Quantitative Impacts of Normalizing Gluttony: Case Study of the USA

Various cultures throughout history may have established social norms around the concept of sins for pragmatic community health reasons. The concept of sin, however, has largely disappeared with the rise of modern cancel culture. Now secular society routinely normalizes all sins including the historical 'seven deadly sins', which provides a natural experiment to determine the consequences of normalizing the concept of sin. In this study, gluttony, which is defined here as the overindulgence in food, is analyzed. First, substantial evidence is provided that gluttony was first ignored and then normalized in modern U.S. society with the body positive and fat acceptance movements becoming mainstream. Then, the health and economic impacts of the expanded gluttony are quantified for the society of those practicing gluttony. The results show ignoring the concept of gluttony as a sin has correlated with a steady increase in the rate of obesity in America. Now 73.6% of the American public is overweight and obese. The U.S. now has more obese people than normal weight or overweight people. This has severe negative impacts on the health of individuals that are overweight as well as the community as a whole. Altogether the overweight and obese are expected to lose an aggregate of > 100 million life years while suffering from a wide range of concomitant diseases. In addition, the obese increase medical costs for Americans by $173 billion and the expected impacts of childhood obesity will add up to another $49 billion by midcentury. It can be safely concluded that normalizing the concept of the sin of gluttony in the U.S. has an aggregate negative impact on U.S. society.