Graduate School of System Design and Management, Keio University, Japan; Social Science Department, University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain; Ronald F. Inglehart Laboratory for Comparative Social Research, National Research University - Higher School of Economics, Russia.
Ronald F. Inglehart Laboratory for Comparative Social Research, National Research University - Higher School of Economics, Russia; Department of Economics, Varna University of Management, Sofia, Bulgaria; University of Tartu, Estonia.
Soc Sci Med. 2022 Aug;307:115167. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2022.115167. Epub 2022 Jun 26.
Obesity rates have been rising steeply across the globe in recent decades, posing a major threat to global human health. Despite this almost universal increase, differences between countries remain striking, even among equally developed societies.
We test if two cultural dimensions derived from a revised Hofstede model of culture from Minkov (2018), namely collectivism vs. individualism and monumentalism vs. flexibility, could help explain national variations in prevalence of obesity (BMI ≥ 30) among women and men around the world. We develop a theoretical framework that links these two cultural dimensions with obesity and then test their association empirically in analyses including 51 countries from all regions of the world as well as using imputed data for a total of 155 countries, representing 98% of the global population.
In contrast to previous studies, we find that, adjusting for undernourishment and other potential confounds, individualism is associated with higher obesity prevalence in the male population, but not among the female population. We explain these findings by pointing to the different mechanisms through which individualism relates to health behavior, some of which are more gender-specific than others. A further novel finding is that flexibility, a national cultural trait that emphases humility, self-control, and restraint of desires, is a strong negative predictor of obesity in both genders beyond various potential confounds and is highly robust in specification curve analyses.
Our findings suggest that taking national culture into account can enhance our understanding of the obesity pandemic and should thus be considered by policy-makers in their design of interventions.
近几十年来，全球肥胖率急剧上升，对全球人类健康构成重大威胁。尽管几乎所有国家的肥胖率都在增加，但各国之间的差异仍然很明显，即使是在同样发达的社会中也是如此。
我们测试了 Minkov（2018）修正后的霍夫斯泰德文化模型中的两个文化维度，即集体主义与个人主义以及宏伟主义与灵活性，是否可以帮助解释全球女性和男性肥胖率（BMI≥30）的国家差异。我们构建了一个理论框架，将这两个文化维度与肥胖联系起来，然后在包括全球所有地区的 51 个国家以及使用总共有 155 个国家的推断数据（占全球人口的 98%）的分析中检验它们的关联性。
与之前的研究不同，我们发现，在调整了营养不良和其他潜在混杂因素后，个人主义与男性人口中的肥胖症患病率较高有关，但与女性人口无关。我们通过指出个人主义与健康行为相关的不同机制来解释这些发现，其中一些机制比其他机制更具性别特异性。另一个新颖的发现是，灵活性是一种强调谦逊、自我控制和欲望克制的民族文化特质，它是超越各种潜在混杂因素的男女肥胖的强烈负预测因子，并且在规范曲线分析中具有高度稳健性。
我们的研究结果表明，考虑国家文化可以增强我们对肥胖流行的理解，因此政策制定者在制定干预措施时应予以考虑。
