Thanks for acknowledging that. It's not something you commonly see in forums. I have a hard time swallowing the idea that obesity and diet are related to acces

Thanks for acknowledging that. It's not something you commonly see in forums. I have a hard time swallowing the idea that obesity and diet are related to access to medical care. Our great great grandparents undoubtedly had far less access to healthcare than even the average lower class, modern American, and yet obesity was almost non-existent for their generation. Occam's razor would say that an epidemic of diet related illness is caused by a societal shift in diet. The simplistic boiling down of the complex answer from nutrition experts is that the massive increase in processed foods in the American diet, post WWII, along with the insane increase in sugar consumption, have led to the obesity and diabetes epidemics (and increasingly believed to be one of the main causes of cancer). IMHO we could do exponentially more for the life expectancy of poor Americans by solving the problem of food deserts than by upending the entire medical system, that is functional for the majority, for a wholly bureaucratically controlled system - which, by the way, will eventually have to include decisions on which people do not get access to treatment.