No, poor people don't eat more junk food than everyone else

Fast food is frequently blamed for damaging our health. As nutrition experts point out, it typically has excessive amounts of fat, salt, and calories per serving. More broadly, it’s seen as a key factor in the growing obesity epidemic in the US and throughout the world.

And because the hamburgers, milkshakes, and fried chicken sold at fast food franchises are relatively inexpensive, there’s an assumption that poor people eat more than other socioeconomic groups. That assumption has led some local governments to try to ban fast food restaurants from certain low-income areas. Food journalist Mark Bittman summed up the sentiment succinctly in a column in 2011:

“The ‘fact’ that junk food is cheaper than real food has become a reflexive part of how we explain why so many Americans are overweight, particularly those with lower incomes.”
Our research, recently published in the journal Economics & Human Biology, examined this assumption by looking at who eats fast food using a large sample of random Americans. What we found surprised us: Poor