I doubt that peoples' capacity for willpower has changed, but that the exercise of that capacity has. There's a lot less personal discipline than there used to be, across the board, and the less you exercise your personal discipline, the harder it is when you try to.
Just to add, being fat takes significantly more calories than being thin. So, you really need a lot of excess food production before large scale obesity is even possible.
And we do have excess food production. We can feed the whole planet. Food supply isn't the problem, distribution and affordability is the problem.
So, that is my purely layman stab at it. I wouldn't even know where to begin doing quality research on this.
http://apps.who.int/gho/data/node.main.A904?lang=en
India for example seems low by comparison, but the rate is still up more than 20% since 1975. 18.5% for adults in 1975 vs 21.8% in 2016. Even Ethiopia the lowest country in the world is over 20.6 vs 17.7%.
> but the rate is still up more than 20% since 1975. 18.5% for adults in 1975 vs 21.8% in 2016
Nitpick: a rise of 20% on that 18.5% would make it 22.2%
Edit: I'm also not sure why the 20% marker seems to be your cutoff for "having an obesity problem". Ethiopia's famous famine went from 1983-85, yet their obesity rate for '85 is 18.7%. That seems to be an awful thin line to walk, where 18.7% marks a famine and 20% marks obesity problem.
Similarly, the Second Congo War went from 1999 to 2003 and almost 4 million people died, mostly from famine.. yet throughout that, the Democratic Republic of the Congo maintained obesity rates above 20% in your link.
For comparison US obesity rate in 1950 was 10% and considered a problem at the time now it's 35%. North Korea might not be twice that, but it seems like every other functioning country is.
PS: Ops yea, just used 18 not 18.5. But it is over 15% increase.
I'm getting tired of this new fad of dismissing someone's comment by demanding evidence for it.
You say this so matter-of-factly but it's actually quite a claim. I think people are right to call you on it.
I understand there is a general feeling that past generations "made do with less" and "had greater moral fiber" and so on, but I'm also a little suspicious of that kind of thinking.
I made no claim about greater moral fiber, but if you think that past generations didn't "make do with less", you're now making an extraordinary against-the-grain claim. So, "give us a citation proving why you should be suspicious of that comment". See how annoying that is?
Secondly, if not trying to to convince someone else, nobody needs evidence for ideas they already believe.
But since you were making a strong claim, asking for evidence means giving you the chance to show that you have convincing reasons for your opinion.
Of course, if you don't have evidence, that's fine, too. Just don't expect to change anyone's mind.
Cool, it's easy: then provide some, please. Provide some citations for it rather than just accepting the common knowledge, since common knowledge is often wrong.
> asking for evidence means giving you the chance to show that you have convincing reasons for your opinion.
No. Asking someone for more information, or asking someone to round out the idea more is giving the chance to show convincing reasons. Asking bluntly for a citational proof is mere dismissal.
1. Companies are motivated to increase profits. [1]
2. Increasing consumption is one way to increase profits. [2]
3. Generally applicable techniques for increasing easily measurable business statistics have been developed and improved. [3]
4. Consumption is one such statistic. [4]
5. People are more likely to eat food they enjoy, even if they know it's unhealthy. [5]
Thus it is plausible that companies have found ways to increase consumption by "hitting people's reward centers".
6. People get fat when they eat more. [6]
Therefore this plausible statement provides an explanation for increased obesity.
I hope this is enough evidence for you. Note that I don't think citations are the be all and end all of evidence. They are a useful tool in academic discussion, but in more informal settings, appealing to common knowledge is usually enough, unless it's that common knowledge itself that is under doubt.
When you eventually provide evidence for your claim that people exercise their willpower less, I won't require citations for everything. I'd like to see a well-reasoned argument, however.
[1] Henry Hazlitt, "Economics in One Lesson", pp. 141: The Function of Profits
[2] Elementary mathematics: if you make a certain profit on each item sold and consumed, increased consumption increases profit.
[3] e.g. https://www.mv-research.com/research/pricing
[4] If you keep books on your sales, you have already measured it.
[5] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278431915...
[6] http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/early/2009/10/14/ajcn.2009...
It doesn't say much for 'being easy' when you have to pad out your list of six with two non-citations, two irrelevant citations, and a difficult-to-source one.
> When you eventually provide evidence for your claim that people exercise their willpower less, I won't require citations for everything.
"When I give you evidence, you won't require evidence"?
> I hope this is enough evidence for you.
It's worth noting that I didn't demand evidence for the original claim; I only demanded it as an illustrative point to people that were demanding it of me.
You also didn't seem to be very interested in the book, since you couldn't find it on the internet: https://mises.org/system/tdf/Henry%20Hazlitt%20Economics%20i...
Your problem seems to be that you conflate evidence (something that gives you more information) with citations (a means to point to evidence someone else has already collected). When someone asks for evidence, they don't necessarily need citations. You could just refer to something they already know, and provide a logical argument from there. That is also why I didn't bother linking to a mathematics textbook for [2], since I'm pretty sure you have already been exposed to the necessary concepts.
Maybe that's the case in the lunch room in an academic department, but it's definitely not the case in internet forums. When someone demands evidence on a forum, they don't mean "walk me through it", they mean "show me the external source that supports it". They mean 'evidence' like a lawyer or a historian would use the term, not 'logical reasoning'.