Yeah, this "epidemic" isn't a worldwide phenomenon. There's definitely societal factors of environment and lobbying that helped get it to this point. Telling someone to "eat less" is about as helpful as telling someone depressed to "get better".
Why only some rich western countries with large disposable incomes and cushy lifestyles have a problem with people eating way too much?
Why do some people in the west (especially the US) always need to outsource the responsibility of their own bad actions and lifestyle choices to "societal factors and culture"?
Am I fat because I'm a lazy pig? No, it's obviously society's and the food's fault lol.
They are.
"Obesity in India has reached epidemic proportions in the 21st century, with morbid obesity affecting 5% of the country's population" [1]. (It's about 7% in America [2].) Meanwhile in China, "the incidence of overweight and obesity among school-age children...was 15.5% in 2010, rising to 24.2% in 2019 and soaring to 29.4% in 2022" [2]. Same story in Vietnam: "The prevalence of overweight among children aged under 5 years increased from 5.6% in 2010 to 7.4% in 2019. For overweight and obesity among children aged 5 to 19 years, prevalence rose from 8.5% and 2.5% in 2010 to 19% and 8.1% in 2020, respectively" [3].
The only country you're right about is Japan, though overweightness is growing there, too [4]. Same across Africa [5].
There is absolutely a systemic effect causing obesity to rise worldwide. That doesn't remove individual agency from the equation. But it's sort of like the opiate crisis: you can have both flawed individual decisionmaking and a systemic bias that fixes the dice while offering more rolls.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_India
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10357130/
[3] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9947684/
[4] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2024/08/28/japan/science-h...
5% of the population is hardly enough to call them fat but fair enough, seems like the entire world is getting fatter as they become more wealthy and industrialized.
But 7% is? India and America have statistically similar rates of morbid/severe obesity.
That said, about 74% of Americans are overweight or obese [1]. The fattest Indian states barely break 40%. But if you only looked at middle class and above, I wouldn't be surprised to see numbers similar to America's.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/hestat/obesity-adult-17-18/obe...