75+ years of highly designed, increasingly addictive foods + significant work on cost reduction + lack of peer pressure = more obesity
It would be interesting to see the inflation-corrected per-ounce price of Coca Cola over the last 120 years. Usage appears to be dropping so perhaps there's some hope.
back in the 90's there was no mainstream HAES movement, or concern about "fat shaming" or any of the other Twitter nonsense
I'd also want to add the lack of physical activity as people move to doing God's Work by sitting still and tapping on a keyboard with occasional visits to the gym, but I haven't found a decent study showing that over time.
If you found a 50% increase in lung cancer next to major highways, would your solution be to use peer pressure to encourage everyone to take shallower breaths and then berate people for not succumbing to peer pressure? Of course not because it's obvious to us that the cause is environmental and the correct approach is regulation to reduce the cause of the disease.
Treating obesity as a public health problem rather than a willpower problem is a) obviously a more sane approach and b) contrary to business interests.