Right, thanks to medical improvements. And, costs. I would say 80% of the people I see who are obese could, if they wanted to, do something about it. It's too much work. It takes a mindset of "I have to think about the future" to do that. Too many people are caught up in the instant gratification that food brings.
There is simply no way to justify obesity in this day and age. The pharma companies love it because there's always another drug they can sell to cover the symptoms not the cause.
And thanks to the fact that some of what we think about health is quite simply hokum. Remember the life cycle of cholesterol: first cholesterol was bad and we should avoid it, then they noticed that people who lowered their cholesterol were actually MORE likely to have heart attacks, so we figured out there was good and bad cholesterol, you gotta lower one but keep the other up, next they figured out the number one source of bad cholesterol is NOT your diet, it’s YOU, your body actually produced it, which then brings up the question of how bad is it really, and now they’re re-shuffling the whole cholesterol chart based on new life expectancy data.
There’s plenty of reason to justify obesity: genetics. That’s the simple fact we learn over and over again, most of these things boil down to genetics, there are people that are not susceptible to heart disease no matter what, there are people that will not get cancer no matter what, there are people that will be fat no matter what. Then of course there’s the fact that society keeps changing, fewer and fewer people do anything that’s really and truly work, we mostly don’t need hard physical labor anymore, which means we’re not burning the calories we used to. But we still have a body that is genetically pre-disposed to are hard scrabble life, our body EXPECTS scarcity and hard work. This is why fat and sugar taste good, the body WANTS them because it thinks it NEEDS them and rewards you for getting them. For millions of years these traits that make us fat now made us SURVIVE. Someday the body will catch up to the new reality, but it will take a couple hundred generations.