The epidemic itself is pretty strong evidence. Gastric bypass and these new drugs are basically the only proven effective ways of reliably helping people lose.

I mean, most of those people could just exercise or change their diets instead of relying on expensive drugs with unknown long term side effects

Except they can’t. We know this. Telling obese people “just change your diet and exercise” has roughly the success rate as hiring a witch to cast a spell.

There are cultures in which obesity is rare and yet they achieve it without drugs and surgery. That itself is pretty strong evidence that the claim that they're the only things that could possibly help is wrong. I'm glad those are options, because they certainly do help people, but if you take that and run with "welp, more pharma is the only way!" then you're not thinking very hard.

Well gee, if all we have to do is change our entire culture, that sounds easy!

I mean, I didn't say it was. Most things worth doing aren't easy. Listen, all I'm saying is we should strive for something better than to be content with producing lots of obese people and then "fix" them with drugs. Pharma would love that, I'm sure, but it's a tactical fix that needs a strategic solution.