Why So Many People Are Overweight and Obese Today—A Finnish Perspective

Abstract

An increasingly obese population has spread worldwide. But what causes so many people to be overweight or obese? Obesity is also one of the most significant public health problems in Finland, as the obesity rate in Finland has increased over the past two decades and is now much higher than the EU average, with every second Finn classified as at least overweight. Finland will be used as a case study, as we have been monitoring the fitness and body weight of Finnish recruits annually since the 1970s and therefore have comprehensive reliable data to use for the period. This article will review existing reports in the fields of obesity and societal development focusing on the Nordic countries. As far as possible, different social phenomena will be discussed in separate sections to try to find out if there is something in societal development that could be a major cause of this obesity epidemic. This article will also give some suggestions on what could be done in the future to slow down the negative trend.

1. Introduction

In recent years, alarming reports of an increasingly obese population have spread worldwide, and it is not only a problem among the adult population. The 21st century has witnessed a basically worldwide childhood obesity epidemic. In 2019, about 41 million children in the age range of 0 to 5 years were declared clinically obese, according to the WHO [1]. Obesity is also one of the most significant public health problems in Finland. In 2024, statistics revealed that up to 60% of working-age men and around half of women are classified at least overweight, with one in five Finnish adults classified as obese. The trend in obesity is particularly worrying among the Finnish young adult population.

But what causes so many people to be overweight or obese? Finland will be used as a case study, as the obesity rate in Finland has increased over the past two decades and is higher than the EU average [2]. Finland is also a good example to use, as we have been monitoring the fitness and body weight of Finnish recruits annually since the 1970s and therefore have comprehensive reliable data to try to identify when things started to go wrong and to monitor whether there could be some societal reasons contributing to this trend. What can we expect from the future? To look forward, we first need to look back in time.

This article will review existing research in the fields of obesity and societal development focusing on the Nordic countries to try to find answers to where it started to go wrong. As far as possible, different social phenomena are discussed in separate sections to try to find out if there is something in societal development that could be a major cause of this obesity epidemic. The article will also give some suggestions as to what could be done in the future to slow down the negative trend. Different Nordic sources were used for statistical reviews on how different habits have developed in the Nordic societies, as it is not always easy to find long-term summarized statistics for a specific phenomenon in each country. However, the Nordic countries traditionally tend to follow each other quite closely regarding societal development, and therefore statistics collected from any of the Nordic countries usually describe development trends in all Nordic countries.

The objective of this review article is to identify possible contributing factors to why things have turned out this way in Finland, with an obesity pandemic, and to discuss suggestions of what could be done in terms of preventive purposes for public health.

2. Method

The article is a narrative based on national and international public reports and articles published in peer-reviewed journals and is therefore a non-structured qualitative analysis performed as a traditional literature review and not designed as a systematic literature review. As this review aims to build an understanding of social phenomena in the Nordic countries that may have influenced the development of obesity, the literature search included reports and articles in English as well as all of the Nordic languages to grasp the spirit of the local society.

A traditional literature reviews allows flexibility, and the method is useful for synthesizing knowledge beyond research findings. When performing qualitative research of the literature and traditional literature review as a method, there are no requirements regarding either quantity or completeness of the selected material. Instead, the focus is completely directed by the interests of the research. Through the researcher’s reasoning the differences and similarities between themes in the materiel are compared and summed up, grasping the overall rules.

3. Where It All Began

In recent years, alarming reports of an increasingly obese population have increased worldwide. An even more problematic reality is that this seems to be linked to the origin of our species. We are not born to be happy but to survive. This means avoiding starvation and not spending energy unnecessarily. This has been deeply rooted in us since ancient times, as for almost all of human evolution, starvation has been one of the greatest threats to our lives [3,4]. During 99.9% of humanity’s time on earth, humans have not had the luxury of having excess weight to take off when lacking access to food. As evolution is slow, the body has not developed a protective mechanism to signal when we are taking in more energy than our bodies need and spend [3,5,6].

In modern times, since the year 1800, society has gone through revolutionary development. In 1800, about 85% of humanity lived in extreme poverty, and basically no one in the world had enough to eat. Obesity and overeating are, by these standards, very young phenomena. Also, back in 1800, child labor was common around the world (and still is in 2025 in some societies). A majority of the world’s population lived under these conditions until 1966. Extreme poverty, which is an underlying cause of hunger, has decreased in percentage terms since 1800. In 1966, 50% of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty, and in 2017, only 9% of the population remained in the group living in extreme poverty [7].

This indicates relatively fast societal development in relation to human history. Since evolution is characterized by extreme slowness, it is not impossible that our biological origins may have some influence on how our physiological bodies react to different stimuli today. The latter part of the 18th century and the 19th century can be considered one of the great dividing lines in world history, as this period was characterized by the Industrial Revolution, paving the way for technological innovations and economic development [8].

