Related to my earlier post, I just came a recent article about the driving forces behind obesity in the developed world. Here is a link to a non-technical summary of the paper (a link to the actual article is nested within) and here is nice analytic piece by the Healthcare Economist.
The major take home point is that most (over 90%) of the increase in obesity seems to be driven by the fact that people are eating more now than before. The authors of the paper contend that the other side of the equation, decreased caloric expenditure, is quantitatively less important, though still non-trivial.
The main question then is: why are people consuming more calories? The theories out there to explain this generally fall into two categories:
1) high monetary and opportunity costs of healthy foods relative to unhealthy foods (the proliferation of fast food joints, putative effects of US agricultural subsidies, etc)
2) lower costs of calories in general due to improvements in agricultural technology
I don't know if anyone has really been able to assess the relative (or even absolute) importance of these explanations in the data. I do know that obesity is a scorching hot area of research and that the coming years should provide us with a slew of new research evidence for us to feast on. A good example: a new working paper assessing the fast food joint-obesity link.
In the meantime, Happy Thanksgiving and enjoy the inevitable feast!
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