> That's why they could stop being fat, if only they chose to.

This seems like one of those "replication crisis" claims.

> That's why they could stop being fat, if only they chose to.

So they're pre-ordained not to?

I have a loved one who certainly chooses to, to the point of having had bariatric surgery; GLPs have been an important follow-up. It's really not as simple as you make it out to be.

> You don't go from 12% obesity to 40% obesity in 40 years due to a genetic shift, but rather a cultural one.

What if that cultural one is letting the processed foods industry engineer everything to be deeply addicting?

> So they're pre-ordained not to?

No. I'm saying it's within their power, so they aren't pre-ordained either way. You were suggesting that it's impossible for a large percentage of the population to not be obese without medical intervention, that it was comparable to excessive acid production which is a genetic anomaly and out of an individual's own control.

> What if that cultural one is letting the processed foods industry engineer everything to be deeply addicting?

Sure, the industry bears some blame and is part of the cultural issue, but even if presented with addicting substances, it is both an individual choice to consume them and a collective cultural choice not to regulate them.

Yeah, you see, this is the same thinking that leads you to say "People who are depressed should just think happier thoughts."

What evidence do you have that it is a cultural shift, rather than, say, a chemical in the environment that wasn't there before, or a difference in the food supply?

Are food options today not more calorie-dense than they were back in time? More easily accessible? Calories have become increasingly cheap and dense to come by. You've lots of processed food being engineered to be highly palatable and calorie dense at an industrial scale.

Plus, cars and all "comforts" eating into your physical activities?

All of those may be correlated to the rise in obesity. I see no evidence that any of them is causal. I don't even think all of them are correlated, honestly. The rise in the number of calories available certainly is, but cars and suburbs have been around longer than that. And the rise in calories may just be a response to increased demand.

America is more obese than many nations but obesity is increasing the world over.

The timing is just about right to blame it on Reagan, either the theory that neoliberalism leads to "structured stress" or than some environmental chemical got approved in that time frame.

The real shift happened in what BigFood started putting into their highly processed food, imho.

Or some other sort of environmental change. Maybe it's hormone related due to the amount of plastic we use? Or possibly birth control drugs contaminating the water supply? Maybe it's due to lithium levels in the water supply? You don't know, and neither do I.