Forgive the unverified sources here, but total potato consumption seems to correlate quite strongly with obesity across Europe, so if there’s any causal effect behind the potato, it would have to explain why countries that eat potatoes as staples seem to have slightly higher obesity rates than other countries.
Very interesting observation. But I think a lot of things have this geographical correlation pattern that we are seeing in the above graph. The main one that immediately commes to mind is GDP/capita: https://i.redd.it/2m553hojgke11.png
There could be just so many confounding factors here. Also note that my lazy potato diet was equivalent to ~180kg/year of potatoes, so appart from Belarus, no country on the graph about reach that.
Forgive the unverified sources here, but total potato consumption seems to correlate quite strongly with obesity across Europe, so if there’s any causal effect behind the potato, it would have to explain why countries that eat potatoes as staples seem to have slightly higher obesity rates than other countries.
Oh, and also comparing averages (patato consumption per capita) with the size of the tail of a distribution (obesity prevalence) can sometimes be problematic. See the following blog post for a good explanation: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/q8hfzHjskaGknKLdn/the-average-north-korean-mathematician
Very interesting observation. But I think a lot of things have this geographical correlation pattern that we are seeing in the above graph. The main one that immediately commes to mind is GDP/capita: https://i.redd.it/2m553hojgke11.png
There could be just so many confounding factors here.
Also note that my lazy potato diet was equivalent to ~180kg/year of potatoes, so appart from Belarus, no country on the graph about reach that.