A new study finds that children growing up in poverty in America are disproportionately more likely to be pared to other e groups (HT: God’s Politics).

So, poor kids in the US are fat…and in this they are just like the rest of America: “The whole country is struggling with this,” said Virginia Chomitz , senior scientist at the Institute for Community Health at the Cambridge Health Alliance . “There’s a lot of factors in our environment and our lifestyle that are pushing us toward being fatter. It’s an uphill battle to push against that tide.”

The obesity of poor Americans is in marked contrast to poor children in less wealthy countries, where the biggest problem is the lack of access to calories: “820 million people in the developing world are undernourished.”

Obesity among the poor in America and starvation among the poor in the developing world; Is there a thread that connects these two phenomena?

Some blame the former problem on the lack of access to affordable fresh food (while the latter don’t have access to much food of any kind). Speaking of the urban poor, Rachel Kimbro, a medical sociologist at the University of Wisconsin who led the study, said, “Good quality, fresh food is not available in a lot of these neighborhoods.”

Which makes bias against the entrance of chain stores that carry fresh produce, like Wal-Mart, Meijer, and so on, into urban neighborhoods all the more inexplicable.