The moralizing about food and diet is similar to the moralizing about drugs and addiction: "Just lock up all the homeless drug addicts in rehab for 3 months, an

The moralizing about food and diet is similar to the moralizing about drugs and addiction: "Just lock up all the homeless drug addicts in rehab for 3 months, and they'll get clean. Problem solved!" Right, except they'll still be homeless, poor, mentally unstable, or all of the above. Drug use is often the symptom, not the root cause. It's similar with food. For many people, food becomes the primary source of joy in life. And just like with drugs, the joy shrinks, the high gets shorter, and the health side effects soon start outweighing the benefits. But it's still quite hard to go cold turkey, and just like a recovering addict, even years after establishing a healthy diet it becomes really easy to fall off the wagon. We can moralize about how starving children in africa have things much worse, but human happiness is contextual to the reality we know. And life in modern western society has a lot of pitfalls, anxiety, and depression. Obesity is in many ways a side effect of people's lived experience.