Totally incorrect. People spend billions of dollars every year trying not to be fat anymore. [0] I also contend that while more liberal places often have less obesity, it's not like the problem is non-existent there; they still have ~20-25% obesity, which is 1 in 4, which is A LOT of obese people everywhere. Don't pat yourself on the back too hard there.

It's not that obese people don't care or don't know, or that they enjoy living an unhealthy lifestyle. There's a lot of complex factors that are involved, but the basic factor is this: humans are evolved to strongly prefer high calorie foods, and we've made high-calorie foods available in unprecedented quantities while also requiring less physical energy expenditure than ever before. Our bodies don't know how to deal with that.

It's been thoroughly proven over the last 30 years that self-control can't be relied upon to prevent this. When you throw someone into a situation where all of their biological functions are pushing them toward acquiring a biological reward that is so abundant they have to actively avoid it, the options are very limited. That person is going to have a lot of difficulty refraining from acquiring the reward. That's true for everyone, and the issue is generally only avoided if your body has never learned the reward in the first place or if you've trained your body to forget the reward (and in both of these situations, as soon as your body learns to desire that reward, you're back at risk).

We need a solution that a) constrains the supply of hyper-caloric foods, which is not practical, because again, if it's available, good luck keeping it out of peoples' hands; or b) modifies either the foods or the consumers of said food so that the excessive calories are neutralized and the same neurological rewards are obtained.

[0] http://washingtonmonthly.com/2016/05/02/what-the-60-billion-...