The cause of the obesity crisis

With Trump's attempt to appoint RFK to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, a lot of people are talking about how our foods and medicines are poisining us.

These days, the main food boogeyman seems to be seed oils. Yet if you try to figure out why people are so worked up, you'll find it's basically nonsense. Seed oils seem not particularly different than other oils, and there doesn't seem to be much reason to think they affect the human body differently. It reminds me of like 10-20 years ago when people were similarly worked up about corn syrup. Similarly, if you look into corn syrup, you'll find that it seems not particularly different than other sugars, and there doesn't seem to be much reason to think they affect the human body differently.

Now I love a good conspiracy, and I even believe in some myself, but nearly everything related to obesity seems to be conspiratorial thinking and motivated reasoning. People don't want to accept the most likely truth. And yet, Occam's Razor provides it for us:

People are eating more food, mostly because food is really cheap and delicious these days.

People are eating more food

USDA data says that caloric intake for the average American increased 23% between 1970 and 2010.

That's a lot.

Food is really cheap

USDA data also says that food expenditures (as a fraction of disposable personal income) decreased from 24% in 1929 to 9.6% in 2008.

That's a lot.

Food tastes better

This one is harder to quantify, but also it's kind of obvious.

We have more and better ingredients, year round. It's November in NJ and I just bought a whole pineapple for $2. What a world! And yes, it was delicious.

We have better cooking techniques and recipes, and more people know about them thanks to the Internet.

We have various processed foods available, which are designed by huge corporations employing entire teams of scientists working around the clock to make them as tasty as possible.

And also people eat out more than they used to, where they can have professionally prepared food that is designed to be as delicious as possible.

Overall...

Those 3 points above are all HUGE changes, that are obviously going to impact what people eat, how much they eat, and how fat they get.

On the plus side, this provides two easy fixes to the obesity crisis: either raise the price of food, or make it taste worse. Then people will simply choose to eat less.

Yet still people want to say "oh no, it's this one magic ingredient, look at this tiny observational study with a p-value of 0.04" -- give me a break.

If RFK somehow manages to ban seed oils and corn syrup, I guarantee you that we're still going to be really fat. That is, unless Ozempic saves us. And that may be the darkest timeline. Ozempic ends the obesity crisis at the same time RFK makes some trivial policy changes, and he goes down in history as a hero.

But seriously, I expect that Ozempic and similar drugs are going to have a modest effect at best. The obesity rate may decline somewhat, but it's still going to be a lot higher than when I was a kid in the 90s, which was already quite high historically.