Hard to exercise or cook when you're overworked and underpaid, and there are whole swathes of the country where there are no grocery stores stocking fresh produce bc it is unprofitable. The obesity epidemic is just another symptom of capitalism.

It’s a problem, but you can’t blame people for it, because people are products of their influences and material conditions. There’s too much sugar in everything. Low quality carbs and burgers and stuff are absurdly cheap due to subsidies from the government. There’s a culture of seeing sweets as “treats” when in reality in such abundance and unnatural form they do more harm than good. People are way too sedentary. Most of the us are forced to sit and be still at school or jobs most of the day. Exercise is seen as being hard and something you have to go out of your way to do. The use of cars over walking/biking. I could go on.

What are the solutions? Shame and stigma certainly do not work. BMI is total bs that we only use because some insurance company found an obscure metric that works relatively well for predicting when people will die. People have different body types, and some will eat very poorly and be super skinny or obese. Staring at a scale does no good, and we know eating disorders are terrible. So what do we do? Strive to exercise a good amount and eat less simple carbs and processed food. Eventually try to encourage that on a societal level with socialism.

A system that destroys community, and treats sports as an extremely competitive thing, where you don't play "for fun" but to win, so if you're not very good (because you're unfit/overweight) you'll probably not want to play and "let the team down." So people are just less active. People rarely do physical activities with their friends.

Combined with a system that tries to make the least healthy food as addicting as possible to maximise profit and cuts people's free time down as much as possible, leaving them with no energy to cook or energy to exercise. So they eat processed, addictive slop that makes them feel awful, so they don't have the energy to better their diet or exercise more.

Also include a system that does everything in its power to tell overweight people they are ugly and bad, chipping away at their self-esteem, telling them that they need to be thin to deserve happiness, then sell them weight loss as a solution. Of course, most weight loss products and programs rarely focus on long term lifestyle change, and it's usually difficult due to the issues above anyway. Weight loss has more and more become a "wealthy" or at least "upper middle class" sort of thing, where you need nutritionists and personal trainers to lose weight and keep it off. It's being increasingly gated off from people.

And of course, make sure that the same system encourages hating fat people, and encourages people to hurl insults at them if they ever do try to exercise.''

TLDR: Capitalism.

Main reason behind systemic obesity is that societies don't care about public health. It goes from big corporations being allowed to flood the market with cheap, overprocessed, addictive food, to the lack of opportunities and spaces for people to exercise.

The salient problem is that the phrase "obesity epidemic" correctly recognizes that there is a large public health issue related to nutrition, exercise, and a host of other causes, but is then always paired with moralizing, individualistic blame and "solutions". A public health problem is inherently a systemic one arising from underlying material causes and not just, "oh people all just decided to eat worse and move less (etc)". Without identifying the underlying material causes you will fail to help address the problem, or at least do so effectively and on purpose.

Sometimes public health people do try to find proximal systemic causes, but they shy away from political economic critiques because they're not even aware that they exist and even when they do they would likely be dismissed out of hand as speculation or being outside their domain. For example, researchers look at processed food components and diet trends to try and explain larger health trends. Or they look at average number of minutes of exercise per day. These are proximal and somewhat obvious causes, little more than contextualizing the main idea of there being a public health crisis related to obesity (sidenote: obesity is poorly defined re: being a medical issue in itself so I'm qualifying it).

Imagine if they actually tried to get at root causes. Why is the food people in the US more full of things that are bad for you? Why do Americans buy more food that is bad for them? What is available and what does it cost? Who knows how to cook? Who has time to cook? Who has energy? How many hours are people working? What is their work life like and does this relate to what they eat? Why are these situations like this? Who controls the workplace? Hours worked? Take-home pay? Food prices? Commute times? The availability of grocery stores? Food science to make foods as habit-forming as possible?

Many of the things I just listed do get mentioned by public health nerds but they tend to fall short of recognizing the dominant role of the capitalist system in why the US is like it is. Why workers have so little free time, are so poorly paid relative to expenses, are so exhausted, are so stressed, why they have to travel such distances just to engage in basic activities like buying food. As a result they only ever reach non-systemic solutions and instead pick at the edges trying to find room for piecemeal reforms that are profit-friendly. They stoke entire food fads and marketing gimmicks rather than say, "workers need more say over their conditions" and "people need power over the state, not the owners of business".