It’s fairly straightforward to cause a lot of emotional and life issues for people. We did it during the Vietnam War with the draft.
Many countries have been involved in terrible wars, then bounced back quickly to affluency that permits casual overeating (on a financial level, that is). Almost none of them developed an obesity epidemic. Even more countries have had economic troubles, and yet ditto. It doesn’t seem to me that your model has real explanatory / retrodictive power.
How well does the US obesity epidemic correlate in time with the e.g. the Vietnam war? (And with the people who were drafted vs. those who weren’t?) Perhaps more importantly, if you’re willing to include less drastic things like college debt, I think very few generations haven’t had a comparable trauma of some sort, and yet they did not develop an obesity epidemic.
Many countries have been involved in terrible wars, then bounced back quickly to affluency that permits casual overeating (on a financial level, that is). Almost none of them developed an obesity epidemic. Even more countries have had economic troubles, and yet ditto. It doesn’t seem to me that your model has real explanatory / retrodictive power.
How well does the US obesity epidemic correlate in time with the e.g. the Vietnam war? (And with the people who were drafted vs. those who weren’t?) Perhaps more importantly, if you’re willing to include less drastic things like college debt, I think very few generations haven’t had a comparable trauma of some sort, and yet they did not develop an obesity epidemic.