My 2c is that one should simply look at the diet of lifestyle of the fat people they know, and the obesity problem will become clear.
Tons of soda. Products like Hamburger Helper instead of actually making pasta and sausage yourself. Extremely high volume of food in general. Constant, constant snacking. No exercise. So a massive amount of low quality food and nothing to burn it. Cancer, heart disease, joint pain, diabetes, heartburn, everything else.
Occasionally you run into some outré example like a family I know who eats exclusively home-cooked meals with grass-fed beef and venison yet are all overweight, but I've had lunch with them and that was some of the richest, tastiest food in my life plus all the trimmings. Also, they don't really care about exercising, or for that matter their weight.
I don't think this is complicated. Weight gain is simply calories in and calories out. The only contentious part is the psychological compulsions that cause people to eat amounts of food that they know are bad for them, sometimes while maintaining a sedentary lifestyle, which they also know is bad for them.
it is a contradiction. Why shame American women for being fat if its not their fault? What did they do wrong if the problem isn't "eating too much"?
Like I said above, the problem is really the psychology that causes people to eat too much. Also you keep talking about portion sizes, but if you eat very frequent small portions of snacks you will also be fat.
To sum it up, American food is highly addictive, nutritionally inferior, and on top of that high in processed carbs that are even more effective at getting people fat. Americans are also atomized and deracinated, meaning they have weaker family ties, a weaker sense of culture, have lost a lot of food traditions, and are therefore reliant on buying garbage. The average American consumer doesn't even know how terrible his diet is.
So you are correct that eating less would make the country healthier, but the problem is changing the pressures and circumstances that cause people to eat more (and lower quality) food.
Sooooo they eat to much.
What the fuck are you even saying.
"the problem is really the psychology that causes people to eat too much."
You can come up with a lot of different reasons for why it happens, but it still boils down to "people should stop eating so much ."
That's like saying bleeding isn't dangerous because knives are too sharp.
that's why you shouldn't be snacking on things either. I saw a reddit post one time of an Asian woman who married an American and the guy could not lose weight no matter the many different programs he tried. Yet he refused to eat like his wife(his wife ate no snacks and if she did happened to eat snacks she would skip the main meal) His wife stayed skinny while the husband was fat because he ate the main meals and ate the snacks.