I basically disagree with the premise of this thread completely and it shows to my mind an ignorance of how people get and stay obese. I’ve talked about it before on nutrition/weight loss threads here (many years ago now), about how I was in good shape for much of my adult life until I retired from a military career and became much more sedentary + increased my intake of various unhealthy foods. Before I realized what I had happened I was about 60-70lbs past the point at which I would be considered obese (meaning that if I lost 70 lbs I’d “only” be considered overweight.)
I was able to lose that weight and have kept it off ever since, and especially the keeping it off part stands as frankly one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life. The personal anecdote aside, to really understand obesity I think it helps to think of a different hypothetical.
Let’s assume that by some weird quirk of human biology, it was found that males having orgasms suffer long term deleterious effects. Let’s say it was found that the male orgasm caused the release or generation of some biochemicals that, over a long span of time, dramatically increases the chances of developing fatal ailments that affect longevity. Since the effects of this are cumulative and take decades past the age of sexual maturity to develop, it’s something natural selection has not selected against–because the negative impacts are past the point at which natural selection “works” since it doesn’t really affect ability to procreate.
Let’s say that the rough estimate is if you had total abstinence from orgasm, your expected life span as a male would be 15-20 years longer. This means no intercourse, no masturbation, nothing.
What percentage of the adult male population would you anticipate follows a regime in which they have no orgasms for the rest of their life? What do you think the societal reaction would be to the males who failed to abstain, and thus suffered the ill consequences?
My guess is that very, very few men would follow strict abstinence to extend their lifespan. And that society at large would discuss it as “basically impossible to obtain, because the male sex drive is something essentially hardcoded into our biology, and while a man might be able to suppress it at times, it’s virtually impossible to resist this essential biological imperative that our bodies have.”
Obesity works on exactly the same sort of thing. Our bodies get fat largely because this is the way our bodies work. Powerful emotional and behavior altering biochemical processes make us want to get food in our bodies and does not make us particularly care overly about the consequences. Because we have complex brains and intelligence, we unlike most animals realize that our biology governed behaviors can sometimes cause serious negative consequences, so we recognize that being too fat is bad medically. But recognizing it and doing anything about it are very different things.
If I overfed my dog every day he would get very fat. I would not have to force feed him. He would just eat more as I served him more. If I took him to the vet, who would be blamed for him being fat? Me or the dog? I would be blamed because it’ widely recognized that dogs have evolved to get their fill of food ASAP and as a species that spent a lot of its formative years scavenging carcasses and such, it evolved to expect periods of plenty and periods of hunger, so it has no real biological hardwiring that tells it to shut off the feedbag when it starts to get dangerously obese. This is literally very similar to how our bodies work, we just like to believe we are so much better than the other mammals that we can easily override biological instincts and behaviors with intellect.
As someone who has actually done this I’m telling you it is among the hardest things I’ve ever done. Not to toot my own horn, but I’ve done hard stuff in my life. I had a long and fairly successful career as a military officer, achieving competitive promotions and had I had hard jobs. I did competitive powerlifting in my late 30s to late 40s, while never setting world records I regularly placed in meets with guys who could. I went into business for myself later in life and have built it into a profitable venture. I’m proud of the life I’ve lead and I’ve accomplished things that were not easy. But 100%, losing a significant amount of weight and keeping it off stands as one of, if not the most, difficult things I’ve ever done.
To be frank the abilities of an MD to affect this are all but non-existent, obesity is the result of very strong and extremely hard to alter biological imperatives that affect most humans (research I’ve read suggests a small subset of humans essentially don’t overeat when given highly palatable foods, which I believe is just a quirk in the human genes and unfortunately for most of us we don’t have those genes); simply telling someone facing a serious biological imperative “stop doing this” is basically nothing. Should MDs advise their patients on the dangers of being obese? Yes. Should they counsel them on things they could do to improve their health outcomes? Yes. But that advice alone should be expected to work about as well as advice to a 21 year old man to “abstain from all sex including masturbation” for health reasons.
While I have talked about it extensively before, all the research I’ve read suggests that when highly palatable (which is what heavily processed “Junk foods” are) foods are basically made freely available, the vast, vast majority of humans will eat to excess. And then to varying degrees some will get a little overweight and some will get morbidly obese. What we’ve also seen with global obesity rates is the more common highly palatable foods are in a society, the more widely they are made available, the higher the obesity rates rise. While the U.S. basically “lead the field” in this measure, we’ve seen time and time again obesity rates going up in countries that used to be significantly behind the United States in this measure. This process all but always follows the introduction of a more robust consumer market, highly engineered highly palatable foods becoming popular, and a cyclical effect where one generation after the other eats more and more of this stuff. We have seen obesity rates rising in countries we long believed had some magical immunity to it (for example in many burgeoning Asian countries.) China is a wonderful example of this by the way. In rural China and the poorest parts of China, obesity is around 6%. In some Chinese cities obesity has risen to over 20% and is considered a major challenge for Chinese society. The cities where we see these higher obesity rates there’s almost a perfect move towards more obesity that coincides with the greater availability of highly palatable foods in stores, the establishment of fast food restaurants and etc.
I don’t have a magic answer for this on a societal level but I can tell you for me personally the only way to break this cycle for a very long term period (what has been about 10 years now) has been draconian and dramatic changes to life style and frankly a level of “deliberate management” of what I do and don’t eat to a degree that I think most people would find very difficult. Especially because it only worked for me because this wasn’t a 12 or 24 week diet, this was something I had to and still have to stick with basically all the time. I’d say after 10 years of behaviorally restructuring my eating, I actually genuinely do not feel as many cravings for highly palatable junk foods, and I don’t find it as hard to live like this now as I did 7, 8 years ago. But to put things in perspective literally every day when I microwave my lunch, which is usually a simple meal that’s based around chicken and rice, there’s a moment where I’m like “it’d be nice to go get a burger today” or etc. I also can tell you from personal experience that if I follow that decision to “impulse eat” junk food, it’s going to beget another round of making that same impulse decision, which will beget another round to do the same, and very quickly I’ll be on the road back to obesity.
One of the only ways I’ve found I can let myself eat what I consider junk food is if it’s in a pre-planned situation where I’ve known about it before hand, and I deliberately know that I can’t chain it to a multiple day food binge. So I’m fine for things like Thanksgiving dinner, but I don’t keep any leftovers. It’s frankly a running joke with a lot of my friends how strict I am with what I eat, because it frankly makes me a bore in many aspects. But this is 100% what is required for me to break the cycle of overeating and obesity.
So frankly to answer OP, there is no “message” that fixes this. You either make highly palatable foods less available, a prospect which requires serious government interventions into society that many are uncomfortable with (including myself), or you find some way to lead people down the path I’ve taken, at scale.