[QUOTE=dangermom]
A question: my brother, who has lived in Korea, has a Korean wife, speaks the language fluently and frequently visits there, has mentioned that a lot of Korean women are obsessed with being thin and don’t eat nearly enough. His wife concurs. (Both are healthily slim themselves.) Do you have an opinion on that?
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Sure, it’s a common meme just like anything else. Are Korean girls in general heavily pressured to stay thin, perhaps to an unhealthy extent? Maybe. Are Korean guys? Probably not.
I’ve heard it repeated plenty of times as some kind of excuse as to why Asians aren’t overweight on average. As though being overweight is the norm. When, at face value, I don’t have any data supporting the assertion that they’re starving themselves to death in order to be slim.
What I do have data on is things like in the US 25% of white children were overweight in 2001, 33% of African-American and Hispanic children, and eight out of 10 of those over 25 in America are overweight. I don’t think we need to justify Korean thinness by attributing it to unnatural eating patterns.
Koreans believe a lot of things, with or without evidence, just like every other person on Earth. Heck, to generalize, socially Koreans tend to accept a LOT of things that don’t necessarily have any grounding in reality.
I don’t doubt that eating disorders among women are relatively common in Korea. However, I don’t think it explains the overall healthiness of the population as a whole, nor even the average slimness in the general population.
Believe me, I’ve seen Korean girls peck at dishes and only eat a few spoonfuls (and that was their only meal that day), but those girls rarely look healthy to my eye (which was trained in America, admittedly). I don’t think those few are any more relevant than the people with eating disorders in America, though. If we’re relying on anecdotal evidence, then I’d point to my 70 or so co-workers (most of whom are women) who aren’t shy about what they eat.