Electrification and modernization following the industrial revolution made it possible for people to spend less time on some previously very time-consuming household tasks, which in turn gave people more time for other activities [7]. The washing machine is such an invention, which gave especially women more time for other things [7]. Development has continued, and the main focus in today’s developed societies is to a large extent still on making everyday life easier through technology. We tend to build and develop technology for everything that is physically demanding or time-consuming [3]. We have electrified bicycles and scooters so that we don’t have to exert ourselves when we choose not to take the car as a means of transportation. Today we do not even need to go shopping: with a few clicks we can order any goods to our door, including our food. This means that, in the 2020s, there is no need to activate yourself physically if you do not want to, as technical solutions have made a sedentary lifestyle possible [3]. At the same time, the 21st century has witnessed a basically worldwide childhood obesity epidemic [9]. But could there also be some other underlying social phenomena that have influenced the negative trend in public health, beside the impact of evolution making us a bit naturally lazy?

4. A Society in Change—Weight Trends in Finland

The development of modern society is characterized by constant change. What has also changed during the past decades is the weight index of the adult population in Finland, which has increased at a fast pace since the 1970s and 1980s [10]. Now, in the mid-2020s, obesity is one of the most significant public health problems in Finland [11]. In 2024, statistics revealed that up to 60% of working-age men and around half of women were classified at least overweight, and one in five Finnish adults was classified as obese. According to a Finnish report [10], preventive activities to halt the spread of obesity would be one of the most important activities to promote public health and to prevent the onset of chronic diseases. The trend in increasing obesity rates among the young adult population is particularly worrying, according to the Finnish report [10]. Later sections in this article will review various social changes that occurred in the Nordic countries during the 1970s to 1990s to see if there seems to be anything that may have influenced the spread of the obesity epidemic, but first we will present an overview of weight change among young Finnish recruits over recent decades.

Finland conducts annual measurements of the fitness, muscle strength, and weight of Finnish young men when they join the Finnish defense forces as recruits [12]. In Finland, it is compulsory for all men to undergo military service, so the data collection is quite comprehensive. More or less the same tests have been used for the last few decades, which allows comparisons to be made between the results of the so-called Cooper test from 1975 up to the present year and the results of the muscle test from 1983 onwards. The fitness tests for conscripts are carried out for each contingent during the first two weeks of service in January or July. The results provide a fairly comprehensive picture of the average fitness level of young men aged 19. In 2021, almost 20,000 conscripts participated in the tests [12].

After the conscripts were tested in 2021, a summary of the key findings for the last 30 years of measurements was published [12], which revealed that the average body weight of 19-year-old Finnish young men had increased by almost 8 kg in just under 30 years, from 70.8 kg in 1993 to 78.7 kg in 2021. The measurements from 2023 show that the average weight had not increased over the last three years of measurements: in both 2022 and 2023 the average body weight of the conscripts was 78.7 kg [13]. The fact that the average weight among Finnish conscripts has not increased during the last three years may have different explanations, but as there is no access to the exact numbers from the measurements which are presented publicly only as average values, there is no possibility to analyze in depth whether or not there are now more very slim recruits than before.

Regarding endurance, the average 12-min running test performed by conscripts at the beginning of their service in 2021 was the second worst result in the history of the measurement (the worst was in 2019) [12]. Also, the results from this test improved slightly (five meters) in 2023 compared to the five previous years [13]. However, the fact remains that, when you look at a graph showing the average values and the proportion with very poor values and the proportion with very high values, there is a very high proportion of conscripts with very poor endurance compared to the proportion with good endurance. Graphics from The Finnish Defence Forces [14] also reveal that, in 1997–1998, there was a shift. Before 1997, the proportion of conscripts with good endurance was higher than the proportion with poor endurance, but in 1997–1998 the proportions shifted, and since then, the proportion of conscripts with poor endurance has risen sharply, while the proportion with good endurance has fallen slowly [14]. If you look at the muscular fitness of young men entering the military service, the proportion of conscripts with good or very good muscular fitness has been decreasing slowly since 1982, and the proportion with bad muscular fitness has increased slowly. In 1982, 16.5% of conscripts were considered to have bad muscular fitness, while the corresponding share in 2023 was 23.3%. In 1982, 56.5% of conscripts were considered to have good muscular fitness, and the corresponding share in 2023 was 33.1%. The biggest change here seems to have occurred between 1982 and 1987. However, it should be noted that, in 2011, the tests for muscular fitness were partially redesigned and are not fully comparable [14]. Exactly what the difference is in the tests before and after 2011 is not clear, other than that a new test battery was introduced in 2011. Using a new test battery appears to have resulted in a significantly lower proportion of people scoring more poorly on the muscle fitness test 2012 than in 2010. The difference among those with good muscular fitness did not increase significantly with the renewal of the test battery: the proportion was 40.4% in 2011 and 40.5% in 2012.

