No, I don't want to speculate, for the umpteenth time, on whether it's a "contagious disease." Rather, during a Bill Gates Q&A with Newsweek readers about global health, Gates wrote that his foundation won't be focusing on what a reader termed "diseases of affluence," including obesity. As a former obesity researcher, I must chime in with a correction. The most obese nations on earth, where close to 95 percent of the population are dangerously overweight, are the poor Pacific islands of Narau, Micronesia, the Cook Islands, Tonga, and Niue. The United States is the ninth most obese nation, with an obesity rate of 74.1 percent. Kuwait, interestingly, has about the same obesity rate as we do. And relatively poor countries such as Dominica, Trinidad and Tobago, and Barbados are in the top 20 most obese nations. Poor diet and beauty standards that encourage fat can be responsible for obesity in the developing world, where widespread poverty motivates people to overfeed their children and themselves out of a desire to store up for bad times or prove a family's wealth. These norms can be especially punishing for women and girls, some of whom are force-fed to improve their marriage prospects. Obesity is a disease of both affluence and poverty. What's clear is that social norms and food politics -- whether dangerous beauty standards borne from generations of hunger or the American predilection for (subsidized) corn syrup-laden, oversized portions -- are a primary cause of the problem. --Dana Goldstein
