alt Hacker NewsWhat is your point? I mentioned drug availability in the 1950s and you dismissed it with an arbitrary list of other time periods. Someone else mentioned food scarcity in a period you mentioned, and you shifted the discussion to the 1990s (and now the past 300,000 years ???).
It seems like you do not want to discuss any factors relating to obesity in history at all, yet you keep engaging in this topic anyway. It is impossible to have a conversation where one side discusses facts like drug availability or food scarcity and the other says “no think about something else” as a canned response.
What do you think is the cause of the increased level of obesity? What do you think is the solution, if any?
My point is that people's health has been rapidly deteriorating over the last 30-50 years especially. Your attempted explanation is essentially, "in every prior period, there was a different period-specific thing that was preventing these health outcomes."
It seems far, far more likely to me that right now is the aberration – in fact we know today is aberrant on several dimensions that are presumably related to obesity, so that's where we should look.
Big, system-wide changes like what we're experiencing are almost always both multicausal and overdetermined.
The causes here are:
1. Production of cheap, extremely palatable, ultra-high caloric density foods (mitigable). Note: This is not the same thing as saying "people used to be thin because they were starving." It is absolutely possible to feed a country amply and not yield the low price/great taste/horrible nutrition profile that dominates the American diet today.
2. Increase in sedentary time due to shift from physically intensive professions (not very solvable), car-centric urban planning (solvable), and the dominance of ass-in-chair leisure activities (probably mitigable)
3. The science is early on this but there's good reason to look further into endocrine-disruptive chemical poisoning (mitigable). We are finding these compounds absolutely everywhere we look and we should be very open to the possibility we are mass-poisoning people and damaging their metabolism: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10003192/