These measurements reveal that, for decades, endurance and muscular fitness among Finnish young men have deteriorated significantly, at the same time as the average body weight has increased. An increased average body weight of 8 kg over the last 30 years is, however, striking and astonishing. Considering the measurements from the last five years, the trend appears to continue, with a high proportion of Finnish young men demonstrating poor endurance even though the average body weight stopped increasing.

Another cause for concern is mental health issues among the Finnish young men. In a news interview [15] with Lieutenant Commander Richard Lundell at the Military Medicine Unit in Riihimäki in December 2024, he said that around 35% of Finnish conscripts are released from military service or have to interrupt their service. That is more than one in three recruits. The most common reason for being released from service is mental illness. Lundell says there has been a large increase in these cases in recent decades. Another reason to be released from military service is obesity.

The same worrying trend is found among Finnish pupils in basic education, according to the yearly the Move! measurements [12]. Move! is a national data collection and feedback system used to measure the physical functioning of pupils in grades 5 and 8 of basic education in Finland [16]. The measurements have been carried out for 5th grade students since 2016 and for 8th grade students since 2018, so it is not possible to track any change in the longer term in any population younger than the Finnish recruits. Move! measures pupils’ endurance, muscle fitness, mobility, and physical skills [17].

After the results of the Move! measurements and the tests from the recruits were published in 2021, the Director of the UKK Institute (Urho Kaleva Kekkonen Institute for Health Promotion Research), Professor Tommi Vasankari, made the following statement:

“The ten percent increase in the body weight of conscripts, together with the deterioration in physical fitness, inevitably leads to a growing burden of diseases (such as type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, mental health problems) and challenges in everyday life. Obesity, poor fitness, lack of exercise and sedentary lifestyles are all significant health risks, which are increasingly dangerous when they occur together. The consequences will be felt in the future in the form of increasing incapacity for work and socio-economic costs. Already today, the costs of inadequate physical activity amount to at least three billion euros per year in Finland.”

[12]

After a drastic decline in the physical functioning of pupils in grades 5 and 8 in Finland over many years, the measurements from 2023 finally gave some positive indications, with a stop in the decline and even indications of a small partial reverse at the national level [17]. According to the Move! measurements from autumn 2024, the proportion of pupils in grade 5 with low physical functioning was smaller than in the previous year, but the results for pupils in grade 8 remained at the same level as in the previous year. However, the measurements also showed clear regional differences in the physical functioning of children and young people. In addition, the functional capacity of 8th grade girls living in rural areas is still deteriorating [17].

As with the measurements of recruits, the annual figures sometimes tend to go down and sometimes up in the Move! measurements. Still, the time span for the positive trend from the last two years is too short to be confident that the positive trend will continue. Also, it is important to remember that results from the last Move! tests revealed that physical functioning is still deteriorating for some of the test groups. What can be said with certainty from a long-term perspective, however, is that the measurement results of conscripts show a significant deterioration in Finnish young men’s fitness and endurance over the last 30 years, while the average body weight has increased by 8 kg in 30 years.

5. Body Mass Index and Its Relationship with Mental Health

Of the Nordic nations, Finland is experiencing the biggest struggle with obesity [18]. According to statistics, the obesity rate in Finland was much higher than the EU average in 2023 [2]. In 2022, 50.6% of people aged 16 years or over in the EU were categorized as overweight [19]. A closer look at the statistics reveals that the share of overweight people aged 16 years or over in the EU in 2022 was highest in Malta (62.0%), with Finland in second place, with a 59.5% share, compared to Sweden, which had a 52.7% share of overweight people [19]. If one examines BMI statistics in the EU in 2022 [19] further, it is found that, among EU countries, the highest shares of obese females was recorded in the Baltic countries Latvia (23.9%) and Estonia (22.9%), in Malta (22.7%), and in Finland (22.0%). In these countries, the proportion of overweight women is higher than that of overweight men, while in other EU countries overweight males are more common. Looking at age groups, the highest share of obesity was reported for people aged 50 to 64 years in Denmark, Ireland, Malta, the Netherlands, Finland, and Sweden [19].

Looking at BMI statistics over time, from 1985 to 2017, BMI rose by an average of 2.2 units in men and 2.0 units in women globally [20], which means that each person became 5–6 kg heavier. This is why obesity and overweight are growing public health concerns. In Finland in 2019, 20% of adults were obese, up from 11% in 2000, and the adult obesity rate was higher than in most EU countries. Overweight and obesity rates among Finnish adolescents in 2022 (24%) were also higher than the EU average (21%) [21].

