because butter's caloric density is 7-9 kcal/g, higher than the 'cheap calorie dense food' being blamed for the obesity pandemic, yet the widespread availability of butter (in some societies) starting ten thousand years ago did not cause widespread obesity, even when it wasn't pricey

this shows that the explanation is wrong; cheap calorie-dense food is not enough to cause widespread obesity

probably the loads of low-fat products you're talking about are packed with sugar and modified food starch, though, as well as xanthan gum, guar gum, carob bean gum, dibutylhydroxytoluene, carboxymethylcellulose, aspartame, polyethylene glycol, all kinds of novel food colorings including titanium dioxide nanoparticles, antifungal additives like propionate, and so on. some of these don't occur naturally, and others aren't traditional food ingredients. it wouldn't be very surprising if one or more of those novel additives affected hormone balances, inflammation levels, or intestinal microbiota in a way that promoted overeating and inactivity. some of them are well-known to affect intestinal microbiota

this is the first time i've seen one that provoked an antibody response, though

i think i'm going to go buy a delicious, cold coca-cola now

Have you ever known anyone to say “I think I’m going to go buy (and eat) a delicious, cold stick of butter now.”? And even if you have, they’re clearly the outlier. The point everyone else is making that you are missing is that even if calorie-rich foods were widely available in the past, the presence of calories alone doesn’t drive appetite – the food also needs to be palatable. Modern processed food is both calorie-dense and engineered to be highly palatable. This is new, and unlike what historical humans generally experienced and evolved around.

It is probably the sugar/highly refined carbs: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2022.023...

Then you dump calories on top of those metabolic changes (and appetite stimulation by the carbs) and you pack on the weight.

the point you think everyone else is making that i am missing is actually the point that i have been trying to make

you say

> the presence of calories alone doesn’t drive appetite

while, although you think i'm the one in this conversation that disagrees with you, the comment that i've written all this verbiage to rebut says exactly the opposite

> I think the primary cause of the obesity epidemic is the widespread availability of cheap calorie dense food and a few hundred million years of evolution devoted to making biological machines designed to consume as much calorie dense food as they could find

i agree with you that the obesity pandemic is almost certainly due to modern processed food, which is new, and unlike what historical humans generally experienced and evolved around

your hypothesis is that palatability (of calorie-dense food) is the relevant difference; i think that's a plausible hypothesis. but i'm not sure that modern industrial food is more palatable than the calorie-dense elements of traditional diets (elsethread i mentioned halvah, but we could also mention longaniza, pizza, ham, bacon, cheese, funnel cakes, pepperoni, buttered pancakes with syrup, onigiri with katsuobushi and so on), and even if it is a difference, that doesn't prove that it's the relevant difference

there are a lot of other differences, and i think we should investigate them, because your hypothesis is far from the only plausible hypothesis