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Thanks to Dinesh D’Souza, I now know that there are fat people in India.
When I was a child, India symbolized poverty and malnutrition. At the dinner table, when I didn’t finish my mother’s mashed potatoes, she’d scold me and say that there are starving children in India who’d love to eat her mashed potatoes.
So when D’Souza tweeted on Monday that fat kids used to laugh at him when he was a child in India, I scoffed at the very idea that there are or were any fat kids in India.
But I decided to show due diligence and fact-check his allegation. Working on a current population of 1.326 billion, and assuming the accuracy of this 2021 study’s estimate that roughly 40% of India’s population is obese, that would mean there are about 200 million more obese people...