Come on kragen, you can't post like that here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Now that you've said that, I realize you're right. In all seriousness, I am in fact fairly ignorant. (Aren't we all, really?) I do try not to be arrogant or pompous, but it does happen. Thank you for your honest feedback.
I would also like to thank you for the well-researched analysis. Everything you've brought up are important and serious considerations, and they are all in fact not just possible, but probable magnifying factors in the serious issue of increasing obesity.
A final thought. Since you're demonstrating to me possibilities that I might not have considered before my ignorant comment, please also consider the possibility that you may not have understood exactly what I meant, or evaluated all the possibilities behind the intent or tone of what I said originally before you chose to try to insult me.
My original comment was a bad combination of geeky and joking. It was intended to be tongue-in-cheek, and I think the mistake I made was using the word "due", as in obesity is 100% due to food. When I wrote it, I was thinking, and should have written, to mirror the author's original wording "something to do with food".
The gist of my comment is that I thought the opening line was funny, because obviously it has "something" to do with food. It has, again tongue-in-cheek, but also quite literally, everything to do with food. My silly nerd point of clarification being that the issue to discuss is what causes us to eat too much, not whether to eat.
What I didn't mean to say, but I actually did say through poor word choice, was that food was the one and only cause of these problems. I realize I also implied that personal responsibility and self control are the one and only cause and solution. On the contrary, my true opinion is that I quite agree with the article's author that the food industry is deliberately causing widespread over-eating, and the effect is then magnified by the use of excessively caloric ingredients. And that's just one of many problems we have.
Human physiology, culture and habits are also massive influences and are extremely hard to overcome. We have evolved to eat more than we need, for good reason, because historically humans didn't have food availability at all times. Now that we have 100% availability of food, and now that almost all of the available food presented to us is both excessively caloric, and being scientifically engineered to cause extra craving, its really no surprise that obesity is a widespread issue. While I'm not always pro regulation, this is one area where I think more regulation is in order and overdue.
I also know personally that there are many factors making diet really incredibly difficult to control. I've been trying to control my weight my entire life, with varying levels of success, or lack thereof. I've had jobs & friends where the socializing made it nearly impossible to control my weight. I've hung around with people that don't hesitate to chastise me if I don't eat & drink the same way they do, and I frequently chose to eat, drink, and have a good time over suffering through a discussion drawing attention to my eating.
I have had more success in the last year than ever before, and its because I quit my job and lost most of the friends that hassled me about eating while socializing. (Though nearly all my friends and family still do, in at least small amounts.) I also discovered for myself a couple of things I didn't know before, that going to the gym wasn't the answer to losing weight, and that for me personally, I'd had a mental block surrounding calorie counting, and when I actually tried it for an extended period, it worked, and was not as hard as my mind tried to make it seem. That's just me, and its not necessarily the same, or easy, or even possible for everyone. I also couldn't have done it (and didn't) at my previous job, so my situation is a factor. If there was a tinge of me being pompous, this is why, my current personal understanding of diet & fitness may have been leaking into my comment.
Funny enough, I actually wrote a paragraph worth of edit to explain myself a little better right after I posted, but then decided I'd let it be short and hope that people understood. Now I regret not having edited my comment, but I hoped this helped, I hope what I added here is more thoughtful and less stupid.
Could be stress levels, perhaps due to imprisonment of family members or economic inequality, both of which have skyrocketed in the US in recent decades. Other aspects of economic inequality, such as a shift toward emergency medical treatment, are also possible causes. It's observable that the social classes most affected by obesity in the US (and, now, worldwide) are the poorest; this might be due to food, but it might not be.
Could be infectious diseases, which are always changing, or more generally, microbiome changes. Diet changes (e.g. increase in sugar, or increase in usage of emulsifiers such as methylcellulose: http://www.nature.com/news/food-preservatives-linked-to-obes...) are one possible cause of microbiome changes, but far from the only one. For example, obesity-associated intestinal microbiomes have been shown to be contagious under some conditions: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v444/n7122/full/nature0...
Another possible cause, though: antibiotics are well known to cause microbiome changes (although maybe this is still "has something to do with food", since most of the antibiotics you consume during your lifetime are in meat.) And antibiotics are also known to induce weight gain — that's why they get put in the meat in the first place, to induce the meat animals to gain weight faster, reducing the time to slaughter. Maybe they make you gain weight too, and they might do that by means other than changing your gut microbiome. Antibiotic use, both in humans and in livestock, has undergone substantial changes over the past decades, and their possible effects on obesity are not well understood.
Another possible cause: dramatically increased air travel and the ensuing jet lag; circadian rhythm disruption has been shown to induce metabolic dysfunction in a wide variety of animal models. http://www.pnas.org/lens/pnas/111/47/16647
For the same reason: artificial lighting. Artificial lighting color temperature as we switch from incandescent to fluorescent, LED, and computer and TV screens.
Sedentary lifestyles are a possible cause — rates of "exercise" are only going up if you don't count manual labor as "exercise", and rates of manual labor are going way down.
Worldwide testosterone levels are falling for unknown reasons; testosterone is very well known to reduce body fat. http://www.globalresearch.ca./health-and-the-environment-tes...
One possible hypothesis advanced for the dramatic testosterone level drop is exposure to environmental contaminants such as pesticides; the pesticides we use, the amount we use, and the places we use them have changed dramatically over the last few decades. Whether or not this affects our testosterone levels, it could easily affect our bodies in other ways, possibly promoting obesity.
(Other factors that are known to lower testosterone levels include stress and lack of exercise.)
Other environmental contaminants with dramatically changing exposure levels over time and that might reasonably be endocrine disruptors include PCBs, phthalates (as the above article mentions), bisphenol-A, lead, and the halogenated flame retardants used in polyurethane foam, which have been circumstantially implicated in the modern epidemic of feline hyperthyroidism. The lower levels of lead and PCBs in the environment are probably good for us, but sometimes there are surprising interactions.
> the probability that out obesity epidemic isn't 100% due to diet is zero.
You, you are an arrogant, pompous idiot, too ignorant even to begin to imagine the extent of your own ignorance.