# Why are South American tribal people so fat?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-south-american-tribal-people-so-fat/809956>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [March 3, 2018, 6:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-south-american-tribal-people-so-fat/809956 "2018-03-03T06:33:56Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Page:** 2

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\
**Post date:** [March 5, 2018, 9:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-south-american-tribal-people-so-fat/809956/21 "2018-03-05T21:30:40Z")

</div>

> [@Brayne\_Ded](#):
>
> On trips to the USA, in 1989, 1991 and 1996, I was struck by the high proportion of obese people, and even more so by the high proportion of obesity among young and younger people. The American lifestyle? I saw fat kids in Japan from 1980, and on the TV I see reports of fat Chinese kids. Blame it on the burgers and the other junk food.

I blame it even more on the sugar that is in **everything**. Fast food isn’t as bad as the 16 oz fountain sodas with free refills that it’s washed down with (although the burger buns are a custom extra-sweet bread). As someone who is currently on a low-carb diet, I can tell you how hard it is to find any processed food that does not contain sugar in some form, with the near-universal presence of “dextrose”.

[Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-south-american-tribal-people-so-fat/809956.md?page=1)