While overweight and obesity burden Finnish society, the burden of mental illness is also significant [21]. In 2019, it was estimated that one in six Finns had a mental health issue, and the suicide rates in Finland remain much higher than the EU average, even though there has been a significant reduction in the past 15 years [21].

But is there an actual correlation between obesity and mental health problems? Does obesity cause mental illness, or does mental illness cause obesity? This is a question that scientists have been arguing about for years, and many studies look for links between obesity and various diseases, i.e., mental illness, but there seem to be no obvious connection. A Swedish doctoral thesis [22] highlighted that the assumption that fat people suffer from mental illness to a greater extent than people of normal weight does not hold when gender and age are taken into account. The exception is for people with a BMI over 35, where a weak association between increased weight and increased mental illness emerges [22]. The study indicates that what is crucial and determines whether the overweight person develops a mental illness is how society and other people make the overweight person feel; it is not the excess weight itself [22].

So, according to this, the rising rate of obesity in Finland cannot be explained only by mental illness, even though both occur at a very high rate in Finland compared to the EU average, with every second adult in Finland classed as overweight.

6. When Time in the Kitchen Became Scarce in Nordic Welfare Countries

A lot of things have changed during the past 60 years. People have changed, society has changed, the way food is produced has changed, food products have changed, our eating habits have changed, and the way we prepare our food has changed, all in the wake of technological development and changing social norms influencing lifestyle changes. In his book “Our Kids” [23], the author Robert Putnam noted that, from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, family dinners became rarer in all societal levels in America. This was due to families struggling to manage with the new scheduling complexities that arose with having two working parents. Putnam argues that arranged family dinners may act as an indicator of a powerful investment that parents make (or fail to make) in their kids [23].

A Swedish government report [24] published in 2011 stated that, already at that time, families with children spent less and less time on cooking. At the same time, the consumption of ready-made food started to increase. The Swedish economist Staffan Burenstam Linder pondered the question of why people on welfare seemed to have so little time, already in the late 1960s. He argued that the increased labor productivity resulted in a widely held view that leisure time became more expensive in relation to work. Burenstam Linder argued that the view of an increase in the value of leisure time in the wake of rising incomes affected the amount of time that households were willing to spend on important activities such as preparing and eating food and the time used for physical activity [24].

As traditional farming society gave way to modern society, with demands for access, speed, and efficiency, food culture changed radically in many Western countries, and Finland was no exception [25]. After the end of the Second World War, the reconstruction of Finland began. A woman’s place in this nation-building was at home as a mother, expressed as the so-called housewife period. This period lasted in Finland from 1943 to 1975, when it was politically sanctioned to be a housewife through a form of joint taxation. This made it financially advantageous in a family for the lower paid partner, usually the woman, to stay at home [26]. In the later part of the 1970s, a steady decline in the number of housewives became apparent due to political changes and rapid societal development. Women joined the workforce, and food that could be prepared quickly was needed as time became scarce [25]. One of the social revolutions that made this possible was a new family policy that was implemented in Nordic countries in the 1970s [27]. This included, among other things, universal parental insurance and publicly funded childcare, which enabled women in Nordic countries to start working [27,28]. According to Anne Lise Ellingsæter, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Oslo [28], women in Nordic countries were early to enter the workforce compared to the rest of the world. But this was because Nordic women wanted to work; it was not the government that in any way forced women to enter the workforce. Actually, family policy reforms in Nordic countries came about as a result of pressure from the women’s movement, as many women saw professional work as an opportunity for economic independence [28]. According to Ellingsæter [28], women in Nordic countries are still among the most active women in the workforce in the world. Could the welfare model and the core of Nordic family policy have anything to do with the situation we face in society today in view of the obesity epidemic?

From the beginning, there was slight concern in Nordic countries that sending children to childcare to spend several hours a day in an institution could be harmful to the children. That is something you rarely hear today [28]. A longitudinal study in the United States [29] examined obesity among children and its association with maternal workforce participation from 1971 to 1994. The study indicated that the intensity of maternal labor increased the child’s likelihood of being overweight. However, it is important to understand that childhood obesity has many causes, and the mother’s working hours are only a small part of a more complex pattern [24]. But the fact is that time spent in the kitchen and preparing food has decreased significantly over several decades. In Sweden, for example, it was found that cohabiting parents with young children engaged in 15 min less of food preparation per day in 2000/01 than in 1990/91 [24]. A reduction in the time spent preparing food has probably led to an increase in the consumption of pre-prepared food with a higher calorific content [24], and in recent years the consumption of ultra-processed foods has increased worldwide [30]. Ultra-processed food is also generally recognized to be related to a wide variety of non-communicable diseases, as well as the occurrence of obesity [30].

