Obesity under affluence varies by welfare regimes The effect of fast food, insecurity, and inequality

Among affluent countries those with market-liberal welfare regimes (which are also English-speaking) tend to have the highest prevalence of obesity The impact of cheap accessible high-energy food is often invoked in explanation An alternative approach is that overeating is a response to stress and that competition uncertainty and inequality make market-liberal societies more stressful This ecological regression meta-study pools 96 body-weight surveys from 11 countries c 1994-2004 The fast-food shock impact is found to work most strongly in market-liberal countries Economic insecurity measured in several different ways was almost twice as powerful while the impact of inequality was weak and went in the opposite direction (C) 2010 Elsevier B V All rights reserved