I’ll tackle this point, others have address the rest.
The difference is the dietary norms of the culture. As a people, the Japanese have a healthier diet. Less fat, more seafood, fewer simple carbs.
On ther other hand, the British have just as big a problem with obesity, as do the Australians. ANd what do you know, their diet is a lot like ours.
I didn’t bother going into this in the OP as I thought it was outside of the scope of the point I was trying to make.
I think there are many different dynamic processes at play in the US that contribute to the epidemic of obesity.
One of the big ones in my opinion is the change in society that made dual income households more of a necessity than an option in the 70’s and 80’s. Before that, I get the impression that generally the wives made the meals and the husbands and kids came in and ate, but there was a sort of gatekeeper in the wife that both regulated what and how much was eaten, at least in many households.
Nowadays, with the wife working, families tend to eat out more, and with the portion sizes being larger than they were, eat more.
Combine that with the lack of time that many people experience today, and you have the stage set for people who don’t do physical work, who don’t want to spend their limited spare time at the gym, and who for reasons of convenience eat highly caloric restaurant meals more often than in the past. Or, barring that, eat highly caloric pre-prepared foods. This all adds up to more calories than they burn off.
I was reading an article that said that eating processed food is one of the causes of obesity. Processed food causes more weight gain than “natural” food even if they have the same amount of calories. The reason is that processing food makes it easier to eat and digest. People often don’t consider that eating and digesting are a form of physical exertion just like walking or running - you burn up some of the calories in the food you eat by the act of eating that food. Processed food requires less “work” so more calories end up being stored by the body.
There are cultures with abundant access to food, where obesity is rare. Obesity is not inevitable. It is not natural. It is the product of our culture.
China is a bad example, because your average Chinese guy is going to be genetically less susceptible to obesity. But the way everyday life is set up does a lot to prevent obesity. People get a two hour lunch break so they can eat a meal of real food. There are fruit stands EVERYWHERE and it is quicker and easier to pick up fruit to snack on than junk food. Most food in homes and restaurants is cooked from fresh ingredients. Students are expected to engage in two different sports a day. Everyone- from the babies to the old people- takes an hour or so walk after dinner. Old people have nightly group dance practice on the streets and sidewalks. Every housing development has a small outdoor mini-gym with various pieces of equipment. As far as food and fitness, people live overall very active and healthy lifestyles. In East coast cities, where these habits are dying out, obesity is on the rise.
We don’t need a magic pill. We need to fix our culture. We need to start going outside again, and stop eating crap that comes out of factories. Thats all it takes.
But if you stop breathing, you kind of die. Eating less does not cause that. (Although I don’t mean to diminish the difficulty of doing so.)
But, even sven, I don’t want to spend more time outside and eat stuff that doesn’t come out of factories. I enjoy it, and it doesn’t make me fat (I’m almost considered underweight by BMI charts) because I have lucky genes. So, given that some people are able to live in the same society, exercise just as little, and not weigh as much, there are apparently other ways of controlling obesity than making them do things they don’t want to do. In fact, if living the way I do did make me fat, I’d rather be fat than change it, and this is how many fat people see things. If you told me I had to go on an intensive exercise regimen and eat completely different food, I’d probably say, “Screw you right back,”, which is exactly why dieting and exercise have such low success rates. Sure, we don’t need a “magic pill”, but it would be better for everyone if one were to be developed, and there seem to be several fields of medicine that could result in something useful for controlling weight.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
Who gives a shit?
All the quibbles, ungrounded scientific speculation, unhealthy diets, societal prejudices, and the power of the Media and Government behind it are 500 times more damaging than the actual fat.
Fat and happy or a fat pinata… your choice.
Forgive me if I have you confused with another poster, but aren’t you also fairly young? Throughout my teens and early twenties, I was always underweight no matter how much I ate. Once I hit my mid-twenties, that changed. For a lot of people, they adopt habits during their teens and early twenties that do them no harm at those ages, but end up doing tremendous harm as they age.
But the fact remains that I have friends who are fat, and are mostly happy the way they are, as opposed to having to change their lifestyles permanently to lose weight. And if my habits do cause me to gain weight later, I’ll have to make a judgment call between the cost of changing them versus the value of being thinner.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris
Except that obesity rates in Japan are rising, primarily as a result of Japanese eating ever more animal fat, which was not a large part of their diet. Fat tastes yummy, and for good reason: we need a certain amount of fat to live. Do you deny that it would be evolutionary advantageous to find fat yummy, given that not eating fat leads to death (and the acquisition of fat was, for most of human evolutionary history, a pain in the ass)?
