Lose Weight: Spend More Time Eating

Catherine Rampell charts the relationship between a nation's obesity rate and the average number of minutes a resident spends eating each day. The resulting graph has a pleasantly counterintuitive result:

It's a cool chart. But what seems to jump out at me is that geography is destiny, not the length of time you spend lingering over a good (or bad) meal. Continental Europe seems to have broadly similar obesity rates. So do the Commonwealth countries, and so does East Asia.

North America, however, displays an impressive ability to get fat in less than 80 minutes each day.