We're all depressed and overworked and have been for decades. Food is an escape
I have always and continue to feel this view of “food is an escape for cuz” model is wrong in line with the the “it’s about lack of will power” we are seeing with all these glp-1 drugs that are helping people that a big proportion of our population have what amounts to a hunger/craving defect and are just living how we all naturally do when listening to our body, but because something has messed up their balance they end up overweight instead of just maintaining their weight.
I’m hoping we at some point have a “lead in gas” moment and discover some culprit in softening agents in plastics or preservatives in foods that we find out is messing up peoples systems. I could imagine that there is something that has a minute effect on the short term and doesn’t show up if you only look at people for 1-2 years but causes significant disruption on the timescale of 5-10 years of exposure.
The obesity epidemic seems to have started in the 1960-1970, so the sedentary lifestyle of computer focused work came later, but it is still recent enough that culprits in the mass produced uniform product market could be a cause, or the advent of one type of fertilizer or antibiotic given to animals etc.
Add forced sedentarism into that set.
This is not exclusive to the US. The world is trending towards those, and different countries seem to only be at different distances from it, but the same velocity.
Also, industrialized food seems to be much more effective in causing dependency. Food preparation has overwhelmingly shifted into less healthy alternatives (even when they sound healthier in a naive review)... And there's a multitude of low probability high impact possible contributors that nobody knows if are important or not.