Obesity Rates by Gender and Country | Hacker News Reader

Obesity Rates by Gender and Country

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19 pointspaulpauper13 comments

Original Source (linked in the tweet):

https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1cmz296/oc...

I originally thought "for some countries like the US where there is such regional and urban/rural differences, this data won't be that helpful because the average will mask tons of variation", but I thought the gender differences were pretty fascinating, e.g. female obesity much more prevalent than male obesity in South Africa, and in Poland the opposite.

„I like big butts and I cannot lie“ isn’t common knowledge anymore it seems.

The data suggests that the gender variance relates with the societal mixing of genders. The low population countries might simply have large variance due to noise but for all countries in the 10s of millions population or higher there appears to exist an interesting signal. Part of obesity is potentially a true epidemic transmissible via human contact, and part of it may be societal norms that differ between genders in some countries more than in others.

How is Pakistan so much fatter than India and Bangladesh despite having the lowest GDP per capita of the three?

The more important question is how can you be sure the data from Pakistan on obesity is sampled exactly same as the data from India and Bangladesh or vice versa.

Like a friend of mine said: "nobody ever measured my height and weight recently, so how can we trust the recent obesity data?". Granted, the discussion wasn't about obesity but about the chart on EU penis size variance between countries, but you get the point.

This data is collected in cooperation with the same foreign organizations (USAID, WHO, etc.) applying the same international best practices. The data is generally quite reliable and comparable across countries.

Wait, what? Egypt is now the most obese country?

I expected to see Kuwait on top as I had in the past, but the list is incomplete. Maybe these are just the countries they could find the data by gender. After small island nations, number one is still Kuwait: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_obesity...

Edit: Actually on this list, the US is still quite a ways ahead of Egypt. The sources are different.

Kuwaitis are a minority within the actual population in Kuwait. Seems kind of like measuring only at the golf club.

The data is filtered by Countries with more than 20 million people. That is quite an arbitrary filter and removes neighbouring countries which might provide contrast but are smaller than that

The condition of "only countries with population >= 20 million" is doing a lot of work. These lists are usually dominated by small Pacific island countries.

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