Obesity and Welfare

Obesity is a public health problem in affluent societies, and tends to be related to socio-economic level and to gender. It is not just a problem of individual behaviour, but responds to larger social, political and economic changes over the past fifty years. This project will follow two environmental approaches to the the rise of obesity, namely 1) that market access to cheap, high-calorie food is associated with high national obesity rates, and 2) that obesity rates are influenced by social welfare regimes, and have risen more in market-liberal than in social-democratic societies. The causal mechanism is assumed to be the individual stresses generated by social and economic competition, which are inversely related with socio-economic status, and which appear to be lower in social-democratic societies. The project investigates these hypotheses by means of comparative statistical studies of the diffusion of obesity in different countries, controlling for local characteristics.

Obesity: the Welfare Regime Hypothesis

Perspectives both supporting and refuting this hypothesis were presented over the course of a two-day conference. Conference presentations and slides will be available online here soon, and the conference proceedings will also be available as an edited volume over the coming year. Preliminary findings have been published in British Academy Review (pdf).

Presentations included:

John Komlos
(University of Munich)

Trends and socio-economic correlates of obesity in the United States

Thorkild Sørensen
(University of Copenhagen)
The history of the obesity epidemic

Adam Drewnowski
(University of Washington)
Mapping poverty and obesity

Peter Whybrow
(University of California, Los Angeles)
Obesity and time urgency

Avner Offer
(University of Oxford)
Welfare regimes and obesity

Stanley Ulijaszek
(University of Oxford)
Behavioural ecology of obesity

Michael Marmot
(University College London)
Subordination and stress

Richard Wilkinson
(University of Nottingham)
Inequality and obesity: the background

Kate Pickett
(University of York)
Inequality and obesity: the pathways

Trent Smith
(Washington State University)

Behavioral biology and obesity

Robin Dunbar
(University of Oxford)

Food and the social brain

James Stubbs
(Slimming World)

Obesity: implementation of behaviour change in the general population?

Georgina Cairns
(University of Stirling)

Obesity and marketing exposure

Avner Offer and Stanley Ulijaszek
(University of Oxford)

Welfare regimes and supply shock