Time Spent Eating and Obesity

A new post by Catherine Rampell at the NYT's Economix blog identifies a relationship between obesity rates and the amount of time individuals spend eating. The amount of time spent eating may be a sign of the amount of "fast food" (which is typically high in fats) consumed. Interestingly, it may not be the smoking and the wine drinking that keeps the French so healthy; it may just be the time spent eating (as a signal of the types of food they eat). Before you start changing your lifestyle by taking longer to eat and enjoying a cigarrette, recall the caveats regarding correlation versus causation.