The report “Future Food Systems: For people, our planet and prosperity” [31] highlights that the cultural norms that determine where people eat or buy their food are changing. Family meals in the home are more or less replaced with more frequent use of street foods and eating at fast and full-service restaurants. This has a major impact on diet quality. American studies reveal that about 50% of meals sold are of poor or intermediate quality. The report [31] highlights that fast-food restaurants, which are sometimes blamed in the media for the rise in obesity, do not need to be worse in terms of diet quality than full-service restaurants. This claim is based on the results from a study of the caloric content of full-service meals conducted randomly in different countries. The study [31] concluded that full-service meals on average contain about 33% more energy than fast-food meals. The negative impact that fast food and snacks have on public health has been commonly known for quite a long time, but less commonly known is the role that high-energy-content restaurant meals play in the accelerating obesity epidemic.

7. Economic Fluctuations and Constraints

The 20th century was characterized by recurrent economic crises. It alternated between boom times and recession. Revolutions, diseases, wars, terrorist attacks, and famines have devastated societies and sunk economies throughout history. Bubbles in world economies have also arisen in different ways and from different commodities over the centuries, like sugar, coffee, tobacco, mines, wheat, railways, gold, oil, and the IT hype at the turn of the millennium, to name just a few that have contributed to speculative booms that ended in crashes [32].

Economic fluctuations affect the socio-economic situation of a country, and socio-economic status affects how and what people consume, which in the long run can have an impact on body weight. At the same time, economically troubled times lead to stress and anxiety and more mental health problems, which eventually could be a factor that also affects weight. As mentioned earlier, the Nordic welfare states emerged after the Second World War. Finland underwent a huge transformation in the post-war period, and the industry eventually gained momentum in the 1960s and 1970s. Children born after the war were young adults, confidence in the future was strong, and the economy flourished. But in 1973–1974, the oil crisis plunged Nordic countries into economic darkness. In the 1980s, the trend reversed, and the economy boomed again, but in the fall of 1987, the largest-ever single-day drop in the US stock market occurred due to an overheated economy. This affected the real economy in Nordic countries, with some delay as the economies in the Nordic countries also became overheated. In the latter part of the 1980s, the Finnish economy improved significantly, with growth rates among the highest in Europe and unemployment just below 3%. But the Finnish banking sector entered a crisis in the early 1990s due to overheating. At the same time, the Finnish economy was affected by changes in the world market following the fall of the Berlin Wall, and trade with the Soviet Union declined dramatically [32,33].

In the beginning of the 1990s, a deep recession hit large parts of the Western world, causing a significant proportion of bankruptcies. This led to large amounts of unemployment in many European countries [32,33,34,35], as well as in Nordic countries. In Sweden and Finland, the recession was so deep that it was called a major depression. Some believe that the Great Depression traumatized society, or at least the most vulnerable part of the population, which in turn might have caused some kind of a lifelong damage for a generation [36]. As this societal phenomenon has not been the focus of any comprehensive study in Finland, it cannot be said with certainty that those who grew up in the 1990s were affected during a longer period than the recession lasted. In other words, it is not clear how the Great Depression affected citizens in Finnish society in the long term. However, a Swedish study which collected data in Sweden between 1988 and 2008 examined whether economic factors at the societal level (municipality unemployment rate) and at the individual level (worry about family finances) could explain trends in mental health problems [34]. The researchers [34] found indications that the “individual-level predictor (worry about family finances) significantly explained the increasing rates of adolescents’ psychosomatic problems” [34] (p. 101).

It was not until the end of the 1990s that business in the Nordic region came to be characterized by a new boom again. This was particularly true in Sweden and Finland, where young entrepreneurs had hopes of perpetual growth. They entered the global market with a focus on IT and the internet. The start of the IT boom is said to be the IPO of Netscape in August 1995. But in the early 2000s, the IT bubble burst. This is how it has continued. Bubbles and financial crises follow one another. The year 2008 saw another financial crisis, but then the Western economy grew quite strong without any major crisis until the coronavirus crisis in 2020 [32].

As financial crises tend to follow one another quite intermittently, it is hard to know if they have any long-term effects on the population. But the deep recession in Nordic countries in the beginning of the 1990s was of such a nature that it affected very large parts of the population very hard, and in a way probably had an impact on all generations in one way or another. At the time when the deep recession hit Finland, the Finnish population might have been quite psychically vulnerable, considering the generation that had fought in the last war that ended in 1945 with the Soviet Union as the enemy [37] and the fact that, in the beginning of the 1990s, the political situation was very unstable in the Soviet Union. This is true again today, in 2025, but now the Soviet Union is Russia.

