I don’t have the expertise to comment on the effectiveness of this legislation, but your simile doesn’t work. Both anorexia and obesity are symptoms of the same problem: society projecting unrealistic body imagery, more generally over focus on physical appearance over health indicators, contributing to serious body image psychological issues, particularly among females. People with either diagnosis often have related eating activities like restriction and many overweight people have been underweight or undernourished previously. These are complex physiological and psychological topics and we won’t make holistic progress as long as diet and health advice, including government programs, are dominated by pseudoscience — case in point, the joke that is the food pyramid.
Both anorexia and obesity are symptoms of the same problem: society projecting unrealistic body imagery
It is interesting to note that several centuries ago, when far more of the population was underweight, being somewhat overweight or even obese was considered the ideal. Now that the average weight has increased significantly, it seems the "unrealistic body imagery" has gone in the other direction.
It would have been more accurately if I had included psychological unrealistic body imagery. Others in this thread have suggested that the manipulation is to make people look fit, but there are regular articles that describe those clicks of the mouse resulting in physiologically extreme, if not impossible body proportions.
This observation distracts from the fact that that nutrition and body science is young. Hypothesizes that have experimental support come from the last 130
years, but even then most of popular theories of the last decades have contradictory evidence.
What I do like about your observation is that it brings to my mind that although there has always been artistic license in previous centuries, for the most part the images were attempting to accurately represent the specific persons show.
