Obesity is most prevalent in countries without overdeveloped food supply chains and food marketing apparatus.
According to http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/01/23/obesity-in-world-... "the top ten most obese nations were overwhelmingly pacific islands, with American Samoa taking the top spot with almost 75% of the population reported as obese and Nauru and the Cook Islands coming in at second and third places with 71.1% and 63.4% obesity respectively."
As far as couch potatoes, the closest research that's available is this - http://www.economist.com/node/9527126 and if you look at the list of top "couch potato" countries, some have high obesity rates, and some dates, so the correlation is inconclusive at best.
Mexico has a higher rate of obesity than the US according to some reports I have read, but having been to both, there is something more I have noticed.
Yes, you see a lot of moderately fat Mexicans, but when you go to the US, there are people that get big on a level that you don't see in Mexico. I am fairly sure the figures would reverse if it was "morbidly obese" being measured rather than "clinically obese".
I don't think you should read too much into the obesity rates of the pacific islands, their small populations means you're mathematically more likely to get extreme results. It wouldn't surprise me if the nations with the least obesity rates were also the pacific islands.
Don't you think that applying mathematical models without understanding of all the causes and their relative weights would yield a meaningless results (not even approximate ones)?
There are innumerable cases of misapplication of statistics (without even having a third control group) and probability distributions to incomplete or simply irrelevant data in history of so called data-driven sciences?
Math is a tool, and application of it to a poorly understood context will lead to false conclusions or mistaking a correlation for causation. Correlations, by the way, could be found everywhere, especially when there is a prize hunt for them.
Back to the subject - tribal eating habits are driven by availability of food sources in a particular location, and the traditional dishes usually were evolved to give the best ratios possible. The case of Tibetan nutrition, which is based on barley flour and yak butter is the good example. Traditional Nepalese food, which varies according to altitude, is another one.
> Obesity is most prevalent in countries without overdeveloped food supply chains and food marketing apparatus.
My eyes are telling me a different story.) But I live in Asia most of the time.
huffingtonpost? economist? research?) Give me a link to something on coursera or edX at least.)
Most of diseases are imbalances in homeostasis. The causes of such imbalances could be genetic or acquired. Most of the later ones could be called habits or conditioning, and could be treated by appropriate CBTs - by corresponding changes of behavior and habits to return back to the balance.
This is the basis of ancient medical sciences (at least in India), which served humanity very well, except, of course, the cases of bacteria and virus caused diseases, which is quite different kind of an imbalance due to activities of an external parasite.
According to http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/01/23/obesity-in-world-... "the top ten most obese nations were overwhelmingly pacific islands, with American Samoa taking the top spot with almost 75% of the population reported as obese and Nauru and the Cook Islands coming in at second and third places with 71.1% and 63.4% obesity respectively."
As far as couch potatoes, the closest research that's available is this - http://www.economist.com/node/9527126 and if you look at the list of top "couch potato" countries, some have high obesity rates, and some dates, so the correlation is inconclusive at best.