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Comment by cthalupa | Hacker News Reader

Except this entire narrative is thrown off by the fact that obesity has been a problem before any of that and is a problem in countries without any of that. Even places like Korea where you are literally shamed constantly by friends and family for being even remotely overweight has obesity growing all while having basically the exact opposite culture of what you are complaining about.

Basically the only developed country where overweight and obesity have stayed flat is Japan.

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Yeah, it's almost impressive how often hypotheses for what's causing rising obesity rates simply ignore actual data. I haven't been able to find it again, but a while back I stumbled on a journal article that was basically some epidemiologists ranting about this. IIRC there are whole categories of proposed causes that you can eliminate just based on the fact that that the rise is correlated across age groups.

South Korea's obesity threshold is much lower than western Europe and the US. There you're considered obese at 25 kg/m2 or above. In Europe and the US it's 30 kg/m2.

There's also factors like this: https://biz.chosun.com/en/en-science/2026/08/17/SC54HFSN7JAU...

I didn't mean to say the cases I listed are exclusively the only ones, but I still maintain they are a major part of it.

Japan teaches accountability and taking personal responsibility -- it's a country where its capital city can get away with barely any places to dispose of your trash and not be littered. DEI is barely a thing, if at all. And it definitely does not celebrate mediocrity.

I'm going based off of set standards, not local. Plenty of international organizations track this and even before you replied to me here there were other links in the thread. But the absolute numbers aren't important either way, it's the trends. I don't care if it's the 25kg mark they're passing or the 30kg, and the numbers I'm basing this off of predate GLP-1 medications. What I care about is the trends for weight - and in Korea, just like everywhere else in the developed world, those trends were rising, and accelerating at the rate at which they rose.

As for Japan, uh, I love Japan, but you have a.... very interesting... view of it. No litter? Walk off the main streets, go down some back alleys. Tokyo is a big city. Japanese people aren't so inhuman compared to the rest of the world as to be perfect. Hell, go have some great craft beer at the Mikkeller bar in Shibuya or literally anything down one of those alleys. You'll find trash, you'll find garbage sitting out, you'll see rats. New Yorkers will stop feeling so claustrophobically clean and start feeling at home.

You're right about DEI, but it's also one of the most homogeneous cultures in the world, the poor treatment of women in the workforce for so long directly lead to a backlash that has precipitated and massively contributed their birth rate issues, and racism against people of Korean descent is still massive.

And the entire salaryman system is literally a "the vast majority of you will get promoted in near lockstep for time served" celebration of mediocrity.

Japan is a wonderful country. There's plenty of things they do better than anyone else. There's plenty of things they are awful at or about, too. Go look at their legal system - they have an absurd conviction rate of nearly 100%. And it's not because they're doing that much better of a job investigating, or having better prosecution, or only charge people they've got definitive proof. And there's a million things they are just as bad at.

Korea is just a perfect counterexample because they also are huge on accountability and personal responsibility, the cleanliness level is similar to Japan, they don't have DEI, and they celebrate mediocrity far less than Japan does.... and yet, still getting fat.

I can't explain Japan. But the explanations people give always have plenty of counterexamples.

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