The shoving of high-fructose corn syrup and other calorie-rich ingredients into everything sold in the US to increase consumption (again, for profits) has a much greater impact on weight management, though.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/09/19/addiction...
It doesn't have to be some conspiracy to make people addicted to calories. People are (relatively) rich, food is cheap, and eating feels good.
That only happens in a society that is not rich and happy.
If people are actually rich and happy you see them take up expensive sports, golf, tennis, horseback riding. They rarely get fat unless there's something personally wrong with them.
Swedes aren't WASPs, but we are this way. I think Spanish people and Germans are too. I agree that it is as you say in India, but surely both Indian-Americans and Asian-American must become a bit this other way, since they'll probably work with many WASPs, and surely they get affected by media and general societal expectations?
My point is that suggesting that people who eat and gain weight must be unhappy and coping, because happy rich people play sports, is a culturally based assumption. American WASPs and Northern Europeans absolutely stand out in that respect. Even in East Asian cultures with strong social pressure to not gain weight, adults playing sports isn’t common.
I think when people have more of their needs fulfilled, it becomes more rational to tackle the final bits. When you're poor, you care about food and having somewhere to live, then at an intermediate level it's about paying the bills and not falling down into the poverty hole, then at a higher level it's succeeding at university, doing good research, making a successful company, but when you have all that, and you can't lose any of these things, then you start also wanting other things, and then playing sports reasonably often becomes extremely natural.
If someone is getting fat, or eating to excess, there has to be something wrong. Something stressing them, something they want to turn away from, to distract themselves. Happy people don't have such needs.
Do you have any evidence of this conspiracy? Perhaps it's just food producers adding an abundant, cheap sweetener to their crap because that's what the market demands?
Read the ingredients and buy or don't buy. People need to have a bit of personal accountability in these things.
Even the much-higher-end supermarkets near me don't have meaningful alternatives for a lot of products where I am, and I'm in a HCOL area.
If I were FDA dictator for a day, I'd requite a corn logo on anything with corn syrup, and crossed corn for anything with HFCS.
Now calorie inflation can be done with sugar, too - the real deal is to have things that aren't "diabetes inducing sweet".
I read the ingredients on everything (I'm a vegetarian) and I don't buy anything with corn syrup or added sugar that isn't either 1) a once-in-a-while treat or 2) something I'd add a bit of sweetener to if I were to make it myself.
I don't shop anywhere special.
The same thing is true for junk food. People eat it because it tastes good. How much food should be regulated is up for debate but there's something irritating about this reflex to blame every problem on some shadowy cabal of rich people.
But it takes a little time and a bit of care.
If you're stuck in traffic for time measured in hours, you're not baking fresh bread during the week.
Personal accountability can only go so far when you're shown ads for sugary cereals and candy every morning as a kid.
Contrast that with, say, the current marijuana market in my region. It's regulated, it's only available at a relatively high price from licensed dispensaries. There are billboards but not much in the way of TV or radio ads. It's not marketed to kids. If you get addicted to marijuana in the Lower Midwestern US, that's a lack of personal accountability because you can't point to all of the stuff that's used to make junk food popular and say "they got me addicted!".