We already know the key contributor: we eat enormously more sugar now than our parents did, and enormously less saturated fat.

Now that we know, with certainty, what a disastrous choice this was, it will take time to switch back. Most people are still convinced saturated fat is the bugaboo it has been painted as, and that sugar is A-OK, and government policy is still overwhelmingly directed that way.

What can be done with half the US maize crop (of what is left over after 1/3 has been diverted to make into alcohol to add to gasoline, enriching Archer Daniels Midland at taxpayer expense) when it is no longer enzymatically converted to sugar is an open question. Does the world want that much maize?

The main point the blog makes is that there's a huge discontinuity in the 1970s that doesn't seem to be explained by diet. And it occurs in other countries as well, though often with a delay.

My personal guess is that there are multiple causes. Different people are affected differently by the same thing. If we have pervasive exposure to numerous things that have (unproven) theories behind them, it would be hard to identify any given one due to the noise and long duration (epigenetic especially) that might be required to manifest rhetoric end result.

There's so much we've learned over the past century, and yet it feels like know almost nothing when we try to dig into complicated life science topics.