I’m not sure how you’d even change modern life to get around this, save maybe for incredibly large sin taxes on everything from soda to every restaurant. I’m sure we’ll just end up with a pill sometime soon. Semaglutide comes close.
50% of participants on 10 and 15mg doses lost 20% of initial body weight!
Until we can mass manufacture that, can we all start taking metformin?
However it's fairly new and fairly unknown yet. I suspect it will become a lot more popular over the next few years.
Interestingly, like Metformin, it's also a diabetes drug.
I wonder if metformin does the same thing, but the patent fell off too soon, so there just wasn't much marketing for its benefits to decision-makers.
metformin for 26 weeks lead to a net 6.6kg weight loss in non-diabetic obese patients (I would've preferred BMI reduction as the outcome measure, and a placebo-control arm, but can't have it all):
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23147210/
Semaglutide yielded net 12kg weight loss in 68 weeks
https://www.cfp.ca/content/67/11/842
Obviously it's diminishing returns over time, but shows how much a drug that's been on the market for decades has still been under-utilized.
That means the issue is systemic and one needs to look at things outside of individual control. Yes, often systemic issue can be overcome by individuals - by the top quartile kind of individuals with more luck, better genes, better education (including what they picked up at home while growing up), more money, more suitable lives than the majority, or with outliers in levels of personal discipline. But systems should work for the people that actually live, if you need to blame two thirds of the population(!) it's most likely your system that is wrong.
Yes you can look at most of the individuals that are part of those two thirds and find what seems to be personal choices - but you miss the environment and the pressures from it that lead people into making those choices.
For example, that a lot fewer people know how to cook today than several decades ago (example link: https://www.bonappetit.com/entertaining-style/trends-news/ar...), do yo want to blame each individual? To me this very much looks like a bigger societal issue. It's not like people make such choices after careful consideration, it "just happens" and they "slip" into those behaviors without much deliberation, based on their living situations.