Social Organization and the overweight/obesity epidemic in developed countries

Food is a cultural artefact. Eating is done in a social context, which regulates the acquisition, processing and distribution of food. But despite recent rises in overweight, there has been little investigation of how consumption of food has changed over the last half-century. The overweight epidemic may well be sociogenic rather than biogenic; however, health promotion campaigns have ignored the socio-cultural nature of food, implicitly presuming that eating is just another form of individual, private consumption.

This chapter uses time use diary data from national surveys in 27 countries over 50 years to chart historical changes in the social organization of eating and to draw implications for public health policy. National mean daily eating durations have negative associations with body mass indices (BMIs). Populations which register more ‘main activity’ time spent eating—the ‘slower-eating’ countries—are less likely to be overweight/obese, while the ‘faster-eating’ countries’ populations are more likely to experience this ‘epidemic’.

The multichannel sequential evidence goes beyond daily eating durations to produce three other indices: (1) changes in the number of daily eating occasions, (2) measures of the social coordination of eating occasions and (3) eating in company with known others. Historical change in these exhibits patterns that might be understood as indicating a partial breakdown in the social control or organization of eating. Comparing time-diary evidence with diarists’ body-camera images confirms the importance of underreported secondary (less consciously considered) eating events, potentially contributing to the explanation of the association of shorter eating time with increasing BMI.