Institutions and Rationality in the Emergence of an Obesity Epidemic — James Woodward (AHS14)
Channel: AncestryFoundation
Date: 2014-08-24

Simplified models of obesity's causes have led to simplistic explanations for the choices and behaviors that would lead to an obesity epidemic in a heterogeneous population of consumers positioned in a market characterized by risk, uncertainty and complexity. Models from nutrition, economics and other social sciences, while intuitive, are empirically unverifiable and frequently at odds with everyday experience and observation. I present a model of behavior motivated by an assumption that individuals engage in "satisficing" behavior to alleviate their obesity but may fail to do so because of institutional failure in the realm of nutrition and its related public policies.

Abstracts and information about the Ancestral Health Symposium can be found at www.ancestralhealth.org/ahs14-program.