"...it is more systematically profitable to sell carb products and (food) companies are really really good at selling things to people."
Apart from the cheap, unhealthy ingredients and slick marketing, modern processed food is also engineered to be appealing; and for the want of a better word, addictive. Prehistoric man would have to do a lot of hunting and gathering before he would consume the equivalent amount of carbs, sugar and salt that one could quickly and easily consume in a single meal from a fast-food restaurant. Humans never evolved to be able to cope with the amount of crap in modern food.
We also evolved to hunt or farm our food before we could eat. Now with the internet, you can order your groceries with the barest physical exertion - the click of a mouse.
While all of that is true I think the real story is one of economics.
It is VERY easy for me to eat as much swine as I feel like nowadays. If we assume that saturated fat/protein isn't bad for you then the fact that I can, in modern times, acquire the pig with less effort than my ancestors doesn't appear to harm me very much. It is tasty pretty much right out of the farm. I imagine it is difficult to make the margins on livestock very high.
Carbs have brands. They have business moats. They have high margins and great psychological keys that make selling them a great business (helps to be addictive). So they push and we buy.
Anyways my thought was that the obesity epidemic has less to do with how we are more sedentary than before but rather the peddlers of PROFITABLE products just got better at their jobs over time.
Apart from the cheap, unhealthy ingredients and slick marketing, modern processed food is also engineered to be appealing; and for the want of a better word, addictive. Prehistoric man would have to do a lot of hunting and gathering before he would consume the equivalent amount of carbs, sugar and salt that one could quickly and easily consume in a single meal from a fast-food restaurant. Humans never evolved to be able to cope with the amount of crap in modern food.
We also evolved to hunt or farm our food before we could eat. Now with the internet, you can order your groceries with the barest physical exertion - the click of a mouse.