Epidemics of Abundance: Overeating and Slimming in the USA and Britain since the 1950s

Avner Offer ()

No _025, Oxford University Economic and Social History Series from Economics Group, Nuffield College, University of Oxford

Abstract: Body weight has risen in defiance of health and appearance norms. The social epidemics of overeating and slimming were driven by market forces and the psychology of eating: restrained eating is easily disinhibited by stress. For men, the rise in body weight was associated with the decline of family eating and exposure to greater food variety. For women, the ‘cult of slimming’ was associated with mating competition, driven initially by adverse sex ratios. Food abundance made a mockery of the rational consumer. Paradoxically, the costs of abundance fell more heavily on the poor, who have had less access to the resources of self-control.

Date: 1998-11-01
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/economics/history/paper25/25offera4.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nuf:esohwp:_025

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Oxford University Economic and Social History Series from Economics Group, Nuffield College, University of Oxford
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Maxine Collett ().