alt Hacker NewsObesity is rising rapidly over much of the developed world, both in Europe and Asia, on a trajectory fairly similar to the historical trajectory of it in the US. Obesity in adult men in North Korea more than doubled between 2009 and 2019. The UK is already up to 26% obesity. 36% of adults in Mexico are obese.
America is an unfortunate pioneer in obesity, but it is not even remotely unique to America.
> It is still weird to me how US choose unironically to develop a drug for reducing addiction
Novo Nordisk, the company behind Ozempic, is Danish. (Eli Lilly is American, though, for the tirzepatide drugs.)
I don't disagree with your fundamental premise - a huge amount of the initial conditions for obesity are environmental. But they're incredibly far ranging, incredibly intertwined with modern life in much of the developed world. Unwinding those, even with strong support from the people, would take decades.
We should still do it. But in the mean time, there's a hell of a lot of people that would die earlier than they would if they weren't obese. And a hell of a lot of them can significantly increase their lifespan with the help of these drugs.
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How does obesity increasing correlate with aging? I'd expect that as people age, they start taking less care of their bodies as it's harder to do it.
Note: I meant to type South Korea here, not North.
> Obesity in adult men in North Korea more than doubled between 2009 and 2019.
Ok, someone needs to explain how thoroughly non-Western, undeveloped countries, more known for starvation and malnutrition than overabundance of food, are developing an obesity problem!