As someone who fights with quick hotel and airplane meals as a part of my livelihood I found this chart unsurprising. It’s known that eating fast doesn’t give your brain time to get the “all full” signal so you can eat more calories – especially if you are eating calorically-dense fast foods. This chart was created by Catherine Rampell of Economix who describes her methodology:
Here I’ve plotted out the relationship between time the average person in a given country spends eating and that country’s obesity rate (as measured by the percentage of the national population with a body mass index higher than 30).
There was no cartogram of this data. However, I felt this cartogram of 2004 McDonalds restaurants (which serves calorically-dense foods) from Worldmapper certainly helps us understand the US’s high-ranking.
There are other fast food chains and sources of calories around the world so the cartogram doesn’t support Catherine’s other findings. I really debated including the cartogram in the post as I don’t want to confuse the data sets. Let me know if I made the right decision.
(via the ever-excellent PSFK)