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Objectives: Lack of wealth (poverty) impacts almost every aspect of human biology. Accordingly, many studies include its assessment. In almost all cases, approaches to assessing poverty are based on lack of success within cash economies (eg, lack of income, employment). However, this operationalization deflects attention from alternative forms of poverty that may have the most substantial influence on human wellbeing. We test how a multidimensional measure of poverty that considers agricultural assets expands the explanatory power of the construct of household poverty by associating it with one key aspect of wellbeing: symptoms of mental health., Methods: We used the case of three highly vulnerable but distinctive communities in Haiti-urban, town with a rural hinterland, and rural. Based on survey responses from adults in 4055 geographically sampled households, linear regression models were used to predict depression and anxiety symptom levels controlling for a wide range of covariates related to detailed measures of material poverty, including cash-economy and agricultural assets, income, financial stress, and food insecurity., Results: Household assets related to the cash economy were significantly associated with lower (ie, better) depression scores (-0.7, [95% CI: -1.2 to, -0.1]) but unrelated to anxiety scores (-0.3 [95% CI: -0.8 to 0.3]). Agricultural wealth was significantly-and more strongly-associated with both reductions in depression symptoms (-1.4 [95% CI: -2.2 to -0.7]) and anxiety symptoms (-1.8 [95% CI: -2.6 to -1.0]). These associations were consistent across the three sites, except in the fully urban site in Port-au-Prince where level of depression symptoms was not significantly associated with household agricultural wealth., Conclusions: Standard measures of poverty based on success in the cash economy can mask important associations between poverty and wellbeing, in this case related to household-level subsistence capacity and crucial food-producing household assets., (© 2019 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)

Material wealth is a key factor shaping human development and well-being. Every year, hundreds of studies in social science and policy fields assess material wealth in low- and middle-income countries assuming that there is a single dimension by which households can move from poverty to prosperity. However, a one-dimensional model may miss important kinds of prosperity, particularly in countries where traditional subsistence-based livelihoods coexist with modern cash economies. Using multiple correspondence analysis to analyze representative household data from six countries-Nepal, Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Guatemala-across three world regions, we identify a number of independent dimension of wealth, each with a clear link to locally relevant pathways to success in cash and agricultural economies. In all cases, the first dimension identified by this approach replicates standard one-dimensional estimates and captures success in cash economies. The novel dimensions we identify reflect success in different agricultural sectors and are independently associated with key benchmarks of food security and human growth, such as adult body mass index and child height. The multidimensional models of wealth we describe here provide new opportunities for examining the causes and consequences of wealth inequality that go beyond success in cash economies, for tracing the emergence of hybrid pathways to prosperity, and for assessing how these different pathways to economic success carry different health risks and social opportunities.

The target article proposes the insurance hypothesis as an explanation for higher levels of obesity among food-insecure women living in high-income countries. An alternative hypothesis based on anti-fat discrimination in marriage can also account for such correlations between poverty and obesity and is more consistent with finer-grained analyses by marital status, gender, and age.

In low income countries worldwide, rising standards of living have spurred an unprecedented rise in obesity. However, in numerous wealthy countries the trend frequently reverses with poorer and less educated women more likely to be overweight than their wealthier compatriots. One prominent explanation for this reverse gradient is that economic deprivation leads to food choices which paradoxically increase energy intake. If true, this would challenge current evolutionary accounts for the modern obesity epidemic and have serious implications for how policy makers tackle increasing obesity in the US and worldwide. In this article, we critically review the hypothesis that deprivation leads people to choose cheaper foods which in turn foster overconsumption of energy. Though the hypothesis is consistent with numerous cross-sectional studies, available longitudinal studies from high-, middle-, and low-income countries show the reverse-that when populations experience resource declines, they experience either declines in BMI or decelerations in BMI growth. Most notably, the recent recession in the US coincides with a clear deceleration in women's obesity across income groups. We conclude by briefly reviewing other plausible explanations for the reverse gradient among women in developing countries. Finally, we discuss how theoretical perspectives and comparative, historical approaches from human biology are useful tools for examining the current wealth of hypotheses about obesity in population health., (Copyright © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)