The "selfish-lazy-greedy assholes" hypothesis doesn't do so well in the face of endocrinology.
There is a weird Internet cult that celebrates obesity, but I think plenty who live in the "nothing you can do" camp internalized bad advice, got nowhere with it, and gave up.
Giving up is the only option after trying and failing diets and exercise programs your whole life. I started dieting when I was ~6 years old.
Desk jobs used to be uncommon back when most people worked on a farm. It is within my lifetime that this changed. When I was born, more than half of all people had physically hard jobs on farms, iirc.
But if sugar/food addiction is relevant, there should be some data on its effects on non-obese, physically active individuals who maintain a lifestyle that allows them to burn enough calories to offset the caloric effects of sugar consumption. What you linked doesn't mention obesity, yet you're conflating addiction with obesity in your response.
That's a necessary condition, but it doesn't really represent a useful model of the system of interest. It's a bit like saying that a car moves forward because the engine is hotter than the surrounding environment.
> That's a necessary condition
And addiction isn't, it's merely a contributing factor. Like I wrote, how do you factor in non-obese sugar/food addicts, and, vice versa, obese people who don't suffer from food addiction?
Obesity doesn't necessitate food addiction, it could be as simple as neglecting to be physically active or other poor lifestyle choices. Placing unsubstantiated importance on the role of addiction is just as baseless as disregarding all obese people as lazy. Any individual can take measures to improve their lifestyle habits and lose weight - how is this not of "interest"? Because a doctor can't prescribe it in a pill?
The point of my analogy isn't that I was crying out for a slightly better car analogy. My point is this: if there's a problem with someone operating a system, it's usually unhelpful to model the system as a black box that happens to follow some universal physical law. It's not necessarily useless to do that, but it's unlikely to capture the aspects of the system that people directly experience and care about.
> Obesity doesn't necessitate food addiction, it could be as simple as neglecting to be physically active or other poor lifestyle choices.
Nobody in this thread claimed (or even suggested, by my reading) that food addiction was necessary for obesity. The description of "poor lifestyle choices" elides any serious analysis of specifically which behavior patterns are involved and what factors drive them. This is especially true when obesity is increasing across large populations. I don't think it's remotely sufficient to suppose that the behavior of hundreds of millions of people changed in similar ways in the span of ~50 years simply because they all spontaneously made unrelated individual decisions to have different preferences. I doubt that you believe this either, so I don't understand why you've arrived at this description as though it's an alternative to addiction and not just a larger category or higher level of abstraction that includes it.
> Any individual can take measures to improve their lifestyle habits and lose weight - how is this not of "interest"?
Of course such measures would be of interest; my objection to your previous post is, in some sense, that it failed to describe any.