Maybe you won’t be surprised; I wouldn’t want to mis-underestimate, as George Bush Jr. would say, the encyclopedic knowledge of the PJ Media audience.
As for me, had anyone asked before I looked into it, just based on personal observation, I would’ve put the U.S. and Mexico at the top of the flesh heap in terms of fattest countries on this round Earth.
Related: ‘Body Positivity’ Activist Claims ‘Obesity’ Is a Fatphobic Slur
Actually, they’re not even close to the fattest, it turns out. All those food stamps spent on soda and Milky Ways and TikTok marathons and #bodypositivty propaganda weren’t enough for the U.S. to even crack the top ten by most metrics.
By World Population Review‘s reckoning, that distinction goes exclusively to the many tiny islands nations of the remote Pacific, for reasons that might not be immediately clear. Global Obesity Observatory concurs.
It goes without saying that the modern Western diet, which has now been exported across the globe via fast food trash chains like KFC — which for some reason the people in developing countries apparently treasure because their franchises are everywhere on every continent — there might actually be a genetic explanation as well.
Via Pacific Health Dialogue (emphasis added):
Pacific people (especially Micronesian and Polynesian) have some of the highest rates of obesity and diabetes in the world that largely developed since the introduction of western culture and diet. Recent studies suggest that much of the risk relates to the excessive intake of sugar (sucrose) and carbohydrates, leading to a type of fat storage syndrome (metabolic syndrome). Here we discuss some of the environmental. genetic and epigenetic reasons why this group might be especially prone to developing obesity and diabetes compared to other ethnic groups. Indirect evidence suggests that the higher endogenous uric acid levels in the Polynesian-Micronesian population may represent a predisposing factor for the development of obesity and diabetes in the context of Western diets and lifestyles. Pacific people may be an ideal group to study the role of "thrifty genes" in the pathogenesis of the current obesity epidemic.
Why Pacific Islanders would be uniquely predisposed to storing fat is another interesting question. Were these peoples subjected to long bouts of no or inadequate access to food, and so their genome compensated with “thrifty genes”? Is it something about the climate?
I’m not sure if this is an analogous situation, but one of the plagues, aside from literal disease, wrought on the Native American population by the European conquistadors was alcoholism, which, as anyone who has spent time on an Indian reservation in the modern day can verify, has continued to plague this population.
Blaming anything on genetics alone is a cop-out; the real world is usually more complicated than boiling a single social ill down to a genetic explanation. But it appears genetics might actually play a role as well in the high rates of alcohol addiction among natives.
Via The American Journal of Psychiatry (emphasis added):
Substance dependence has a substantial genetic component in Native Americans, similar in magnitude to that reported for other populations. The high rates of substance dependence seen in some tribes is likely a combination of a lack of genetic protective factors (metabolizing enzyme variants) combined with genetically mediated risk factors (externalizing traits, consumption drive, drug sensitivity/tolerance) that combine with key environmental factors (trauma exposure, early age of onset of use, environmental hardship/contingencies) to produce increased risk for the disorder.
