I don't know how life was in the Western countries while growing up in Romania. Being born in 1982, in the eighties as kids we received sweets only on holidays

I don't know how life was in the Western countries while growing up in Romania. Being born in 1982, in the eighties as kids we received sweets only on holidays. I remember chinese chocolate (which was really good btw), a locally made soda and oranges and bananas. Even now when it smells like oranges, I feel like it smells like Christmas, because that's when we were getting oranges. Then in the nineties, after the revolution, we got an explosion in the junk food consumed. People importing Coca Cola from Turkey made a fortune. The result is that at this point we are in the top countries in Europe when it comes to heart disease and diabetes. It's easy to see what happened if you follow the trends: 1. sugar (sucrose, HCFS) consumption going up 2. snaking ... when we were little, we were only eating 3 meals per day at most 3. stress Also if you believe the hyperinsulinemia theory of obesity, well, there are indications that mothers that developed insulin resistance will pass that resistance to the child. Which is one explanation, besides genes, for why children born of overweight parents also have a tendency to get fat. And yes, we eat too much. Unfortunately thin people have always blamed fat people of gluttony, not thinking that the hunger and satiety signals might be broken in some people, for various reasons, including insulin resistance, or maybe because the junk we eat doesn't contain the nutrients the body needs.