clearly

it's true about the laxative effect! you'd have to use a different oil. and it's true that steatorrhea ensues if you try to get all your calories from fat

but things like halvah, lemonade, buttercream frosting, and white chocolate are still a lot older than the obesity pandemic

None of those would have been common as we know them today. Refined sugar was expensive until ~industrialization. And HFCS simply didn't exist, which is what people are really discussing when they talk about sugar, refined foods, and the obesity epidemic.

industrialization was still 100 years before the obesity pandemic

the hypothesis that hfcs is significantly different in its nutritional effects from sucrose was interesting and has some anecdotal support but is not well supported by evidence so far

'refined foods' have many other nontraditional ingredients introduced around the same time as hfcs, like polyethylene glycol, and we might actually be talking about those instead