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

Avner Offer ()

No _025, Oxford Economic and Social History Working Papers from University of Oxford, Department of Economics

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
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (24)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nuff.ox.ac.uk/economics/history/

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: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oxf:esohwp:_025

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Oxford Economic and Social History Working Papers from University of Oxford, Department of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Anne Pouliquen ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).