This is blatantly not true in the US, you can observe any number of people anywhere drinking full sugar sodas all day long.
I'd probably lose weight drinking sugar water because it would kill my appetite by inducing nausea.
The same applies to your starch comment. Yeah, it's hard to overconsume plain rice if you eat it with no sauce and no salt. Not because it's better for you, but because it's unpleasant. It'd also be hard to overconsume pure lard if that were all you could eat. It'd get old immediately and you'd eat enough to survive and not much more because it's so unpleasant.
I'll point out that Atkins makes similar claims for a fat-heavy diet. In essence, they claim that if you cut carbs entirely, you can eat as much as you want. In reality, people on Atkins tend to just eat less because the diet gets so monotonous.
[1] I misread initially and thought you said no salt. Sorry about the confusion there.
But anyway, key points on the rice diet:
> patients were hospitalized for several weeks at the beginning of treatment.
This was a diet specifically created for people who were otherwise going to die. It was never promoted as a healthy diet for normal individuals.
> white rice, sugar, fruit, fruit juices, vitamins and iron
So not just rice. Not just rice and fruit juice. But also whole fruit plus vitamins and iron to account for the fact that just eating rice will kill you.
Also, not brown rice at all. You're just pulling in random stuff to try to support your wild claims.
> Kempner described his diet as "a monotonous and tasteless diet which would never become popular.... Kempner's only defense of its use was the fact that “it works,” and that the diet was preferable to the alternative of certain death"
Sounds like a great endorsement of the diet from its creator.
So the comment that started this thread proposing that people consume too much is not true. It is just that people consume too much of wrong stuff. The solution is to limit bad items so normal body feedback loops work, not the amount of food.