The other commentor has already pointed out how the phrase has went over your head, so I'll be picking apart your stats argument, to beat a dead horse.
You're going to have to qualify why "poor people" are relevant. Do you have a definition for poor people? Is it the federal (imo wrong) definition of some >$20k/yr income? Or perhaps one with more detail like people that work dead-end jobs, live paycheck-to-paycheck, and are saddled in debt?
Second, I'm not going to lambaste you for posting a journalistic summary of research (which in-and-of-itself is just a biased interpretation of many studies, which themselves are similarly biased interpretations of data -- hell, it's like a derivative), but I will lambaste you for picking an article that doesn't have any significant mention (at all) about food choices, much less what these "poors" actually eat. Or even the simple "fact" that I cannot find anything in that article about "calories" or "dollar" or anything more than a single sentence saying, paraphrased, "poors are more likely to be fat because healthy food is expensive."
And third, you're just conjecturing and jumping from point to point, without any real evidece.
Here's my take: poors eat a lot of processed food, because it feels good, saves time, and -- on the surface -- seems cheaper.
Do poors eat less meat, or no meat at all? I have known only a couple of poors to eat any significant portion of meat, and only because they were in the physical trades, where protein and creatine intake matter. The poors with less physical occupations simply subsist on processed foods rich in carbohydrates.
You can see some of the gen'd sneaks on: https://web.archive.org/web/20211011073927/https://thissneak...