This is not new. We are no different from our ancestors in this aspect of the human condition. The change lies in the fact that we now live in an age so wealthy and capable that consistent overeating is affordable for a majority of the global population. Since people, on average, tend to follow their incentives in the short term rather than in the long term, the result is a very rapid growth in lifestyle diseases.
Visceral fat tissue doesn't care that you think it is hard to avoid. Maybe it is hard. But that doesn't change the choice, or the fact that it is a choice: choose to eat less, or choose to suffer the consequences resulting from the visceral fat tissue that you gain. That means greater lifetime medical expenditures, more years of chronic age-related disease, more disability, and a younger death than those who did managed to stay slim. Visceral fat tissue interacts with the immune system to generate chronic inflammation, and may increase the burden of senescent cells that also contribute to inflammation. Inflammation accelerates the development and progression all of the common age-related diseases, particularly cardiovascular disease. Issues in the vascular system in turn accelerate the decline into dementia. There is no such thing as being both healthy and overweight. Excess visceral fat tissue at any age is a bad thing.
What lies ahead in the matter of cheap calories and consequent declines in personal health? Most likely a future of continued issues and an increasingly overweight population, at least until someone comes up with a low-cost technological fix that work well enough to gain widespread adoption. Zero calorie food bases, maybe, or an implementation for human medicine of one of the various ways in which mice can be engineered to resist fat deposition. For the individual, it will for a while yet remain a matter of willpower and choice. It is risky to let things go in the hope that medical science will rescue you from the consequences of poor choices. The future of rejuvenation therapies will not happen as rapidly as we'd like: it will be piecemeal, and roll out incrementally over decades. That is plenty of time for even the younger members of the audience to dig a deep hole of ill health through becoming overweight and sedentary.
https://www.fightaging.org/archives/2017/07/a-civilization-intent-on-eating-itself-into-an-early-gra...
A Civilization Intent on Eating Itself into an Early Grave
If the successes in technological development achieved over the past few hundred years is teaching us anything, perhaps it should be that individual members of a species that evolved in an environment of pervasive scarcity and intermittent famine are not well equipped for an environment of consistent plenty. Our biochemistry and our instincts lead us astray: eat too many calories and life expectancy and long-term health will suffer for it.
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