Why do all the fattest people live on islands

Here’s a mystery which has been keeping me awake at night recently. Why do people who live on islands, and even more so very small islands, tend to be grotesquely overweight?

I stumbled across this strange apparent correlation the other evening, while sporcling. This is what I do in my spare moments these days, in lieu of a life. Sporcle is a website which offers hundreds and hundreds of quizzes, and has some particularly good quizzes on geography. This is how I know which country in the world has the most renewable water resources per capita (Iceland), which country has the most camels (Somalia), who produces the most apricots (Turkey) and plantain (Uganda), which US cities have seen their populations drop by the largest number (St Louis). And even stuff like which are the nine sovereign nations in the world which have the consecutive letters ‘gu’ in their names.

Go on, see if you can do that: two minutes, starting now.* Anyway, all of this will, I think, stand me in very good stead as a journalist; I will be informed, and a better person all round. And Sporcle doesn’t wreck your computer with viruses like Ukrainian animal porn does, so I’m told.

The website’s list of ‘overweight countries’ was drawn from the World Health Organisation. Of the 26 countries named, 14 were island nations and most of those very small island nations; indeed there is a case for saying the smaller the island, the fatter the inhabitant — and small islands comprised nine of the top 13 ‘heaviest’ countries. This is a remarkable statistic when you consider that of the 196 sovereign nations, only 38 are islands of any description. So not only a preponderance of islands at the top of the list, but more than half of the top 26 were islands, when islands comprise only one in five of our recognised sovereign states.