I have seen several documentaries that argue that it is not the people’s fault if they are obese, but the fault of the food industry. The industry produces highly processed food full of empty calories, so it is their fault if the population is obese. I think there is a deliberate confusion between cause and effect here. At best you could argue it is a vicious cycle: Maybe people buy more junk food because of higher availability, but the industry is producing that junk food because that is what people are buying. It isn’t as if you couldn’t find any healthy food in your supermarket anymore. While some highly processed food is cheaper than fresh fruit and vegetables, that argument doesn’t hold for example for sugary drinks, which are a lot more expensive than drinking water.

Yes, capitalism works a lot with temptation. Billions are spent on advertising to tempt people into unnecessary consumption. But I do not believe that the existence of temptation absolves people from giving in to that temptation. The success of the fight against smoking shows that we can do some things to restrict advertising and reduce the temptation. But in the end we all live in a world in which we always will be tempted to do a lot of things that are bad for us: Drugs, alcohol, cigarettes, junk food, the list goes on and on. If we are not all alcoholics and heroin addicts, it is because at some point in our lives we learned that sometimes it is better to resist temptation. That requires a certain strength of character. It is unfortunate that strength of character has fallen out of fashion in favor of unlimited permissiveness. Yes, there are always a few anecdotal cases of people being overweight due to a specific disease they aren’t responsible for; but you can’t extrapolate from that to over a third of the population. Even when obesity numbers were a lot lower, only a fraction of these people were overweight for medical reasons. Most simply were tempted by a lot of tasty food, and ate too much.

Weight loss drugs like Ozempic or Wegovy basically work by removing the temptation. They send signals to the brain that you are full and really don’t want another piece of cake anymore. As a result of widespread use of the drugs, there has been a visible hit to the earnings of some food companies, with some CEOs having to address the issue to their investors in their latest earning calls. If that looks like a win for the people against the evil food industry to you, look again. The US health care system is seriously messed up, and prices for these weight loss drugs are significantly higher than in Europe. But even in Europe the cost of taking the drugs is higher than the savings from reduced food consumption. And we don’t know the long-term effects of taking these drugs for decades yet. You don’t have to live an extremely ascetic lifestyle, just some common sense around food usage and a bit of movement for most people is enough to stabilize their weight below obesity-level. That seems to me a much better solution than first spending too much on junk food, and then spending even more on the drug that stops you from craving that junk food.