It would be interesting to know how many groups or classes of people have bridged the gap from insecurity to plenty without experiencing an obesity problem. Ev

It would be interesting to know how many groups or classes of people have bridged the gap from insecurity to plenty without experiencing an obesity problem. Even Japan is struggling with a rise in obesity. Remember when the rich were all plump, and gout was a rich person's disease? Upper-class culture evolved to deal with the problem, but it didn't happen overnight. This looks like an instance where the upper classes took a few generations to adapt, but now we're looking at the poor (and also the middle class) and saying why don't you just catch the fuck up right now? Obviously people arriving at the problem later have more information to work with, but cultural change is hard. Give 'em a generation or two. This article concentrates on the availability of food, but I think that's only one side of the problem. I remember an NPR segment a couple of years ago where they went to a food bank near a wealthy area and compared what people were donating to what people were taking from the food bank. The rich folks were donating whole-wheat bread, which ended up just sitting on the shelves. Either the poor folks didn't know what to do with it, or felt insulted that the rich folks were trying to change their eating habits, or they just didn't like it. The poor folks wanted white bread and canned vegetables. Just because you've got whole-grain bread and fresh vegetables doesn't mean you know what to do with them or how to get your kids to eat them. Better supply might help, though: provide healthy food, and maybe they'll figure out what to do with it, even if they didn't really want it in the first place. Getting kids raised on junk to start eating healthy food is another problem: I don't have kids myself, but evidently kids are little nutritional self-harm monsters. If you give healthy food to a kid who is used to pizza rolls and potato chips, he won't eat it, and he'll get cranky and nasty because he hasn't eaten. He'll torture himself and everyone around him until he gets candy or a Coke or mac and cheese. If you've let your kids get accustomed to eating junk, there's going to be a hell of a lot of suffering -- for both parents and kids -- before healthy eating starts to feel normal. Maybe that's why the adjustment time is measured in generations. Personally, my parents had some crude notion of healthy eating, so I didn't get soda, candy, or sugary cereal, but we ate a lot of pancakes, french toast, spaghetti, bread and butter, bacon, buttery popcorn, etc. Those are foods that it's easy to gorge on, quantities were not consistently limited, and I liked eating, so I ate way too much. My parents maintained discipline and knew it was important that I ate a healthy diet; they just didn't have a good enough understanding of nutrition. Hopefully with my own kids I'll maintain what they achieved and add a better understanding of nutrition.