This article is completely stupid. For example, the change in price of ingredients is trivial in Coca-Cola's decision to make its sodas bigger. In fact, Coca-Cola would like nothing better than to go back to the days of selling small bottles of soda. They make more money that way. The cost of soda pop is due to almost everything BUT the ingredients.
Portion sizes are also a myth. The size of a standard McDonalds hamburger hasn't changed much at all. Yes, they now offer bigger sandwiches but that's obviously because people want them. Wendy's has been offering single, double and tripe burgers for as long as the chain has been open. It's just that nobody took them up on the triples very much in the beginning.
The best clue to why more people are obese can be found, I think, if we look not only at the amount of sugar in things but at the sweetness of the flavors that are used today. If you're forty to fifty years old you witnessed the great sugarizing of breakfast cereals. Children are always attracted to sweet tastes and with each passing decade, the tastes of childrens' foods have gotten sweeter and sweeter. The things I liked as a kid disgusted my parents. The things my friends' kids like disgust me. Adults always feed their kids things that are a bit sweeter than what they themselves like. That level of sweetness (both in flavor and in sugar content) has gone up. Mountain Dew soda pop, for example, was much too sweet for my friends and me. Indeed the brand went moribund for a long while but is extremely popular now. Look at these "bubble teas" teenagers like. The flavors are appallingly sweet.
The serious consequence is not developing a taste for sweet flavors but developing a tolerance for sugar. That leads to type 2 diabetes as one's cells become increasingly insensitive to insulin. People overexposing themselves to carbohydrates require more and more food to get the physical feeling of satiety, particularly when a sedentary lifestyle means they are carrying around a lot of glucose and glycogen in the blood already.
Maybe that's why the low-carb weight-loss diets seem to work well for baby boomers.
peace,
boddi