> "Frankly it's suspicious that you had to go to Mexico to get good examples."

I did not "have to go to Mexico" to get good examples, first thing which came to mind was those articles about Mexico. The link about obesity tripling is from the World health organization.

Let's assume for a moment that you live in the USA - the USA also has a problem with massively increasing obesity levels, see[1] the CDC saying the prevalence of obesity has increased from 30% to 40% in the last twenty years. Before you say "nobody trusts the CDC after COVID", the National Institute of Health says obesity in the USA has tripled since 1960[3] from around 13% to around 42%.

In case you think the political connection is Mexican developing corruption, here's [4] The CocaCola company saying "Coca‑Cola engages in direct advocacy at U.S. federal and state levels of government to share information and perspective on our public policy priorities." and their most recent disclosure Q1 2023 includes specific lobbying issues "Water security, replenishment, restoration." Should "water security for CocaCola company bottling plants" ever come into conflict with "water security for citizens" you can guess which side CocaCola will be lobbying on.

> "Okay well I live in the united states and we have drinkable water. So then what?"

Drought.gov reports that 90 million people in the USA and 266 million areas of major crops are experiencing drought this week[5]. California, for example, pumps huge amounts of groundwater for growing almonds for export and when the ground collapses into the holes where water used to be, it compacts meaning the ground can hold less water in future, reducing the groundwater storage capacity. An NPR article[6] says "Upmanu Lall, a hydroclimatologist at Columbia University and a luminary in his field, has co-authored and led numerous studies that document the rise of contaminated drinking water in the U.S. He and his colleagues assessed a national data set of 17,900 water utilities and other community drinking-water systems, revealing that water-quality violations of the U.S. Safe Drinking Water Act more than doubled between 1980 and 2015" - this is general underinvestment in infrastructure causing problems like 150k people in Jackson, Miss. getting undrinkable water - a systemic problem because supplying drinking water isn't as profitable as supplying sugar water, so that's where the economy allocates more funds and more efforts.

In the UK, Thames Water is a supplier in London - by far the biggest and densest city in the country - and since it was privatised it's £14Bn in debt[7] - basically taken £14bn in loans to pay out to shareholders, underinvesting and cost cutting in providing the service people need, a story played out around the UK with £50Bn in debts by private water companies, echoing the systemic problems with clean water supplies in the Mexican story. Getting away from pressure of advertising but still talking about systemic pressures to increase profits and payouts more than to provide best service, pressures which companies have huge resources to crush individuals, which individuals have almost no ability to resist.

So then you've taken "companies are more powerful than individuals and humans have known cognitive weaknesses which companies exploit which is a systemic problem with advertising and manipulation around the world and accross all companies and in the nature of the economies we run" to "examples of CocaCola specifically, affecting a specific community in Mexico, using a lot of different influences at local and state level with many different approaches and methods" to "I have clean water so there isn't a systemic problem at all" which is a non-sequitur - "I don't drink CocaCola" is not evidence that advertising generally doesn't work, or a refutation of the idea that pressure increases over time, or a response to the inhumanity of industries which exploit human weaknesses for profit on a vast scale to the detriment of human dignity, health, society and quality of life.

> "You're making up a straw man if you think I'm attacking children under 5 for not having personal responsibility. But yes, I do blame these cases on bad parenting."

39 million cases of '''bad parenting'''. Don't question the system, this is all the explanation anyone should need, case closed.

Don't look at "How to 'magnetize' a baby [with sugar]"[8], how babies crying has a disproportional effect on adults, how 'getting people hooked early' is a trick to affect the rest of their lives used by cults and religions and others, how the adults are increasingly stressed which causes more bad decision making, by an environment where housing is for rentier profit, where vehicle ownership is mandatory after years of car industry lobbying and marketing rebuilding cities around cars, where manipulative marketing and lies "yes junk food can be part of a healthy diet [coughinmoderation]" abounds, where companies do things like buy up shelf space in supermarkets to put their products front and center, use manipulations such as putting a photo of a baby on product packaging to imply that it's child related or child safe, and increasing contrast and colour to make it look 'friendlier' 'more noticable', and etc. etc.

But no, blaming the parents is the important thing to reassure you; you're on top so there can't be any systemic problems.

btw. if you reply with something as empty as "I don't eat almonds" or "my parents were bad and I turned out fine", you're missing all the points.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html

[2] https://usafacts.org/articles/obesity-rate-nearly-triples-un...

[3] https://usafacts.org/articles/obesity-rate-nearly-triples-un...

[4] https://www.coca-colacompany.com/policies-and-practices/publ...

[5] https://www.drought.gov/current-conditions

[6] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-growing-drinkin...

[7] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/jun/30/in-charts-h...

[8] https://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/how-to-magnetize-a-... - "Dr. Barnard also discusses how industry, aided by government, exploits these natural cravings, pushing us to eat more and more unhealthy foods."