Obesity since the 1980s in the United States of America

Obesity since the 1980s in the United States of America

Jason Lusk*

(Source)

In a recent postMatthew Yglesias protests against “ the fact that conventional wisdom seems to have settled on the idea that there was a sharp rise in obesity starting around 1980 “. Rather, he argues that body weight has been increasing for a long time, and that if we are looking for the causes of weight gain and obesity, we need to take a longer view than simply asking ” what has changed in 1980, which seems fashionable today in the Twittersphere.

Here are his last two paragraphs on possible factors for weight gain over the past century:

« It turns out that, like many things, it has its downsides. The question of what, if anything, needs to be done to remedy these drawbacks seems to me quite difficult, but I don’t think its origins are a great causal mystery.

In fact, passing off origins as a huge conundrum leads to the false suggestion that there is a very simple and straightforward solution. The truth – that we suffer certain disadvantages from living in a society of great material abundance – is more difficult to accept, as people would be rather unhappy with political changes that reverse the trend, which is more than a century old. , so that food becomes tastier, more available and more convenient. »

I agree – perhaps because it’s awfully similar to the conclusion I came to in 2013 in The Food Police. Here is what I wrote then at the conclusion of the chapter on fat taxes:

« It’s only reasonable that we eat a little more food when it costs less and give up manual labor when an air-conditioned office job comes along. We can’t separate all the bad things we don’t like about obesity from all the good things we enjoy now, like driving, eating snacks, cooking faster, and having less strenuous jobs. Yes, we can have less obesity, but at the cost of things we enjoy.

When you hear that we need fundamental change to get our waistlines back to where they were three decades ago, know that it might require a world that looks like it did three decades ago. »

We are unlikely to find a simple, single-causal explanation for the rise in obesity. The figure below, taken from a article published in 2006 par Keith et al. in L’International Journal of Obesity, is perhaps the best illustration of this: it plots obesity (the red dotted line with x’s) against other factors that have been proposed as causes of obesity. It is obvious that there are many strong positive correlations, but this shows the likely futility of finding a single easy answer.

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* Jayson Lusk is an agricultural and food economist. He is currently Distinguished Professor and Head of the Department of Agricultural Economics at Purdue University.

Source : Obesity since the 1980s — Jayson Lusk