These are two symptoms of the same problem, I don’t see any issue with the statistics. Plus, of course, not everyone who’s poor or hungry is obese.

If you think about it, it makes sense that food insecurity and obesity go together. If I didn’t know when I’d have food, I’d try to overeat when I could, like many wild animals do before winter. And most of our cheap food is low quality and very high in fat and carbs (esp. sugars).

The problem that’s bigger than both obesity and hunger is poverty, and poverty causes both of those things.

See this paper for a longer explanation: “Food insecurity as a risk factor for obesity: A review” https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9549066/

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emushack 4 days ago | parent [-]

Did you really just compare human beings to wild animals who hibernate?

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dahart 4 days ago | parent [-]

It was a loose analogy, but it is thought Neanderthals may have hibernated (or gone into a state of torpor). Your comment offers no reasoning nor evidence; is something wrong with it, and if so what, exactly? Food scarcity in winter time is something humans have historically been exposed to and evolved with in much of the world. And clearly over-eating in humans corellates somewhat with food insecurity. Regardless of the mechanism, my point was that it’s not hard to imagine why obesity and hunger might go together.

	▲	emushack 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		And yet, the very study you linked to concluded that despite 5 years of research on the topic, it still isn't clear what the actual causes are. But you know, I definitely think your arm-chair reasoning probably contains the one true reason. Research has mostly focused on explaining the paradox at a household level. Farrell and colleagues reviewed the literature pertaining to low- and middle-income countries and focused on the bigger picture, that is, analyzing the issue at an individual, household, community, and country level. They proposed 5 context-mechanisms factors that could modify the association between an individual’s food insecurity and obesity risk: affordability of energy dense, processed foods, quantity & diversity of food consumed, spatial temporal access to nutritious food, interpersonal distribution of food and non- dietary behavior. Nevertheless, affordability of energy dense foods was identified as the main mechanism since the authors had limited evidence to support the other mechanisms (26). Other authors have proposed that social support can also play a role since they found that food insecure women who reported lower levels of social support were more likely to be obese (28)