Adult obesity prevalence

It is a curious feature of the universe that as Americans have grown wider, they have simultaneously named their daughters after a character from a fantasy television programme with increasing enthusiasm, as though both phenomena were responses to the same cosmic memo. One might expect obesity rates and Game of Thrones baby names to occupy entirely separate filing cabinets in the great bureaucracy of human behaviour. Yet here they are, moving together like dancers who have never met but somehow know all the same steps.

What we are almost certainly observing is the simple arithmetic of a growing and shifting population. The United States added roughly 24 million people between 2008 and 2022, and those people were distributed unevenly across age groups, regions, and income brackets. Arya shot to prominence around 2013 when the character became a fan favourite, and the parents naming their children Arya were likely to be younger, urban, media-consuming households—the precise demographic cohort that also experienced substantial shifts in food availability, portion sizes, and sedentary behaviour during the same period. Both trends are really just different ways of measuring the same underlying churning of American life during an era of streaming television and industrial food systems.

The correlation between obesity and fantasy baby names is not, as it happens, evidence of anything except our wonderful tendency to find patterns in the static. What we have stumbled upon is a reminder that two things can move in perfect harmony while remaining entirely indifferent to each other's existence. The universe contains multitudes of such coincidences, most of them much less charming than this one. Arya and obesity: travelling together, meeting nowhere.