Dennis Raphael is a professor of health policy and management at York University. Raphael did a health study in Lawrence Heights. His findings show that the correlation is not between the couch and the potato.
“People who are poor don’t have the resources to be healthy. Diabetes is three or four times more likely to occur among poor people. We interviewed low-income people. We were struck, when we did the study, by how unable people were to access resources: the poor don’t go to ball games, to movies. They never spoke of recreation, of volunteering, of going out with friends.” In other words, the poor have fewer ways to relieve their stress, and stress is a factor of the disease of diabetes. 72 per cent of the people we surveyed couldn’t afford the food they needed to be healthy. “People are suffering, but I see little evidence that things are getting better...they knew about eating healthy food. But we found they didn’t have the money to afford the food they needed.”
Some people seem to think that if you are fat, you are more prone to diabetes. Raphael insisted however: “It isn’t whether you are fat, it’s whether you are poor."
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