This was an interesting read, but they really took some liberties in building up their case about why traditional explanations are so wrong. For instance, they

This was an interesting read, but they really took some liberties in building up their case about why traditional explanations are so wrong. For instance, they never really refute the very common claim that it's the sugar & high fructose corn syrup in our diets. They attempt to refute it by comparing incredibly rare populations of modern hunter gathers that eat exclusively honey vs ones that don't, and then apparently make the leap that this difference must also apply to non-hunter gatherer societies? That makes zero sense, every single part of our modern lives are unrecognizably different from that of hunter gatherers. They also gloss over the purely thermodynamic aspect. There is a bit of discussion in the CICO section about how your body can do tricks to store more or less of the calories you eat. They they say people exercise more than they used to but are still gaining wait. Ok, but is that added exercise enough to burn off the added calories that they're eating? Clearly not, and it almost seems like a purposeful misdirection to set it up in this way without mentioning that there is a relatively simple basic calorie equation does, in fact, need to balance as a fundamental law of physics. There likely is something to the ideas that either people's base metabolic rates have declined, or something has tampered with our self-control or is impeding our natural impulse to stop eating at the right time. And it's a very interesting topic. But this over-the-top "mystery" angle really weakens the rest of their points.