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