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DanArmak comments on Critiquing Gary Taubes, Part 2: Atkins Redux - Less Wrong
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If indeed it's an epidemic - that is, highly correlated in space and time - it's very unlikely that the cause can be found and fixed in purely personal terms like 'emotional and life issues', which are unlikely to have changed in tandem for the US population recently.
Agreed 100% - it's much more complicated than just emotional overeating, and perhaps my views on the subject are colored by my own experiences. Diet, exercise, education, lifestyle choices, etc all play their part as well.
I disagree. It's fairly straightforward to cause a lot of emotional and life issues for people. We did it during the Vietnam War with the draft. College debt is a more contemporary example. Or we can have macroeconomic factors that, on the margin, move people away from friends and family or take more stressful jobs with longer hours. Hell, even the transition from manufacturing to service and knowledge jobs can do it - if you close down a factory and re-employ the workers by having them deal with irate customers as part of their day, you can contribute to more emotional and life issues.
Many countries have been involved in terrible wars, then bounced back quickly to affluency that permits casual overeating (on a financial level, that is). Almost none of them developed an obesity epidemic. Even more countries have had economic troubles, and yet ditto. It doesn't seem to me that your model has real explanatory / retrodictive power.
How well does the US obesity epidemic correlate in time with the e.g. the Vietnam war? (And with the people who were drafted vs. those who weren't?) Perhaps more importantly, if you're willing to include less drastic things like college debt, I think very few generations haven't had a comparable trauma of some sort, and yet they did not develop an obesity epidemic.