Perceptions of Reasons for Weight Gain in Different Cultures

AnnPT77

Here's a different take, just for fun, on the US, the influence of culture, and obsesity:

What have been among our core cultural values, from the very beginning? Upward mobility, material success.

What are some characteristics of material success? You can employ labor-saving strategies, and indulge wants. You obtain higher-status employment, and behave in higher-status ways.

These days, that same culture has:

* an increasing fraction of white collar jobs (and more "efficiency" in all jobs, i.e., less requirement of the expensive human labor for things that can be mechanized, the easiest to be mechanized of which involve routine physical effort);

* near ubiquitous availability of affordable ready-to-consume food and drink, in quantity;

* a service economy where people of non-stratospheric income can buy services you once had to do yourself (cooking being one of the most obvious, but also grocery delivery, lawn services, housekeepers, . . . ); and

* a broad ability of average people to afford devices that minimize physical effort in home chores and recreation (we now mostly watch on screens things that average people used to physically do: Play musical instruments, dance, cook, play vigorous games . . . ).

What do princes and princesses of the realm do, in fairy tales? Sit on their thrones and have all the good things brought to them. Now, increasingly, so can we. Upward mobility, material success ==> self-indulgence, minimized self-exertion ==> weight gain and lack of fitness.

I agree that evolution wired in some tendency to fatten up in prep for lean times that now (we hope) don't come; but our culture helped foster a cozy nest to do it in, and a tendency to wallow in that nest.

Not only does getting fat not require "something wrong", we've wired it in. In this setting, thin people are the pink sparkly unicorns.

Next, cue the Puritan/Calvinist cultural themes . . . getting fat is easy and indulgent, so food is sin that requires expiation.