Perhaps the darkness, gloom, and melancholy that historically have been the stereotypical mentality that characterizes the Finnish spirit actually are psychic scars of wars that were completely torn open again by the Great Depression. The Finnish people have always lived in the shadow of their big, unpredictable neighbor in the east. Born and raised in the Finnish culture, this is a cultural interpretation; you learn that the sense of melancholy is a common part of Finnish life, it is a part of your cultural heritage.

This may be a clue to how things have turned out in Finland. In Finland, violence against women is much more common than in other European countries on average [38,39]. And statistically, crimes against life are more common in Finland than in the other Nordic countries on a per capita basis [40,41,42], which is surprising to the majority of people.

A study [43] by the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare (THL) shows that Finnish women tend to comfort eat as a way of coping with difficult situations in life [43,44]. As violence against women is very common in Finland [38], many Finnish women are in difficult situations, so there is a possibility that there are many Finnish women who use food as comfort to cope with everyday life. Perhaps this might be the reason why Finnish women are more overweight and obese than the Finnish men. Finnish men, on the other hand, turn to alcohol as a way of coping with difficult situations in life [44], which often makes matters worse for women, as alcohol has shown to often be involved when it comes to acts of violence. Researchers at the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare emphasize the importance of watching out for both comfort eating and alcohol use, as they affect weight, and therefore health, in both the short term and the long term [43].

A Swedish professor, Alvar Nelson, analyzed crime and crime trends in Finland and Sweden over fifty years in 1984 [45]. Nelson argued that, if you look at the societal development of our countries, you may notice many similarities, but also striking differences. Both countries have achieved high living standards, but under quite different conditions. Nelson suggested that the differences may be due to war, which has burdened the Finnish population, while Sweden has maintained its neutrality with very little sacrifice, which he highlights as a possible reason for the different nature of violent crime in the two countries [45].

Professor Seppo Vainio from the University of Oulu has studied how environmental factors affect us [46]. For example, we now understand how nutritional deficiencies and changing environmental conditions can affect genetic inheritance via so-called epigenetic mechanisms. But it is also now known that strong traumatic experiences, such as the horrors of war, can affect our genetic heritage and influence certain diseases [46]. But what causes so many people to become overweight or obese that it is literally called a global epidemic? For a long time, it has been assumed that obesity is mainly caused by the genetic makeup of each individual, but in 2009 an OECD study [47] revealed that genes seem to have less impact on the increase in overweight and obesity than, for example, health-related behaviors.

The “WHO European Regional Obesity Report 2022” [6] claims that there is convincing evidence that genetic, socioeconomic, and environmental factors all together play a role in the development of obesity. It seems to be the interactions among environment, the social and cultural conditions that surround an individual, and hereditary conditions that determine whether we become obese or not [6]. As we have created an obesogenic society with an excess supply of calories, society makes it more difficult for the most vulnerable society members, especially those who are culturally or socially most vulnerable, to make healthy lifestyle choices. According to this, it is to some extent individual choice that affects whether or not an individual becomes obese. In turn, how individuals choose their lifestyle, and who chooses which kind of lifestyle, depend to a large extent on the surrounding environment [6]. This argument suggests that the increase in overweight and obesity is determined by an interaction among the environment, social conditions, and cultural conditions surrounding an individual, and also to some extent by hereditary conditions [6,24,46].

Finnish society has gone through rough times when there has been no option to complain, but just focus on surviving, resulting in a displacement of other emotions within one to two generations. The basis for contemporary bottled-up emotions, which take the form of melancholy or a kind of silent sorrow, is most likely due to participation in wars, as Finland is the only Nordic country that has been under attack from Russia during the 20th century. This, in turn, might be the reason why domestic violence is much more common in Finland than in other Nordic countries, or why we have high suicide rates, or why mental illness is very common in Finland. In addition, some researchers argue that there is a correlation between mental illness and obesity. Maybe the tough years of war and later economic fluctuations have affected the Finnish people more than we think, in terms of violence, mental health, and obesity. As there has been no research conducted on the wartime generation, all that remains is a cultural interpretation and discussions about possible connections and causes. But since it is precisely here that Nordic countries differ, it may be a possible interpretation.

8. What About the Consumption of Goods That Are Thought to Affect Weight?

From 1980 to 2022, total energy intake from food and alcoholic beverages in Sweden increased from 12,300 kJ (2900 kcal) to 13,000 kJ (3100 kcal) per person per day [48]. It is noted that the main increase in energy supply over the period was from protein, largely due to increased meat consumption. According to different sources [49,50], Finns eat less meat than Swedes and drink fewer soft drinks. The question then is, what do Finns consume more than Swedes or compared to the EU average?