How about processed foods (which are less healthy) are cheaper?
So you think evolutionary psychology is bad science. But filtering every behavior explanation through the lens of a moralistic theism is bad methodology too, and just as likely to result in biased results. Can’t you see you are committing the same sin you are accusing the evolutionary psychologist of? You have some data; you are positing an explanation for the data; but at the end of the day, it’s a “just so” story, and no more verifiable than the claims of evolutionary psychology. You know, the beam in your eye and all that.
The three Cs: corn syrup, computers, and Coke.
I lost over a hundred pounds in two years. While I did exercise slightly more and eat slightly less, I think that the largest reason I was able to lose weight was because I had my meds changed. When I went from Paxil to Lexapro, I quit gaining weight. When I had Cymbalta added to the Lexapro, I started losing weight. I think that for me, weight control is more than the simple calories in vs. exercise equation that’s commonly cited. Sure, it’s a factor…but I really started gaining weight in my mid 20s, at exactly the same time as I was first put on antidepressants.
Is it possible to live off fat reserves, though? Are overweight (or not even overweight, but just plain not-thin) people really better off in a famine?
You took the words right out of my mouth!!!
I gained 20 lbs. over a period of time when I took Paxil. It made me too darned TIRED to exercise, of course I wasn’t doing cartwheels of sheer joy! My best friend took an anti-depressant, forgot which, for only 3 months, and she gained weight right in her midsection, and nothing has budged it. My mother, when she ws 70 something, was put on all kinds of senior citizens meds for blood pressure and cholesterol and what not - she weighed 130 lbs. since she was 18 and ever since she started taking all those pills, she gained 30 lbs. Or more. And she’s very active and her diet hasn’t changed.
Along with bad fattening food, and no gym/recess for the kids, and not enough exercise, and weight gain that comes sometimes with age (and redistribution of the weight to the wrong places 
and everyone sitting in front of some machine gaping at it slack jawed for hours a day - it’s modern medicine, too.
Although it wasn’t really resolved, you might want to look at this thread about an experiment where a 450lb man doesn’t eat anything for a whole year and winds up at 175lbs.
I remember that thread. But most people aren’t that overweight. If you’re carrying, say, 20 or 30 pounds, is that going to help when the famine comes?
Every little bit helps.
At 3500 cal per pound of fat, and an energy expendiature of ~2000cal/day, that 20 to 30 pound spare tire might just carry you an extra month after all your skinny bretheren have dropped out.
I’m sorry, but I have to comment on what I see as the profound ignorance embodied in this sentence.
It’s like saying “We don’t need cars, we just need to grow wings!”.
“Fixing the culture” is not exactly easy. In fact, I think it’s nigh impossible. Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think so. Tell me : how do we “fix our culture”?
We need the magic pill exactly because this “culture fixing” is so damned hard. I think we’ll invent a fat-blocking pill before we’ll come up with some magic educational program that convinces everyone to eat healthy, exercise regularly, and live a healthy lifestyle.
It’s just not gonna happen. Health reformers are up against too much… the genetic facotr I talk about in the OP, deep cultural cues as to what is a “treat” and what is “normal food”, and the basic problem of getting people to forego things which are immediately rewarding in order to ward off some distant threat that doesn’t even seem real in the here-and-now.
Realistically speaking, from the point of view of those of us who are simply out to save lives, a “magic pill”, or food substitute, or something is a lot more likely to pan out in actual saved lives than your high-minded ideals of virtue and enlightenment. We can’t just “fix the culture”.
But we can build a fix via technology.
The person with the fat reserves is better off, yes, although that’s not all they’ll need. But it takes care of the number one dietary need, which is CALORIES. If you lack the basic fuel to move and act, it doesn’t matter what else you have.
So the person with the fat reserves, Critter A, will be able to survive on a lot less than the person with a tiny BMI. Someone with fat reserves will be able to get by on just the small amounts of food we need for actual nutrition, as opposed to bulk, calories, and fat.
And of course, everyone needs lots of clean water. 
I must admit, I am quite disturbed to learn about the weight-gaining properties of Paxil, as I am on quite a heavy dose of it (80 mg/day) and morbidly (though cheerfully) obese.
I’ll have to talk to my doctor about it.