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What's really interesting is that Mexico has about a 24% obesity rate, making it lower than most obese European countries, and much lower than the US. Similarly

What's really interesting is that Mexico has about a 24% obesity rate, making it lower than most obese European countries, and much lower than the US. Similarly, countries like Jamaica, which have a predominantly black population, have much lower obesity rates than the US. The poverty angle doesn't quite fit either, as both Mexico and Jamaica, as well as many Eastern European countries (Romania, Slovakia) have much higher rates of poverty than the US; but much lower obesity. Although, there could be a link between poverty and the availability of high fat/high sugar foods.

rayiner 14y ago
Neither Mexico nor Eastern Europe have the incredible prevalence of cheap processed food we have in the U.S., nor the de-facto demographic segregation of particular minority groups in inner cities where that kind of food is the only thing practically available. It's just incredibly misleading to look at the U.S. as a single country in these sorts of situations. You end up taking the average of several very different societies segregated along racial/economic lines. Take Chicago for example. You'd think it'd be a very diverse city, given that it's about 1/3 white, 1/3 black, 1/3 hispanic. Except it's not. I was walking down Michigan Ave the other day (where the high-end retailers are) and literally 99% of the people around me were white. Chicago is actually a collection of racially segregated neighborhoods, each internally quite homogenous and with dramatically different access to healthy food, nutritional education, etc.