Much like the smoking kills campaign it wouldn't be terribly difficult to have a similar campaign for sugar, fake foods, etc. You don't have to eat like a rabbit to stay a healthy weight, but certainly you shouldn't be eating microwave dinners and candy. The problem is sugar itself is analogous to a drug. Moreover, the food lobby is infinitely more powerful than phillip morris could even be in their wildest dreams. We are being poisoned by policy. Unfortunately the solution will remain personal responsibility until our policy makers stop allowing companies to poison us for profit.
The triviality of the solution is that to lose weight you simply eat less. Thermodynamics is all you need for that. 80% of the battle is won and lost here.
The complication is food is designed in laboratories to be addictive as possible. Even vegetables are harvested in such a way they contain extra chemicals and far fewer nutrients. The result is your monkey brain is drawn to Big Gulps and candy because they give you a dopamine release, whereas a steak and vegetables does not. Pair this with food that is deliberately designed to be less satiating and more addicting and you have the recipe for an obesity epidemic.
I think we're mostly agreeing. I do think that calorie for calorie not all foods are equal, and simply eating less is not quite the right thing to focus on. Eating 100 cals of sugar will do different things to your body that 100 cals of protein. Sugar signals the body to store fat. It also makes people crave more food. It is difficult to avoid added sugar these days. I do think people would naturally eat less if there were less sugars in food.
The triviality of the solution is that to lose weight you simply eat less. Thermodynamics is all you need for that. 80% of the battle is won and lost here.
The complication is food is designed in laboratories to be addictive as possible. Even vegetables are harvested in such a way they contain extra chemicals and far fewer nutrients. The result is your monkey brain is drawn to Big Gulps and candy because they give you a dopamine release, whereas a steak and vegetables does not. Pair this with food that is deliberately designed to be less satiating and more addicting and you have the recipe for an obesity epidemic.