Were Rich People Fat in the Past?

No

So, yet again, I have got into an argument about whether 'Rich People Were Fat in the Past' with someone.

Of course there were some ancient fatsos. Henry VIII in his old age was unambiguously grossly obese. Famous BBW fan Peter Paul Rubens got his models from somewhere. There are even photos of fat people from Victorian times.

The existence of fat people in the past proves only that the calories were there to get fat if you wanted them.

To show that people with access to abundant calories were or weren't obese in a general sense you need statistics.

And no-one seems to have been remotely interested in obesity statistics before about 1970. Which is kind of weird. We've got all sorts of Victorian statistics. If there were lots of fat people in Victorian times no-one seemed to pay them much mind.

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My last attempt to answer this question was here: https://theheartattackdiet.substack.com/p/the-fat-whores-of-london, which I took as answering the question once and for all.

I think the gleaming detail there is that apparently a BMI of 26 was sufficiently unusual in a twenty-six year old woman in Victorian London that it was taken as an indicator of poor moral character.

But people keep saying: "Rich People Were Fat in the Past" as if it was one of those obvious things that everyone knows is true.

I can see why if you believe that obesity is primarily caused by excessive food availability, you have to believe that.

But there's a contrapositive here.

If "Obesity is Caused by Mere Availability of Calories" implies "Rich People Were Fat in the Past", which it does, then straightforwardly:

"Rich People Were NOT Fat in the Past" implies "Obesity is NOT Caused by Mere Availability of Calories".

So the question "Were Rich People Fat in the Past?" seems important.

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And so I have had another go.

First off, you just don't have to be that rich.

Suppose you're five foot ten, a fine natural height for a man, the platonic ideal, some might say.

And suppose you need $1/day to feed yourself adequately, that will get you enough calories to be BMI 21.

I think that was about right at one time, very poor subsistence farmers were always said to make about $1/day when I was a lad.

How many calories do you need to consume in excess to hit BMI 30 by age 30?

Well, at BMI 21, the typical "primitive tribe" value, your weight is 67kg

And at BMI 30, your weight is 95kg.

How many calories is that excess weight? 28kg of fat.

People tend to say that body fat is worth 7.7kcal/gram.

So that 28kg of excess fat is the effect of overconsuming 215600 kcal. A very lot of excess energy, I agree. Someone at BMI 30 is carrying enough spare energy to boil a ton of water into steam.

Another way to look at it is that that's 20kcal per day over your thirty years of life.

But you can afford something like 2500kcal on your one dollar per day. That's what it means to be adequately fed.

So in order to become really quite unpleasantly fat, you'd need $1.01

If you have $1.02 per day to throw around, then you'll be able to pile on another 28kg of fat by the time you're thirty.

You'll be 123kg and you'll have a BMI of 39.

One more cent every day, and you could afford to be 151kg, BMI 48. Does this count as "scooter obesity" yet?

So there we have it.

If just being able to afford the extra calories is the important thing, then anyone who can manage to get hold of ever so slightly more food than a peasant farmer on the verge of starvation should be basically spherical.

I should also point out that very very few people in the past were anywhere near starvation level. Even the peasants.

Most people, most times, had more than enough to eat. Almost everyone had the calories to become "scooter obese", almost all the time, almost everywhere.

The entire idea that Mere Calorie Availability is causing Obesity is just a priori preposterous. People don't get fat just because they've got spare food. Almost everyone, everywhere, everywhen in history has more than enough spare food to be horribly, horribly fat.

That's the core of my objection, but I know that such theoretical arguments are usually lost on people. So I've had a good look, and I've actually managed to find some real 19th century obesity statistics, which I'll talk about in the next post…..