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Notes -
How can it be a mystery? It's like Scott's example of the Russian periodic table with room-temperature superconductors and antigravity. There are some healthy diets in the world. There's the upper middle-class pious diet with home-cooking, multigrain bread, fruit, fish and so on. There's the Japanese diet with fish and rice - there's zero problem with obesity in Japan. The Mediterrenean diet isn't bad either. Only as countries westernize, only as McDonalds and Coca Cola expand into new markets does obesity emerge.
The most obese countries are Pacific Islanders, which is genetics-related, followed by oil-rich Arab countries who are ultra-Westernized and then the US.
According to wikipedia, Ethiopia has a higher proportion of obese people than Japan! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_obesity_rate
I'm confident that if the US government shifted its vast agricultural subsidies program towards pumping out sushi rather than corn and beef, there would be quick improvement. I agree that raising awareness does nothing, what's needed is serious movement on the ground. Dissolve Coca-Cola, retrain fast food cooks to produce sushi, ban HFCS and things will turn around quickly.
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