As someone mentioned to me the other day, we need to stop the proliferation of Dunkin Donuts, Burger King, Arby's etc.
It's too easy to stop and eat, rather than going home and preparing something, and the kids almost demand fast food.

I’m not entirely sure I understand the question(s). 🤷🏻‍♂️

If by weight loss and technology you’re talking about what I would call interventional weight management such as GLP-1 drugs or bariatric surgery, it’s pretty clearly not the way I’ve chosen to go. I think they can work, but I also think that even if effective at losing weight, there’s still a “mind over matter” element to making the decisions that support keeping it off. That may be food choices that accommodate the bariatric surgery, or paying for meds for life - I don’t know. But if it’s gonna end up with mind over matter, it seems like you might as well just start there.

Why did we all get fat, why do we (most of us) struggle to keep it off, and why is America becoming the land of the bloated and home of the overfed? That’s an overly large topic, but I think at its heart it comes down to two things.

First, as humans were conditioned to find the easiest way to accomplish any mission, whether that’s bringing down a mammoth or buying food we enjoy. If it’s easier to get satisfaction at a drive-thru than to spend the time cooking, we’re gonna head that way. Similarly, if we can take an injection once a week instead of making hard decisions at every food choice (and getting insurance to pay for it!), that’s just an “easier” way to lose weight.

Second is that as a society, we’re conditioned to feel entitled to pleasure as the reward for hard work. I suspect most people enjoy the foods they eat, and that their nutritional value isn’t always top of mind. Also, as a society we have more leisure time and more disposable income than we did twenty or fifty years ago. Why not spend that leisure time and disposable income on things we know bring us pleasure? After all, that pleasure is “now”, and the price of that pleasure is “maybe someday”.

So if that wasn’t the questions, well, you just got a free tour of The Mind of Charlie. Pretty scary place, ain’t it?

Turn it around. What do you suppose happens if we take a caveman to Old Country Buffet?

Our lives are mostly miracles by historic standards. But we have bodies that are designed to survive hard times. We have a pesky calorie storage thing that rather suddenly seems ill suited for our lives.

But this- ran into an article unfortunately behind a paywall. But in the teaser bit I was allowed to read - there really is a huge scientific debate about weight & weight loss- Is the problem how much we eat? Or is the problem what we eat? I guess as someone who lost weight tracking I start from the how much position. But I also know that as my WW point target shrank, my food choices changed to provide more volume.

As to technology, technology has succeeded in getting us quite a few calories fairly easily and fairly cheap. Has this led us to eating the wrong stuff? That’s wrong in terms of content not just wrong in terms of too easy and too much.

Maybe science & technology will tell us the answer soon.

In a book I recently read , "Ultraprocessed People: The Science Behind Food That Isn't Food" by Chris Van Tulleken, they performed an experiment with two groups. One group tate ultraproccesed food and the other Food that was not ultraproccesed. Leaving aside other details of the study, it was found that those in the Ultraprocessed group ate an average of 500 calories more per day. For you arithmeticians, that's a pound a week. Go figure.