Food addiction is for sure one reason for obesity, but the last few decades or so of research has really challenged the “you’re fat because of personal accountability” assertion.
The single best read out there on the topic, for the layman like myself, is probably this series of articles: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-p.... It does a really good job of laying out all the contradictory information out there in a normal-human readable format while referencing studies to keep it real.
You're completely missing my point. It is not down to personal accountability. It is due to certain sectors of our society leveraging the strong addictive potential of food.
Imagine confronting a recovering alcoholic with a glass of beer. Not just offering it but tempting him, wafting it in front of his nose, holding it up to the light to show the bubbles. And then saying "well it's your fault for drinking it" when he can't resist any longer.
We're all susceptible to addiction. Some more than others, of course. When it comes to food we're all descended from animals that evolved with food scarcity. We didn't evolve with refined sugars. What we're seeing in obesity figures is simply the susceptibility of people and ability to cope with their addictions. More than a quarter of all people are obese in France, a country once thought to be the prime example of healthy eating. And, guess what? McDonalds is very popular in France. Maybe it wasn't their genetics, maybe it was just the lack of McDonalds?
I’m not missing your point, I’m saying that addiction/over-consumption is not the primary reason for the obesity epidemic, and I gave you a series of articles going into a very deep dive on the topic.
Can you give a TLDR of the thesis, because on its face that just doesn't make any sense at all when obesity only exists in countries where calories are plentiful and cheap.
History doesn’t support the idea that we’re simply eating more calories today. Going as far back as the American civil war we have records of what people were eating and what their general BMI was, and there is no causal link demonstrating that we are eating more today than we were then.
To the contrary, there is evidence that we were eating more calories in the past than we are today, and that general levels of exercise are actually greater today than they were in the past as an average across the populace.
Honestly, read the articles. There is a ton of information in there challenging what we “know” that no summary will do justice.
Here’s an excerpt:
> A popular theory of obesity is that it’s simply a question of calories in versus calories out (CICO). You eat a certain number of calories every day, and you expend some number of calories based on your metabolic needs and physical activity. If you eat more calories than you expend, you store the excess as fat and gain weight, and if you expend more than you eat, you burn fat and lose weight.
> This perspective assumes that the body stores every extra calorie you eat as body fat, and that it doesn’t have any tools for using more or less energy as the need arises. But this isn’t the case. Your body has the ability to regulate things like its temperature, and it has similar tools to regulate body fatness. When we look closely, it turns out that “calories in, calories out” doesn’t match the actual facts of consumption and weight gain.
> “This model seems to exist mostly to make lean people feel smug,” writes Stephen Guyenet, “since it attributes their leanness entirely to wise voluntary decisions and a strong character. I think at this point, few people in the research world believe the CICO model.”
The single best read out there on the topic, for the layman like myself, is probably this series of articles: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/07/07/a-chemical-hunger-p.... It does a really good job of laying out all the contradictory information out there in a normal-human readable format while referencing studies to keep it real.