The Swedish Board of Agriculture describes a development in Sweden between 1960 and 2005 where the group “other foods” contributed almost three times as much energy in 2005 as in 1960 [24,48]. In 2005, the consumption of sweets, chocolate, and sauces almost tripled and accounted for as much as 10% of calorie intake [24]. Interestingly, according to a Swedish report [24], the proportion of energy intake accounted for by sugar among Swedes appeared to be broadly the same in 2005 as in the early 1960s, but a difference in the origin of energy intake was noted. In 2005, energy intake came from processed or ultra-processed foods, while in the 1960s the energy came from homemade bread, coffee, jams, juices, etc. [24].

There is a significant difference between processed food and ultra-processed food that is important to know in the context of this article. Processed food can be more or less self-made in the kitchen: for example, tinned or pickled vegetables, salted or smoked meat and fish, cheeses and breads, beer and wine. In contrast, ultra-processed foods are foods that are constructed by industrially modifying raw materials through chemical and/or physical processes. Ultra-processed food contains various additives such as modified starches and sweeteners, and the original raw materials are processed to the extent that their internal structure is broken down. Some scientists believe that this could be the main issue making ultra-processed foods unhealthy [51,52]. Ultra-processed foods became common in the 1980s [53], even though the term “ultra-processed” became more commonly known around 2009. It is important to note that it was in the 1980s that ultra-processed foods made their entrance into the family home.

Looking at BMI statistics, the age group in which the highest share of obesity was reported in Denmark, Ireland, Malta, the Netherlands, Finland, and Sweden was for people aged 50 to 64 years [19]. This group was born in the late 1950s or in the beginning of the 1970s, meaning they were 8–22 years old in 1980, when ultra-processed foods started to make inroads into the market.

Another possible influence that stands out in this context, when going through statistical analyses from the 1980s to the 2000s, is the consumption of soft drinks. From 1980 to 2006, the consumption of soft drinks tripled, from 30 L to over 90 L per year per capita [24]. A more recent Swedish report [54] states that, between 1990 and 2001, direct consumption of soft drinks, cider, etc. almost doubled, from 50 L per person per year to around 90 L, and that consumption has remained at that level since then. But this is in Sweden. According to the German statistical service Statista [55], soft drink consumption in Finland is lower than the EU average. In 2022, Finnish consumption of soft drinks was around 57 L per person per year, compared to the EU average of around 98 L per person per year [55,56]. This indicates that obesity cannot be only a soft drink issue, as Finns drinks fewer soft drinks than the EU average but are more obese than the EU average.

At the same time, statistics from last year show how Finnish purchasing behaviors have changed. We eat less organic food and more comfort food. For one category, there has been an increase in consumption, even though food has become more expensive. This category is that of unhealthy foods, or comfort foods as Luke calls them. We have been eating more crisps, sweets, and ice cream, while eating fewer fruits and vegetables and less vegetarian and organic food, as these products have become more expensive [57,58].

While it is not easy to identify striking differences in consumption habits that might affect the Finnish population, one thing that can be noted is that milk drinking is relatively high in Finland. From an international perspective, Finns consume a lot of milk. Of the EU countries, Finland was in third place after Ireland and Estonia in 2024 [57,59], and even though the consumption of milk has decreased here during the past thirty years, as well as in other countries, consumption still is high. Milk consumption in Finland was at an all-time high in the 1950s and 1960s, when most of the milk consumed was farm milk. Farm milk is milk that is not treated in any way and is used directly on the farm or sold directly to consumers. In the 1960s there was also an overproduction of butter in Finland, which led to a drastic reduction in the price of butter, which meant that butter consumption in Finland peaked in the 1960s [57,59].

A Swedish study [60] from 2014 indicated that a high intake of milk is linked to shorter life expectancy in both women and men. The study also found a positive association between milk intake and concentrations of markers for oxidative stress and inflammation, arguing that high intake of milk seems to cause chronic inflammation [60]. Now it is known that inflammation appears to play an important role in the development of obesity [61]. So perhaps Finns’ avid milk drinking is a contributing factor to obesity.

There are also studies claiming that there is convincing evidence of a link between diet quality and mental health [62]. The research indicates that a Mediterranean diet may be positive for mental health, while a diet high in saturated fat, processed foods, and saturated sugar was associated with an increased likelihood of depression [62]. Benton et al. [63] argues that, in high-consuming countries, animal product consumption should be reduced and replaced with increased consumption of fruits and vegetables. This would benefit public health in terms of a reduced non-communicable disease burden.

Our modern food system is based on staple crops, essentially cheaper calories, which have become increasingly abundant. At the same time, nutritious crops have become more expensive and less available. This change has caused an increase in overconsumption of calories and underconsumption of important nutrients. This results in the long run in obesity and an increase in non-communicable diseases [31,63].

9. Other Changes That May Have Had an Impact on the Prevalence of Obesity

In 2019, it was calculated that about 41 million children globally, in the age range 0 to 5 years, were clinically obese [1]. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), many different factors may have influenced the epidemic, but one of the main factors that has been identified is an increase in sedentary lifestyles and a lack of outdoor play among children [1].

