I don't know why this is a debate, both sides are right. There are lazy people who dug themselves into a hole. And the food supply has become poisonous/addictive. If you don't think food can be addictive you've never seen a dope fiend at dunkin donuts use 20 packets of sugar in their coffee. The sugar high holds them until they can get their drugs. Both drugs and sugar(fats too) activate the brains reward system and that's how people become addicted.
Just look up the science behind doritos they were designed to make you addicted.
It's more fundamental, and at least initially, unintentional than that.
We know that when people are subject to strong enough hunger, they'll eat other humans if that's all that's available, That's how powerfully that drive is capable of influencing human behavior. "Willpower" only works if appetite isn't severe.
Somehow it's easier to accept the inability to eat due to lack of appetite, an equally powerful mechanism the body can employ to stop calorie intake. Psychologically food becomes less appealing, and physically you'll throw up if you're feeling "full" but eat anyway, even if you *need* to eat, like a bodybuilder trying to bulk, or someone who's severely ill.
The leading theory, with growing evidence is this:
We evolved in an environment of intermittent food availability.
Fruit would become ripe all at once. Fructose, a liquid sugar abundant in ripe fruit seems to suspend normal energy intake limitations, the reason appears to be that this would keep appetite high allowing us to consume lots of excess calories during the short period they were available. When the fructose intake stopped, appetite would return to normal. A very effective survival mechanism.
Then, sometime around the 1960s, liquid sugars, like corn syrup started being used in a large proportion of the US food supply. Breads, cereals, beverages. So for the first time, humans began to be exposed to liquid sugars continuously. Being exposed to this in childhood probably breaks normal appetite regulation, causing dysfunction of the system that make's us feel satiated and "full".
About a decade later, as the first generation of children exposed to this reached adulthood, we see obesity (and diabetes) rates start to quickly rise.
It's been accelerating in the US ever since.
Even more damning is the fact that as liquid sugars have appeared in other region's food
supplies, exactly the same phenomenon has developed. South and Central America. Europe, even Asian countries like Japan and China are seeing this phenomenon with rising obesity and diabetes. All timed about a decade after the widespread introduction and foods containing liquid sugars.
So yeah, I can understand why those whose appetite likely functions properly, making it fairly easy to resist food would prefer to think everyone experiences appetite the same way they do, and they're simply superior, when it's more likely that don't really have to exert very much "willpower" at all.
There are plenty of skinny losers who don't seem to have the "willpower" to accomplish anything else in life, but they do when it comes to food? Or is it just more likely they don't have a strong appetite?
