>But I don't think Americans are uniquely self-indulgent compared to every other first world country You haven't spent a lot of time in other 'first-world' cou

>But I don't think Americans are uniquely self-indulgent compared to every other first world country You haven't spent a lot of time in other 'first-world' countries. A lot of what passes for food here in America would be regarded with outright horror in most of Europe. Their food regulatory agencies simply have a much stricter standard for what can be placed on shelves. Here in America it seems like it takes just a couple dubious studies often funded by the food manufacturers to get something labelled food grade. Pick up say a chicken pot pie next time you go to the grocery store and take a look at the ingredients list and if next you have the opportunity to go to somewhere in Europe do the same. Another big difference is that the (vast) majority of Americans must have food be sweet otherwise it is unpalatable. This is why virtually everything has sugar in it. Many Europeans I know are simply shocked at how hard it is to find bread, of all things that doesn't have sugar in it. If you compare the menu from the same fast food brands like say KFC in say Tokyo and NewYork, the Tokyo version is going to be less salty, less sweet and will have fewer artificial ingredients because the average Japanese eater doesn't put sweetness above everything else and probably has a different idea of 'tastiness' As for your claim that obesity is more of a lower class thing, I'm not sure what America you're living in. Obesity in the US knows no class, even if the rates are slightly higher for the working class it is still a problem across all social classes. And I'm not sure what that has to do with the point that people who sell crap or do crappy things are not judged by what they sell but how much they make, which is a bug or feature of capitalism in general but especially American capitalism.