As an alternative, there is no one single cause of the obesity epidemic. People are made of confounding factors, and the world is very complicated. The world does not owe you simple explanations.

Two books have helped me understand the obesity epidemic:

Burn by Pontzer - https://www.amazon.com/Burn/dp/0241388422

Podcast about above: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CSNS45RJL0

Hungry Brain by Guyenet - https://www.amazon.com/Hungry-Brain-Outsmarting-Instincts-Ov...

Podcast about above: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AlWriMdYuKk

- The Hungry Brain: https://www.amazon.com/Hungry-Brain-Outsmarting-Instincts-Ov...

- Burn: https://www.amazon.com/Burn-Research-Really-Calories-Healthy...

What presumption! The author doesn't know how useful I find Goodhart's Law!

Seriously though, Goodhart's Law means that the world is more complex in a way that you may not have realized. Saying it is wrong, and that the world is more complex than you may have realized is just expanding it.

Every model is wrong, some models are useful after all.

> "Well, let’s think about the weight control example. Losing weight is a process with two well known inputs: calories in (what you eat), and calories out (what you burn through exercise). This means that the primary difficulty of hitting a weight loss goal is to figure out how your body responds to different types of exercise or different types of foods, and how these new habits might fit into your daily life (this assumes you’re disciplined enough to stick to those habits in the first place, which, well, you know)."

Oh the irony! If you want to lose fat and keep it off, you need to understand and address HUNGER[0]. Just because you understand part of the system, doesn't mean you understand the whole system.

If one part of the process or system is obvious and easy to measure, we will measure it and talk about it. Thus we talk about weight and BMI, not Body Fat Percent and Lean Mass. We talk about calories and measuring food intake and not the body system that drives us to maintain our energy reserves.

Hunger is hard to understand, impossible to measure, and impossible to compare between people at scale. Calories are relatively easy to measure, but they are only INPUTS to the system, not an understanding of the system.

0. Basically every obese person has lost a significant amount of weight at least once in their life. Losing weight is not a mystery. Book recommendations:

guyenet hungry brain https://www.amazon.com/Hungry-Brain-Outsmarting-Instincts-Ov...

pontzer burn https://www.amazon.com/Burn-Research-Really-Calories-Healthy...

You should read "The Hungry Brain" [0]. It's by a neuroscientist, who explains the deep ways that the appetite mechanism is wired into just about every area of our brain, making "willpower" very hard to sustain. As just one example, prisoners placed on a forced starvation diet became obsessed with cooking implements. It also provides strong evidence that physiological mechanisms (not conscious choices) are behind appetite differences and fat mass variations in the population.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Hungry-Brain-Outsmarting-Instincts-Ov...

That's actually not working as intended. There is a part of the brain that is supposed to monitor body fat percentage and suppress hunger and encourage physical activity in order to get body fat to lower again.

This book[0] goes through how the metabolic system works, how it is supposed to self regulate, and how it can miss-regulate. It also talks about what it is about our food since the late 1970's that has changed to cause this to happen more frequently.

[0] https://www.amazon.ca/Hungry-Brain-Outsmarting-Instincts-Ove...

EDIT: I want to add a bit. This book goes through how the metabolic system of humans is supposed to work, and it can get technical at times. It also goes over the specific traits that certain foods have that can be problematic, which gives enough info to make a self-improved diet. It backs up everything it can with specific citations of scientific experiments.

Ditto for the obesity crisis - the solution isn't to make less caloric foods, it's to change the culture of excessive portion sizes and sedentary lifestyles.

Agree that our sedentary lifestyles are a significant contributing factor to obesity, but you have it backwards about portion sizes.

Calorie dense (palatable) foods trigger our the reward centers in our brain more than non-palatable foods, and actually make us more hungry. This is an evolved survival strategy.

If you look at hunter gatherer diets, they will eat huge portions of extremely high calorie foods when they are available (e.g. drinking whole glasses of honey). They don't put on a lot of weight because they are more active, and don't have daily access to high calorie foods.

This means that large portions (and by extension obesity) are caused by the easy availability and low cost of high calorie foods. Telling people to eat less doesn't work because the systems that trigger hunger and fat retention work at a subconscious level and are in general more powerful than the conscious mind. The food environment that we have built up around us is a bad one for human beings.

If you want to learn more about how our hunger and fat regulation systems work then I can highly recommend "The Hungry Brain" by Stephan Guyenet [1].

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Hungry-Brain-Outsmarting-Instincts-Ov...