[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

> You don't see a lot (if any) fat people in certain parts of the world where access to cheap, unhealthy, highly caloric food is not as readily available as it is in the US

The word "unhealthy" is doing a lot of lifting in that sentence. For instance, there's the Kitvian people, who have no food scarcity whatsoever and a diet that consists of 70% carbohydrates, which a lot of nutrition "science" tells us is bad, yet obesity is completely unknown to them.

Or the Maasai diet, which is about 66% fat, yet they also don't have an obesity problem.

Sugar consumption in Austrailia between 1980 and 2003 dropped 23% but obesity nearly trippled.

The idea that this is merely due to food addiction caused by some "unhealthy" quality of what we're eating is not well supported by the data. Or at least we haven't isolated what exactly the "unhealthy" part of that is yet.

[ashwagary]

How hard is it to gather self discipline stats for those groups you mentioned? Not all populations put the same pressure on themselves to stay healthy. There is a massive safety net in Australia that doesnt exist in most of the world.

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

Some people are just desperate to make this about self-discipline despite significant evidence to the contrary, apparently.

[ashwagary]

You are correct, this is not purely due to self discipline.

It seems to me that traditional diets with long observed health outcome histories paired with self discipline lead to better results than the constantly reinvented hyper-processed fad food products (aka fiat foods) consumed in large health safety net environments.

[TheNewsIsHere]

This is sort of what I was getting at with my original comment. I also don’t give credence to the idea that this is primarily about will power, although I see how my original comment could be construed that way.

The US is dumpster fire, and I say that as a US citizen. We have so much high-calorie, low quality food, and so many obstacles to healthful food security in some places, that it borders on the intuitive that these would be significant contributing factors.