Fear and insecurity may well come into play.

Eating isn't the only reason people become fat/obese. But since you mention stress in correlation with obesity, I'd Netflix this documentary.

The guy that has kept track of stress in baboons has written one of my favorite books. Which is saying something, because I don't choose favorites due to the thought of, "If I learned something from this, I have no reason to complain."

Never the ONLY reason - but a big one.

Cheap fruit sugar. Added to (almost) every processed food in sight.

I don't think we evolved for famine.

We do put on fat quickly but we don't lose it slowly. Fat metabolism is a significant source of energy on all activities with intensities up to marathon paced running. We don't hibernate. Humans need a lot of exercise to stay healthy, which means constant calorie use. This is a trait that suggests we are actually evolved for no famine.

But then you may ask, why do we put on fat quickly? Fat is a very efficient way to store energy. 1g of fat stores over 6 times the energy as 1 gram of carbs (partly because 1g of carbs require 2g of water to be stored). Storing and using fat allows humans to keep their total weight down and still have enough stored energy to run or walk all day. Storing fat is also useful to match the constant day-to-day calorie use with the intermittent calorie consumption of a hunter/gather lifestyle (e.g. a successful hunt every X days, etc).

As anyone who has lost lots of weight can tell you, when you cut your caloric intake drastically, your metabolic rate also slows down drastically. Which is why most of us gain that weight right back, and then some. And, every time we try to lose it again, it gets harder and harder to take off that fat. We evolved for famine, but we live in a time of caloric glut.

I will add that the point about hibernation is irrelevant. Hibernation evolved to allow non-migratory animals to withstand harsh conditions that come on a regular, but relatively short basis (winter, seasonal dry periods, etc.). Early humans didn't need to hibernate, because they knew how to preserve and store food. They also migrated throughout a wider range than many of the animals who do hibernate.

Whatever happened to civility? Must you use mocking smilies to make your point?

Intermittent (due to hunting, eg) daily calorie consumption that is not indicative of famine:
1200, 1200, 1200, 4000, repeat.
Avg daily 1900 calories. NOT a famine.

And we DON'T lose it slowly. Humans can and do metabolize fatty acids directly. Again, it's a significant component of energy use for exercise up to marathon paced intensity. We require exercise to be healthy. A famine requires limited calorie use. Humans are ill-suited for that.

Fat is useful and optimal for human endurance and a hunting lifestyle. The fossil record supports the importance of both traits in the evolution of humans. In particular, humans are arguably the world's greatest endurance athletes. Humans can and do hunt by chasing every sort of animal to exhaustion.

I provided an explanation against a famine theory and an alternate explanation for the facts. AND YOU LAUGH.

If I had said "possibility of famine" it would convey the idea better. When we are insecure about future availability of food we eat a lot. The excess energy is stored as fat and we can use that if the possibility of scarcity appears.

When the game is scarce we do not know we will get that 4000 calorie day tomorrow... or next week. So when there's 5000 calories sitting right in front of us the best strategy (in a world where future food is insecure) is to eat it all up.

If a person were psychologically unable to feel secure about future provisions then every time that 5000 calories is sitting there it would feel right to eat it.

If we had evolved in the context of plenty being a significant health/adaptivity problem we would have developed better regulation. "I already have too much fat."

But since that was not a major problem, while scarcity was a life-and-death problem, we don't seem (as a species) to self regulate as well as might be optimal in the modern world.

As to how fast we can lose fat—yes, when the body is called on we metabolize fat well, but in practice the effort to eat half a buffalo is much lower than the effort to metabolize the fat gained. It is litterally easier to gain than to lose. In practice we seldom hit the worst-case scenario we are preparing for so we bank more than we starve/burn. A few extra pounds of fat is better than metabolizing pounds of muscle if the crunch comes. I did not mean to make a litteral scientific claim that we can gain gram x of belly fat faster or slower than we can lose that same gram.

1) Eat that high calorie meal because it might be the last one you get
2) Eat that high calorie meal because it's going to be a few days before you get another one like it

I think we both agree that either 1) or 2) don't work in our modern world where you can eat a high calorie meal every day. 1) comes with negative emotions: uncertainty, fear, etc. 2) doesn't. It just happens to be the best way to eat calories available on a variable schedule. As an aside, I'll mention that although we don't seem to have any internal regulation based on our fat stores we do experience "fullness" that limits how much we eat in one meal. We're not like the pure carnivores that can eat a large % of their body weight in one meal.

