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Comment by mpalczewski | Hacker News Reader

Obesity started to be a thing in the last 100 years. It wasn't evolution.

You misunderstood what I said. We evolved in a world where food was scarce, hence why we evolved to overeat once we do find food. In the past 100 years, food has no longer been scarce (for people living in a first world country), hence the obesity.

There's been an upper class for whom food wasn't scarce for thousands of years. Socrates wrote about it, and it was looked down upon as type of gluttony and quite unhealthy. However, even those upper classes, who didn't have any food scarcity did not typically get fat.

Blaming it on food scarcity isn't the whole story. It's not enough that food scarcity stopped. It wasn't carbs either, as there are cultures without carb scarcity that weren't obese(Though we do put corn syrup in everything now).

My guess is that it's a dopamine addiction. We understand that sometimes we must do things we don't like, but the idea of eatings things we don't enjoy scares many people.

It's also how corps package food, and the ones that make their foods the most addicting(the most dopamine -> the most pleasure) survive.

>even those upper classes, who didn't have any food scarcity did not typically get fat. //

Some kings in the past had massive obesity problems, like Henry VIII. Apparently for him it was forced immobility following a hunting accident. Most people in the UK just haven't been able to afford to get obese until the last several decades, and I warrant companies have learnt how to hook us on high-fat and high-sugar foods to make bigger profits.

There's a phenomenon that many island populations have abnormally high levels of morbid obesity. This comes from the huge advantage of having any genetic disposition to better store more fat/energy in a situation where more can not readily be obtained by increased hunting range, etc.

Which? The only case I heard of was the archipelago in thr pacific where the lands and water were so polluted from colonial agriculture that they couldn't eat their ancestral foods, and had to rely heavily on imports of canned and prepared foods.

Most pacific islands are high up on obesity rates so one pollution incident is not an explanation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_Pacific

If you follow the "see also" from that article studies find the genetic factors towards becoming obese in a favorable environment to be different in different ethnic groups, from 6-85%.

So a theory that fits the statistics is that colonialism brought in a favorable diet for weight gain to everywhere(?) but the percentage of people who became obese when subjected to a favorable diet was largely a factor of local genetics, genes most useful in an unfavorable environment did well and put the peoples in those places at the top of the list for obesity rates.

Obesity was literally always a thing, it was just hard for crap covered serfs to get the calories to make it a thing for them. For the other classes though...

Obesity as always existed. Exess availability to carbohydrates has been far less common.

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