Any answer to this will be an oversimplification, but my short answer is increased poverty makes for more people with unfulfilled needs. With holes to fill as it were. Food fills that hole. Not perfectly, but enough that people use food in place of what actually fulfills. But food is only a substitute, so it doesn’t sate. There are many things people can substitute for what’s actually fulfilling, but sugar is the cheapest “drug” on the market. The same dynamic is a huge part of what underlies the opioid epidemic.
Also once you are addicted to over consumption you cannot just give it up completely. Alcohol, gambling, opioids can all be stopped using a sensible program and never touched again. You ask any addict of those three if they would never lapse if they had to take them in moderate amounts every single day for the rest of their life and they would laugh at you.
Couple this with easy and cheap availability of the most addictive food types that are heavily advertised, it’s no wonder it is so hard.
This is so true and so sad. It is like eating disorders really truly clicked for me with this statement.
While I now live outside the US and have curbed my eating habits drastically and I am now no longer obese, just on the cusp of overweight/healthy weight, I struggle every day not to indulge in over-eating, as that has been a stress-response my entire life I’m pretty sure. Living abroad has made it easier to fight it because they don’t have aisles upon aisles of ready made crap. And the boxes/bags they come in are pretty small so you can’t eat say, an entire family size box of cheez-its or little Debbie’s because neither of those are even sold here. There is some junk food but variety is extremely limited, so that definitely helps.