No the root cause is that Americans continue to be indifferent to eating crap. As long as it is sweet or salty, packs a ton of calories and has some semblance of food in it, theres money to be made from it. It doesn't help that how much money can be made is one of the main yardsticks of worthiness in this culture often superceding common sense.

Sure, the root root cause is Apathy, like many other factors. But I don't think Americans are uniquely self-indulgent compared to every other first world country. Americans maybe have more food coming in (or grown domestically), but I'd be surprised if the gap (if any) was that large.

So I think finding the root cause one level up is still worthwhile.

> It doesn't help that how much money can be made is one of the main yardsticks of worthiness in this culture often superceding common sense.

This portion is interesting, but contradictory to the statistics. It's actually lower class citizens who have higher obesity rates in America. A poignant factor that suggests that the costs of certain foods may be something to investigate (I'm sure it's already well investigated. I just haven't looked it up in years).

>But I don't think Americans are uniquely self-indulgent compared to every other first world country

You haven't spent a lot of time in other 'first-world' countries. A lot of what passes for food here in America would be regarded with outright horror in most of Europe. Their food regulatory agencies simply have a much stricter standard for what can be placed on shelves. Here in America it seems like it takes just a couple dubious studies often funded by the food manufacturers to get something labelled food grade. Pick up say a chicken pot pie next time you go to the grocery store and take a look at the ingredients list and if next you have the opportunity to go to somewhere in Europe do the same. Another big difference is that the (vast) majority of Americans must have food be sweet otherwise it is unpalatable. This is why virtually everything has sugar in it. Many Europeans I know are simply shocked at how hard it is to find bread, of all things that doesn't have sugar in it. If you compare the menu from the same fast food brands like say KFC in say Tokyo and NewYork, the Tokyo version is going to be less salty, less sweet and will have fewer artificial ingredients because the average Japanese eater doesn't put sweetness above everything else and probably has a different idea of 'tastiness'

As for your claim that obesity is more of a lower class thing, I'm not sure what America you're living in. Obesity in the US knows no class, even if the rates are slightly higher for the working class it is still a problem across all social classes. And I'm not sure what that has to do with the point that people who sell crap or do crappy things are not judged by what they sell but how much they make, which is a bug or feature of capitalism in general but especially American capitalism.