Shows? “Here comes Honey Boo Boo.”
There actually is a huge amount of research on this, cites available if you want. The answer is 100% no. Mocking, bullying, and other “social pressure,” has the exact opposite effect with added bonus of poor self-esteem. Those who do “diet” in childhood in response to those pressures are much more likely to end up with greater obesity (although some develop other eating disorders).
No one is doing a fat person a favor by exerting “social pressure” on them.
I wouldn’t ever support social pressure against people who are struggling with their weight. However - I also don’t think it’s unfair to point out that some social groups may consider fatness to be a sign of wealth, power and authority. This was a characteristic trait of the old German burgher class and I’m sure many others. (Look at baseball umpires for example - seems they pretty much have to be fat to be taken seriously)
But there needs to be some sort of social pressure to educate obese people in healthy lifestyle practices. Fundamentally, obesity is a symptom of poor education.
I’ve often seen restaurants try to work the huge portion thing. It never seems to last. The ‘more is always better’ attitude is a tad American. Canadian’s tend to view buying more than you can eat as bad value and wasteful, more often than not.
Also our tax dollars are always being spent on campaigns concerning, being more active, quitting smoking, for instance. These campaigns reach into schools where the education portion kicks in. Often coordinated country wide. It seems to be working. I notice a distinct difference between generations regarding healthier foods, and frequenting the gym for instance.
In addition universal health care insures people get help for issues earlier, issues that untreated can contribute to obesity.
if you think there isn’t any social pressure, you’re not paying much attention.
Which of course why highly educated Americans have so little obesity and the poorly educated Vietnamese have so much … oh wait.
No, the U.S. does not lead in obesity because we are the least educated and the most ignorant.
There is plenty of (often counterproductive) social pressure. (And there is plenty of miseducation. Which could be several threads itself.)
I would agree strongly with one aspect of what you said though. Obesity is a symptom. That is a key thing to recognize. It is not the problem; it is a symptom of the problems, and the problem has roots at several levels.
At the individual level the problems is excessive consumption of calories, mainly empty calories, often in the form of added sugars, highly refined carbs, added fats, all processed and packaged in forms designed to induce overconsumption, and inadequate fitness. Those are problems whether the common symptom of those problems, obesity, is manifest or not.
At the societal level the problem is that our system rewards those companies who have best learned how to exploit our brains’ systems to buy more and more processed shit, and that we do not currently have enough activity built into our lives to result in fitness without making a special effort to make it so.
Once someone is obese curing the problem (improving nutritional habits and improving fitness) will most usually only partially reverse the symptom of obesity, maybe sustained loss of 5 to 10% of body weight. The individual may still be fat, or at least a bit overweight, even thought the actual problem has been addressed and health/quality of life vastly improved.
Individuals need education about that and about how to make it so. The need support in doing so, encouragement to stick with focusing on the problem not the symptom, because focus on the symptom (which again, will be unlikely to completely resolve) will only cause frustration.
And collectively we need to treat the diseased system that induces such numbers of its members with these problems, which include both those who are obese and a sizable number who are not, those who metabolically are obese although they are of normal weight (referred to as just that, “metabolically obese normal weight,” MONW), which represent 23.5% of normal-weight adults in the United States to be precise.
Those MONWs are actually at greater risk than the obese, btw.
There is some reluctance in this country to treating the diseased system. Some are confused and think that doing so means “excusing” the individual, instead of recognizing that both need attention.
Swinging back around to the topic: which is a larger factor in the lower obesity levels in other countries - nutritional habits or activity levels? I can see Americans improving on the former, but not the latter.
IMHO it’s nutrition. The evidence for that is that activity levels do not change so suddenly and so dramatically but once the Western food industrial complex successfully gets its marketing claw into a society obesity rates start climbing up rapidly, usually hitting on kids first.