Want to see social inequality and how it impacts obesity? Look at takeout food in your neighborhood - and in the halls of Cambridge.

Yet the halls of Cambridgee are where a new paper claims takeout food is an indicator of social inequality. Obviously elites at Cambridge have a long and cherished history to gaze upon, including one in which a feudal system made sure poor people were never overweight. Today, there is more equality than ever, poor people can afford to be fat, but the Cambridge scholars believe that even cheap food is a way of promoting oppression.

The Centre for Diet and Activity Research (CEDAR) at the University of Cambridge mapped takeout food to obesity and income. Prestige, the kind of paper British comic John Oliver just ridiculed is born:

As rationalization for a paper that was basically phoned in, the authors note that there is a lot of obesity in the U.K., then they write "it is thought that this may be due in part to increased takeaway food consumption". By who? The authors and other people doing the kind of modern epidemiology that has people facepalming on a daily basis.

To get a shot of confirmation bias, they looked at data from an existing cohort of almost 6,000 adults aged 29-62 years in Cambridgeshire. Individuals were asked about their highest educational attainment, eating patterns, were weighed and measured by trained researchers, and had the density of takeaway outlets in their home and work neighborhoods calculated. 

They found what you already guessed; people with lower education ordered more takeout and were more obese. Clearly, the takeout food caused them not to go to college. Presto, an American Journal of Clinical Nutrition article is born.

They turn business reality upside down; food outlets crop up where people spend money - there is a reason Whole Foods stores plop down in wealthy, anti-science hotbeds full of people on the left wing of American politics. The authors conclude the opposite, that takeout food just plops down somewhere and it creates a market in its radius by creating obese people.

"Neighborhoods are clearly important in shaping what all of us eat, no matter how educated we are," explains Dr Thomas Burgoine from CEDAR, part of the Medical Research Council Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge. "But this effect appears to be much greater for those with lower levels of education."

To biologists, this sounds like spontaneous generation of maggots hundreds of years ago. That is the sad state of epidemiology, people who believed in alchemy and astrology were doing better critical thinking.  

In America, educational attainment is not much of an indicator of wealth - if you got that $200,000 degree in Fine Arts, you are not going to be wealthy compared to a computer programmer who never went to college who is now working at Twitter. Nonetheless, Cambridge surely wants to protect the notion that a Cambridge degree is the key to a better life - maybe even to being thinner.

So the authors patronize that if you didn't go to college, you lack both knowledge of how to cook and that some foods have more calories and therefore are exploiting by that fish and chips booth.   

Dr Pablo Monsivais, senior author of the study, adds: "Higher educational attainment brings with it many advantages, including more money to spend on fresh, healthier foods, as well as better knowledge of food and nutrition, and the tendency to dedicate more time to preparing meals at home, which we know are healthier than those bought out of the home. Without these advantages, people may be more vulnerable to their environment."

Concluding with the naturalistic fallacy is a fine way to end. Why not promote the notion that some food calories will make you fat while the same number of calories of another food will not? 

Solution they posit: Ban takeout food.

It's for the peasants.