alt Hacker News>This is less than the US (though it's very regional within the US), but you don't get to brag about a 1-in-4 obesity rate.
Are you sure?
>In 2023, over 35 percent of adults in the Netherlands were classed as overweight, meaning they had a body mass index (BMI)of between 25 and 30. Furthermore, just under 16 percent of adults were obese
>47 percent of French adults were overweight, of which 17 percent suffered from obesity
>49% of the Belgian population has overweight, of which 18% have obesity.
>Spain: 43% of adults aged 18 years and over were overweight and 16% were living with obesity
>46.6% of women and 60.5% of men in Germany are affected by overweight (including obesity). Nearly one-fifth of adults (19%) have obesity.
Looks like it's actually 1-in-5.
For the purposes of this discussion, I will take your numbers as truth and run with it.
Are you arguing that 1:5 is good, but 1:4 is bad?
The only large populations of people in the world that aren't quite fat are southeast Asians. And this is fairly accurate whether they leave in southeast Asia or in the US or western Europe. Not 1:5, closer to 1:20 or in one case 1:50.
Even then, southeast Asian obesity rates are climbing. The US may have led the pack because of a consistently high standard of living, but I don't see any indication that there are macroscale populations anywhere in the world keeping the disease at bay.