Yes, but are they eating dried foods covered in salt out of foil-lined bags as an anxiety reflex, or are they eating at mealtimes when they're hungry? Ultimate

Yes, but are they eating dried foods covered in salt out of foil-lined bags as an anxiety reflex, or are they eating at mealtimes when they're hungry? Ultimately all causes of obesity must be mediated by changes in food consumption behavior or metabolic rate. Very few things alter the metabolic rate; it's relevant to many medical conditions and widely studied. So we're left with foods that affect food consumption patterns. Really, when we talk about foods that cause obesity, we're talking about foods that undermine the normal psychological function of hunger, either by not making you full, making you eat when you're not hungry, or making you continue to eat beyond fullness. Many processed foods are specifically tested, re-tested and optimized to increase these kinds of effects because it generates profits and there's no law against it (yet). There are no traditional diets that can make people fat as effectively as Doritos, for basically the same reason that there are no traditional medicines that treat myelogenous leukemia as well as imatinib.