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Except, again they have the same food environment we do. They have restaurants, including fast food. They have convenience stores full of processed junk, just like we do. The difference between them and us is not the food, it’s food culture. They have much stronger taboos against overeating and being fat. People there have no problem shaming people for eating more than they should, they have no problem pointing out when a close friend or relative gains weight.
Not really. I'll skip HFCS, which is both over-discussed and probably not a key driver of the blubber gap, and point out that America is the only country where bread is routinely sweetened. Notoriously among VAT geeks, Subway is legally candy in Ireland because there is so much added sugar in the bread.
Seriously, the amount of added sugar in mass-market bread in the most European countries (I am only directly familiar with the UK, Ireland and France) is zero. If you want sweet bread, you spread honey on it.
In my experience, all the diets which actually work for large numbers of people involve severely restricting refined sugar (including fruit juice) and somewhat restricting sugar in whole fruit. That is a lot harder if staples like bread have hidden sugar in.
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So, in your opinion, the change in obesity in the US and Europe since the 1970s has been due to different shaming norms?
Well, changes in food culture in general, but shaming is a part of that. People used to eat much smaller portions, and they’d discourage snacking between meals “don’t spoil your dinner” was a normal admonishment in the 1970s and 1980s. Kids weren’t allowed to drink soda very often. My family only really had desserts around when we had visitors of some sort. And kids were encouraged to be active and play outdoors and so on. Parents did get concerned when their kids got fat (keep in mind, this was 1980s fat, not obese). It wasn’t explicitly shaming as in “drop the burger fatty” yelled at strangers, but people did see it as weird when someone was having huge servings of something.
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That, and the American anti-smoking campaign
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American weights have blown up in the last century. So we can't blame DNA on this one.
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Heredity provides a ceiling on intelligence. And on musculature (at least without serious drugs) -- some people can indeed lift and not build much muscle. I haven't seen anyone say "cultural factors" about physical appearance beyond that which is (obviously) affected by diet and exercise; nobody's claiming height or nose shape is cultural. Except in some very unusual cases, the floor heredity puts on healthy weight is well below what people call "fat". Does heredity affect propensity to gain weight? You bet. But it doesn't make you fat.
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It is quite striking, isn't it! The same person here will literally attribute intelligence and personality, assimilation, etc almost entirely to genetics, then turn around and say attractiveness and weight is a character flaw. It's fascinating.
Yes, it is quite striking that a (probably largely) wrong claim is pointed out as wrong and a (probably largely) correct claim is pointed out as correct. And people around here can simultaneously believe that one claim is true but an unrelated claim is false.
There have been IQ heritability studies. It's a lot more than 50% heritable. Understanding that's gated by childhood nutrition, parasite load, etc; people around here throwing around IQ heritability assertions are largely correct.
There are others in this thread who are claiming that negative outcomes in children of single parents are primarily due to genetics.
In other words, genetics can tell you to leave your partner but not how much to eat.
These kinds of claims require evidence.
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One can be born with ugly features, or a short adult height or otherwise unpleasing proportions. Weight isn't like that. No amount of genetics will make you 300 pounds without putting the requisite calories into your system.
Personality, on the other hand, whether genetic or not is one of the most immutable things there is. The so-called personality disorders are pretty much intractable. About the only thing that changes personality is brain damage and the various extreme measures called "brainwashing" (usually involving drugs, torture, or both)
Where do you think the desire to eat comes from? The aether? It comes from your experience of the discomfort of hunger, and the feeling of reward from eating, created in the brain, exactly the same as intellect, neuroticism, conscientiousness, violence, etc.
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I strongly disagree here. People can and do change. There's a whole psychological literature on how environmental effects actually increase contribution towards personality towards middle age:
Throwing around loaded and categorical statements like 'the most immutable thing there is' without any evidence to back it up is poor praxis my friend.
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