This is rather political. I think you can probably find something similar in both the UK and the US: some 'poor' people are getting enough money that they can afford to eat a lot of cheap, unhealthy food, while others genuinely struggle to get enough to eat. The difference in money isn't all that much when compared to factors like whether you have children, which area you live in, and which benefits you're getting.
The right uses the former group to claim that welfare programs are overly generous, and can be scaled back. The left uses the latter group to claim that the safety net is barely adequate, and should be strengthened. I'm more inclined to agree with the left; I'd rather the safety net was a bit too cushy for some than that people went hungry. In the last few years, the number of people using foodbanks in the UK has increased dramatically, for instance.
Of course, politicians regularly try to tweak welfare to reduce both extremes. But reality is too complex, and you always end up with some people not getting enough while others get more than they need.
At least among children (the only group for which I could find this data, see the citations I added to the post you responded to), this is not correct. The number of poor children who don't get enough to eat is virtually the same as the number of rich children who don't - about 5%.
In the last few years, the number of people using foodbanks in the UK has increased dramatically, for instance.
This does not mean people aren't getting enough to eat. The human body responds in very predictable ways to food consumption - do waistline measurements suggest anyone is lacking food?
Most parents probably prioritise feeding their children above almost anything else. Then there are provisions like free school meals. So I wouldn't really expect the statistics to show many children not getting enough to eat.
You seem to be focussing on the correlation between poverty and obesity. That's well known, but there are a couple of key differences from the discussion at hand:
First, the poorest category is generally quite broad. I'm looking at one of your citations now, and it lumps all households below about $20k into the 'poor' bracket. The fact that obesity is more prevalent overall in that bracket doesn't mean that everyone in it gets enough to eat.
Secondly, getting the food you need isn't just about calorie intake. After all, a cup of vegetable oil has almost all the calories you need for a day. People need a balanced diet, including vitamins and protein and so on. So waistline measurements alone aren't enough to determine how many people aren't getting adequate food. News stories such as tinyurl.com/cqw7r43 suggest that poorer households are cutting back on fruit and veg as money gets tighter.
Finally, when people can't afford enough food, they are likely to turn to unconventional sources like foodbanks and dumpster diving. That people need to rely on charity and scavenging is a failure of society. We don't need to see people literally starving to death to accept that people have a problem getting enough food.
I'm looking at one of your citations now, and it lumps all households below about $20k into the 'poor' bracket.
That's actually very likely the right thing to do. Thanks to various wealth transfer programs, anyone with earned income <$20k has consumption of approximately $20k.
Calories are not nutrition. Food loaded with sugar and preservatives is much cheaper than healthy foods, and it also happens to be more readily available. Many poor neighborhoods don't have grocery stores where one can purchase fresh fruit and vegetables, but they do have convenience stores where you can buy all the candybars and junk food you can eat... at a considerable markup.
If someone gets fat off potatoes and bread they are consuming too much. They could reduce consumption of potatoes/bread and spend the money they save on vegetables.
Government definitions of "poor" don't necessarily equate to what you and I would call "poor," due to politics (basically, getting more people identified "poor" helps you get votes if you're the party perceived as better able to help the poor, and in the US one party has dominated the poverty issue and used this strategy for a number of decades).
For example, someone I knew in high school (a number of years ago now) qualified for the school lunch program, so nominally his family was poor. But they lived in a house, with a yard; had cable TV, computers, and Internet. I would say they're working-class, or maybe even lower middle-class.
If the lowest-income 20% of the population is labeled as poor for the purposes of this statistic ("nominal poor"), but the number of people who are so poor their children are starving in the streets ("desperately poor") is 0.20% of the population, then it's not so surprising that statistics over the nominal poor much more closely resemble the general population than the picture of the desperately poor.
During my teen years, my dad made a pretty good software engineer salary, and we lived in a paid off house with a big yard and lots of computers. But with 8 children (and the associated tax exemptions) and substantial charitable donations, we often had net taxable income that was well below various "poverty" thresholds.
I'm guessing he's referring to the fraction of underweight children, 5.1% below the poverty line and 5.7% above 4x the poverty line.
Not sure whether 4x should qualify as "rich", but more importantly, being underweight is pretty low bar. For example, I am underweight.
The actual number as reported by USDA is 1%. The keyword to look for is "very low food security", formerly known as "food insecurity with hunger", which is the lowest range of food security measured by USDA. (The second lowest range, "low food security", formerly "food security without hunger", means poor diet but no reduction in food intake. Note that even among the "very low food security" households less than half reported "lost weight" and less than a third reported "did not eat the whole day".)
One interesting observation: "Typically, households classified as having very low food security experienced the condition in 7 months of the year, for a few days in each of those months." I'll go out on a limb and hypothesize that these few days are the last few days of each month. So one thing to try to reduce that number would be making welfare payments daily, instead of monthly. (I read that welfare these is delivered electronically, you carry a special card which looks like a credit card and a certain amount appears on it the first day of each month. So it shouldn't add any overhead to switch to daily installments.)
The right uses the former group to claim that welfare programs are overly generous, and can be scaled back. The left uses the latter group to claim that the safety net is barely adequate, and should be strengthened. I'm more inclined to agree with the left; I'd rather the safety net was a bit too cushy for some than that people went hungry. In the last few years, the number of people using foodbanks in the UK has increased dramatically, for instance.
Of course, politicians regularly try to tweak welfare to reduce both extremes. But reality is too complex, and you always end up with some people not getting enough while others get more than they need.