I concur with the authors that the food insurance hypothesis (IH) may be relevant as an explaining factor for current obesity trends, and that a simple evolutionary mismatch (EM) logic is unable to explain inter- and intracountry differences in obesity rates. I think, however, that a more sophisticated version of the same EM hypothesis might be better defended against IH. In particular, I am thinking of obesity as a failure of self-control in the presence of ego-depletion phenomena (Baumeister et al. Reference Baumeister, Muraven and Tice2000; Baumeister & Vohs Reference Baumeister, Vohs, James and Mark2016). As shown by Dragone (Reference Dragone2009), regulatory failures in eating behavior may even occur in the context of rational intertemporal decision making.

In a simple version of the EM, it would be implied that richer, better educated people should be more able to access food and thus be more obese than poorer, less educated ones, which is contrary to the evidence. But in a more sophisticated version that takes self-control issues into account, access to better material and educational resources provides individuals with a larger, relatively more fulfilling menu of alternative rewards to counter the constant ego-depleting pressure that is caused by resistance to the easy availability of tasty, highly caloric food that is currently guaranteed to almost everybody, even in case of modest spending capacity. This kind of self-control problem can be seen as a consequence of the generalized improvement of access to food sources caused by the constant improvements of material subsistence conditions along the long-term industrial and post-industrial development cycles (Ezzati et al. Reference Ezzati, Vander Hoorn, Lawes, Leach, James, Lopez, Rodgers and Murray2005). In conditions of substantial material scarcity, self-control issues concerning access to food were relatively exceptional, and even occasional opportunities of overfeeding could have been regarded as functionally (rather than dysfunctionally) related to long-term survival goals. But in the current context of material abundance, an almost constant exercise of self-control is needed to both stick to healthy food choices and resist unhealthy food temptations. Where effective countermeasures are lacking, ego depletion in food-related choices will eventually occur once the self-control muscle has entered the refractory phase from over-exercising (Muraven & Baumeister Reference Muraven and Baumeister2000), and the subject will eventually capitulate to unhealthy food choices.

As a matter of fact, relatively more affluent people have a much richer repertoire of choices and tools to counter unhealthy food craving including (a) the availability of tastier, more appealing (and more expensive) healthy food; (b) reliance upon personal trainers and consultants to support them in maintaining their self-control goals through implementation intention (Webb & Sheeran Reference Webb and Sheeran2007), planned goal striving (Bayer et al. Reference Bayer, Gollwitzer and Achtziger2010), and self-awareness (Alberts et al. Reference Alberts, Martijn and de Vries2011); (c) seeking alternative rewards from a vast range of non-food-related sources, often inaccessible or less accessible to less well-off people (Sivanathan & Pettit Reference Sivanathan and Pettit2010); and (d) having access to a richer range of positive affect stimuli to ease recovery after self-regulation (Tice et al. Reference Tice, Baumeister, Shmueli and Muraven2007). In addition, relatively more affluent people are exposed to stronger social incentives to exercise self-control over food choices to preserve their physical aspect: from the need to promote their public image, to the necessity of commanding others’ respect and admiration to maintain leadership, to keeping up with success-related aesthetic role models, and so on. It is also to be remarked that consistently successful self-regulation generates intrinsic rewards that effectively moderate ego depletion, provided that substantial depletion states are strategically avoided (Vohs et al. Reference Vohs, Baumeister and Schmeichel2012), so that subjects who are able to draw upon a richer repertoire of self-regulation tools and are exposed to stronger social incentives will tend to widen the regulatory gap with respect to less endowed and successful subjects (Muraven Reference Muraven2010).

In other words, more-privileged people have better chances than less-privileged ones of achieving a better regulatory balance by accessing superior healthy food alternatives and valuable, alternative non-food-related compensatory rewards, as well as of being driven by stronger self-control motives, with better consequences in terms of body weight management. Moreover, they can rely upon the ego-reparative capacity of money (Boucher & Kofos Reference Boucher and Kofos2012). On the other hand, many different kinds of non-healthy food, because of their current abundance, are among the cheapest and more accessible sources of rewards – and in particular, of rewards that do not depend on social status, recognition, or education, unlike most others – and are therefore likely to be the option of choice for relatively poor, uneducated individuals (Orr et al. Reference Orr, Galea, Riddle and Kaplan2014). This is the case not only as a consequence of ego depletion from food-related self-control attempts themselves, but also in addition as an easily accessible compensation of negative affect from other forms of failure of self-control (e.g., poor concentration on study and school failure). These forms include an ego-depleting lack of autonomy in goal implementation (Muraven et al. Reference Muraven, Gagné and Rosman2008), social stigma (Inzlicht et al. Reference Inzlicht, Kay and Aronson2006), resistance to peer group conformism (Renna et al. Reference Renna, Grafova and Thakur2008), exposure to persuasive messages (such as advertising of unhealthy food; e.g., Wheeler et al. Reference Wheeler, Briñol and Hermann2007), lack of countervailing strategies (Janssen et al. Reference Janssen, Fennis and Pruyn2010), or ironically as an ego-depleting cross-effect from successful self-control in other domains (e.g., refraining from addictive habits; e.g., Shmueli & Prochaska [Reference Shmueli and Prochaska2009]).

The often-stressed problem of physical accessibility of healthy food, or more generally of a varied menu of food choices, does not likewise seem to be a major explanatory factor for the social incidence of obesity. Even in poor neighborhoods, accessibility of sources of unhealthy food is generally matched by comparable accessibility of healthier food choices (Lee Reference Lee2012), so that a stronger propensity for the former is more easily explained in terms of regulatory failure than in terms of lack of accessibility or food insecurity.

Therefore, a suitably extended EM formulation could provide an alternative, or at least complementary, explanatory route for obesity trends vis-à-vis IH. In particular, it would be especially interesting to investigate the actual (possibly culture-specific) mix of self-regulatory versus food insecurity factors at work in the widely observed social influence dynamics characterizing current obesity trends (Shoham et al. Reference Shoham, Hammond, Rahmandad, Wang and Hofmand2015).