naturally lean people don’t have to diet or deprive themselves of food because food just isn’t that central for them.
There’s no point a lean person claiming the moral high ground for what comes pretty easily and naturally to them. Weight loss has very little to do with discipline or willpower.
When obese people are poor then tend to find ways to keep up the food level (and obviously in many cases this involves a level of crime). Another outcome is that they may actually eat somewhat less, but retain their weight due to a slowed metabolic rate. In that case you’ll see increased rates of depression, fatigue, sleep disorders, immune disorders, skin disorders, and a range of other illnesses.
With rising rates of overweight and obesity, we need to realise what is REALLY going on and use proven methods to address it. If we don’t, our already messed-up health care system is going to collapse altogether.
on April 14th, 2009 at 10:36 pm
That is outrageous nonsense. I have been poor, I did not turn to crime to get food (and neither did these cretin) nor did I go without. America’s poor have a higher quality of life because of we import cheap goods and produce cheap food, thus even people living at poverty level can afford three meals a day.
Being poor doesn’t lead to criminality, this is the kind of vacuous elitism a person selling a weight loss scam can be expected to blurt out when trying to sound serious. And losing weight has nothing to do with discipline and willpower? Only a degenerate selling an ebook promising lazy people they can lose weight without trying would even suggest such a dangerously uninformed opinion.
People get fat because of the sedentary lifestyle they lead. Period. If people don’t want to be fat they’d work out. None of this is my problem or my business.
I don’t allow such obvious snake oil to be peddled on my site. Find your suckers elsewhere.
on April 29th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
It is unfortunate that the severely obese are discriminated against on a daily basis. Just judging from some of the comments left here it would appear that attacking someone based on there weight is all right with many people. What people don’t understand is that being morbidly obese brings challenges to your life that most people simply don’t recognize and losing weight for these people is almost impossible short of surgery. These two women are obviously too fat, physically limited and under educated to get a decent well paying job. My fiancé is in a somewhat similar position as she is over 400lbs and despite having a college degree in education, still finds it hard to get people to hire her. Most people view the morbidly obese as lazy, unclean, stupid and needy. This type of attitude toward people of size is really unacceptable because most of them other than their size are no different than the so-called normal people.
What people also don’t realize is that fat discrimination is based on archaic beliefs regarding deadly sins which are nothing more than a fantasy based value system developed during the early years of the Roman Catholic Church. This ancient and used up prejudice is nothing more than a spring board that enables bad behavior on the part of the discriminator. People who actively practice this type of behavior justify it by believing all sorts of outlandish claims of obesity causing anything from high insurance premiums to global warming. It’s a damn shame that droves of supposedly educated people are too stupid to recognize that scapegoating entire segments of the population based on weight or appearance is naïve juvenile thinking, flat out wrong and worst of all reprehensible bigotry.
on April 29th, 2009 at 6:46 pm
So you’re claiming that we should accept that these two fat people are “starving” because you think it’s discrimination to judge people by how well they care for themselves?