I haven’t seen anyone here “support Israel”. Almost everyone agrees that the Israeli State is not free of guilt, far from it.

What people really disagree over is whether that alone makes Palestine right (nuanced) and whether it justifies Hamas’ actions (unhinged but unfortunately semi-common take on here).

But obesity rates in Europe are still steadily climbing, despite food scarcity not being a widespread issue for decades and food quality increasing in the 21st century. Sure we’re behind America, but it’s not getting any better; we’re seeing the same kind of linear increase in obesity cases, on both sides of the former Iron Curtain (and obesity was already growing in many communist countries where access to cars was… elusive at best before the fall of the Wall):

The essay I linked talks about The Australian Paradox where “obesity in Australia nearly tripled between 1980-2003, while sugar consumption dropped 23%”.

It’s not as simple as “our food is better” or “they have more cars”. Yes it’s better (significantly so), and we aren’t as car dependent as Americans (though it’s still very bad here outside of historical city centers), but the correlation with obesity in particular is more elusive to find than you’re implying since things have also been steadily getting worse on this side of the Atlantic.

I would highly recommend reading the article I linked, it goes to great lengths to thoroughly debunk common myths like this about the causes of obesity.

I can’t recommend reading A Chemical Hunger enough. These scientists are right, obesity isn’t a willpower issue, despite common belief to the contrary.

TL;DR: We don’t know why obesity is. Yeah sure you eat to much, you get fatter. But why do some people crave so much excess food? Why does their metabolism try so hard to keep the fat in? Why is the obesity epidemic worsening everywhere in the world, despite measurably improved eating habits over the last ~15 years?

The article goes at length to disprove mainstream myths like “not enough exercise”, “too much shit in our food”, etc. Truth is, we don’t know what’s happening chemically (same issue as the scientists encounter in the NYT article). However, the thesis of A Chemical Hunger is that there are good reasons to think that everyone has a “lipostat” which dictates how much fat we should have. Too skinny, and you will want to eat more and gain weight faster, and vice-versa. Yet for an increasing number of people, the lipostat is breaking.

The open question is, why? Right now, we don’t really know, but we really aren’t studying the biochemical causes of obesity hard enough due to this stupid belief that fat people are fat because they’re “weak minded” or whatever.