Comment by simianparrot
21 hours ago
We don’t teach children accountability. We teach adults the opposite.
Body acceptance movements («it’s sexy to be obese»), a social safety net built around supporting the people taking the least responsibility for their lives (like drug addicts), and a culture celebrating incompetence and throwing merit out the window in the name of DEI.
Is it really a surprise a large percentage of the population is obese, stupid and unwilling to change? It’s simply a fundamentally bad incentive structure on a western societal level.
Except this entire narrative is thrown off by the fact that obesity has been a problem before any of that and is a problem in countries without any of that. Even places like Korea where you are literally shamed constantly by friends and family for being even remotely overweight has obesity growing all while having basically the exact opposite culture of what you are complaining about.
Basically the only developed country where overweight and obesity have stayed flat is Japan.
Yeah, it's almost impressive how often hypotheses for what's causing rising obesity rates simply ignore actual data. I haven't been able to find it again, but a while back I stumbled on a journal article that was basically some epidemiologists ranting about this. IIRC there are whole categories of proposed causes that you can eliminate just based on the fact that that the rise is correlated across age groups.