It was obvious hyperbole, directed at the poster I was responding to, a fairly typical speech pattern. Did you actually get the impression I was trying to suggest that literally every thin person in the country thinks in the same way?

But you clearly missed my point. Eating is a cause and an effect. If every obese person in the country ate exactly like 'the thin people do' (by which I assume you mean the same foods and quantities) then yeah, most of them wouldn't be obese. That is exactly the kind of 'simple statement' I was talking about.

If all of the stupid people in the country learned the same things the smart people do, we'd be in much better shape educationally too.

I personally see thin people buying the same stuff obese people buy all the time. I see thin people at fast food places and sit-down restaurants (which are usually not substantially healthier). I've seen families that live off the same food supply and one person is obese while others are thin. You can argue "the thin people must only buy those foods or go to those places sparingly", but we all know that's not really generally true either.

There is so much variation that it's hard to generalize this, but the sentiment you've expressed is a big part of the reason we can't get anywhere. People's bodies react to food differently. Obesity is not always caused by a lack of inhibition. We need to stop detesting obese people before there can be a serious solution that curbs the growing obesity trend. If "diet and exercise" were tenable solutions, we'd be seeing steadily declining obesity rates; instead, the rates continue to skyrocket worldwide (in conjunction with modernization of country's food supply, suggesting that modern processing "contaminates" food with substances that promote obesity). We need a better answer.