Is there a causal relationship between electricity consumption and obesity, or is it just an illusory correlation❓
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The answer is… kind of, but only really at the lower end.
Countries with very low (around 0) electricity usage are going to be places where food refrigeration is hard to come by, if even possible, and so stockpiling and transporting food becomes more difficult. These places, then, have to grow or hunt their own food, and it’s often just enough to get by, especially considering how much hard work goes into it.
Once electricity becomes more prevalent and food refrigeration becomes common, people tend to be a bit freer with their food consumption. This doesnt mean that they all turn into fat slobs, but it does mean that they have the the option to do so that didn’t exist before.
Once you hit that threshold, you start to notice things spreading out on the chart, whereas there are basically no obese countries at 0 kWh, outside of a few outliers. I’m kind of curious about which countries are up there at 45% obesity rate and no electricity.
For example: Tonga, Samoa, Kiribati, Nauru with electricity consumption per capita (the median) 548 kWh.
Ah, that explains a lot, then.
These are all island nations in Oceania that receive large amounts of their food supply from outside the country. This offloads much of the energy cost of refrigeration onto whatever nation owns the ship. I don’t know if there’s a good way of figuring out how much energy is spent shipping supplies to those countries, though.