Since I think our ancestors were more like 2) than 1), I'd figure cultural differences, not an innate psychological feeling of uncertainty, account for the differences in obesity between similarly wealthy countries.

She/He's not wrong, while the was indelicate, you did explain that like someone who's never been overweight and had to lose a lot of weight.

Insecurity and "comfort foods..."

You could be right- I'd also add that we don't have the cultural attachment to cuisine and pride in cooking that are prevalent in virtually all European nations. American cuisine is actually quite new. I'd also add that the whole cultural emphasis (American) on faster/more efficient probably plays into this as well.

There is a lot of talk and bluster about that, usually along the lines of: "Well, I'm from the South and we like our chicken fried and our biscuits drenched in gravy and our vegetables cooked with pork fat ..." You know the drill. There is a lot of foods common in the South that are healthy and nutritious, but usually when people talk about that cuisine they mean the fry-everything-and-cover-it-in-butter style of cooking.

The US spends 6.9% of the family budget on food. Most continental European countries spend over 10%. Germany, for instance spends 11.4%.

http://bigpictureagriculture.blogspot.com/2011/09/food-as-percent-of-total-household.html

http://www.visualizing.org/stories/visualizing-global-food-spending

is that poor Americans are heavier than affluent Americans, and a lot of cheaper foods are calorie-intensive.

I am not discounting a connection here, but it is probably an indirect connection, rather than being about how many calories one can afford.

The correlation of cheap and fast food with mega-calories is so great that a larger food budget (probably largely cultural) may well be indicative of less weight.

For instance, someone who eats a lot of gourmet fish will spend much more on food than someone who lives on Big Macs, while probably gaining less weight.

For white males there is little income effect. For black males, the more affluent are heavier.

The lower income white and black women are heavier than the more affluent women. However, the variation in BMI attributable to income is smaller than the increase in BMI over the last few decades.

Furthermore, it is likely the case that fat women are paid less, rather than that low income causes women to become fat.

http://paa2005.princeton.edu/download.aspx?submissionId=51638

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1448278/

But the starting place remains unconvincing, which is the suggestion that the US is heavier because food is cheaper here than in Europe.

Even if we stipulated, for the sake of argument, that there is ZERO correlation of income and obesity in the US, just a flat line, presumably the higher income end of that line has a larger food budget, but without a higher incidence of obesity.

Anyway, the OP is just a musing.

we subsidize grains heavily (and thus meat/cheese indirectly).

That makes foods heavy in fat and carbs artificially cheap.

Ending those subsidies would be a huge step in the right direction.

Moreover, the US has a far more racially heterogenous population than any European nation, plus way more poverty and inequality--all three of these are factors in US obesity.

In short, I'm not convinced that Europe has anything "figured out" vis a vis obesity.

--Some would say that the fact that economic insecurity (poverty and inequality) correlates with obesity rate is not exactly a refutation of the idea that economic insecurity might have a causal contribution to obesity rate.

--The phrasing in the OP reflects my premise, which is that Europe is obese but less so than the US.

--Regarding ethnicity, every European nation has a lower national rate than the rate for non-hispanic white Americans, with the UK and Latvia being the only ones coming close to the US there. Yes, black and hispanic Americans do provide most of the margin when comparing the US and Europe, but for the most economically insecure ethnic groups to have unusually high obesity rates does not really refute the OP.

I think you make a good point, actually...

I agree with you. Too many people in the U.S. are under too much stress because of insecurity. Middle-aged people live in fear of losing their jobs from layoffs and outsourcing.

Losing your job shouldn't be a death sentence, but it is literally that to millions of Americans. Losing health insurance means losing access to life-saving care for people with cancer, diabetes, and other illnesses. Universal healthcare, available to everybody whether or not they have a job, would make a big difference in stress levels and ironically, would increase the health of millions of people and reduce the burden on our health care system.

Simple solution, foreclosed by the screech "we can't have socialized medicine!!!!" funded by the private for-profit health insurance industry.

That's my take on their very high suicide rate (one of if not the top in the industrialized world). That and very high population densities that are proven stressors for humans.

And they aren't obese.

I don't doubt that stress may play a role for individuals. But I'm not sure how big a role it plays for nations. Especially when much larger factors such as lifestyle, diet, and genetics are thrown in as well.

I typed some other things, they were just repeating what you said, so I deleted them.

It's at the level of an unconscious reaction. I have to consciously resist this and remember that I'll be able to eat next week etc. It is our animal nature.