In Finland in 2021 it was found, through a study conducted among higher education students, that students sit still during large parts of their waking hours. Indeed, 41% of the Finnish students sit for at least 12 h or more on weekdays. Prolonged sitting is a health risk even if the person is moving at a level that meets the recommendations. Too much sitting is known to increases the risk of obesity, sleep problems, and mental disorders, among other things [64].

The physical activity habits of children and young people in Finland is followed up on a regular basis not only from the Move! tests, but also by the LIITU survey, which is a national follow-up survey that broadly surveys physical activity and sports culture in 7- to 15-year-olds [65]. In 2022, only about a third of children and adolescents (36% self-assessed, 33% measured with a pedometer) in Finland met the physical activity recommendation, which is slightly less than in 2018 (38% self-assessed). A worrying trend highlighted by the survey is that, in 2022, one in five girls and one in four boys considered physical activity unnecessary. Physical activity seems to continue to be given less and less importance, especially among girls. Girls are also more likely than before to report various barriers to physical activity. The most common barriers were external barriers, such as the lack of supervision and sports facilities, the costs of physical activity, and the time spent on homework [64].

Sahlberg and Doyle [66] argue that education in the 21st century needs more possibilities for play, and especially outdoor play, for children and youth. They found free outdoor play to be important for the development of creativity and resilience. They also highlighted that free outdoor play automatically increase children’s physical activity, which is related to greater muscular strength, lower body fat, stronger bones, and an improvement in both metabolic health and mental health [65].

10. Discussion on Possible Preventive Actions and Recommendations

Physical inactivity is probably a partial explanation for the obesity epidemic: we use fewer calories than we eat. Something that we should take very seriously is the fact that young girls and boys in Finland consider physical activity to be unnecessary. This is the first thing that needs to be addressed in preschool and primary school. As a society, we cannot afford more sedentary youth.

At the same time, industrialization and urbanization have changed our eating habits and our view of food. The food industry has developed to respond to modern society’s demands for access, speed, and efficiency. We experience a lack of household time and replace home-cooked meals made from good ingredients with ready-made food and high-calorie snacks. Food prepared at home is rarely cooked from scratch, and we have also become increasingly distant from the origins of food. Locally produced food has been replaced by the highly processed products of the food industry, and we have lost sight of and perhaps respect for what ends up on our plate. We eat out in restaurants more often, and less food is cooked at home; and, as pointed out in this article, food prepared in restaurants has been shown to contain a much greater amount of energy than homemade food. In some respects, it appears that it is the welfare state itself which has created the conditions for an increasing proportion of the population to become obese. Have we gone so far in our gender equality zeal that we cannot imagine investing the time needed to make healthy and good food with healthy ingredients from scratch in our own kitchen, not even with children’s or our own well-being as a sufficiently large driver? Apparently, most of us have; or is it a lack of understanding?

Sahlberg and Doyle [65] argue for a change in education to provide space for more free play, but perhaps education needs to be considered as a very important key to change and development in more areas than only more access to free outdoor play. We seem to need more education to develop a comprehensive understanding of how the food we eat affects our body. We also need to develop an understanding of what happens when we use less energy than we take in. One suggestion is that education in Finland, which right now is very academically oriented, could for example focus more on subjects like home economics, nutrition, and cooking skills. These subjects could be included as compulsory subjects in the curriculum of a renewed education approach to provide knowledge about how the consumption of different foods affect our bodies, but also to equip the children of today for an uncertain future. Feeling prepared for uncertain times and knowing that you can cope on your own, for example, by knowing how to grow your own food, should be among the most important skills to learn today to foster a resilient society.

This review summarizes various phenomena in the development of society that in different ways may have had some impact on the now-declared worldwide obesity epidemic. It is scientifically proven that, to some extent, our genes have an impact on how easy it is for us to become overweight, but it is not just genes that determine how things turn out. Our culture and the surrounding community affect us as well. One of the main causes of the obesity pandemic, besides genetic causes, seems to be extensive and widespread sedentary behavior, starting at a young age. Our dietary choices and what we choose to consume also matter, and we need to learn more, through more research, about how ultra-processed foods, soft drinks, and milk affect us.

We cannot influence our genes or the residual trauma of wartime horrors or other traumatic experiences, but we can influence our everyday choices today, and we can influence how our society treats overweight or obese individuals. We can also influence education, what we teach next generation. In Finland, we need to immediately stop the negative spiral of violence against women that blackens the Finnish welfare state. Through education we can bring a change, but our educational system needs to undergo a major renewal to meet the current urgent need for new knowledge, as the needs appear to be very multifaceted.