 The human body runs on food. Once, food shortage was the major concern. After the Second World War, technological advances in food production led to a new era that was characterized by an overabundance of inexpensive food and relatively little physical activity. In the decades that followed, other sociocultural shifts continued to contribute to the changing way we ate. Women who had previously controlled most of the average family's food preparation now entered the workforce in significant numbers, and the processed food industry began to capitalize on our need for fast, convenient food. This meant that fewer meals were being cooked at home, and since convenience foods were generally higher in calories than home-cooked meals, the average person's caloric intake increased dramatically. Academics studying the intersection of food and health, like Michael Pollan, have written extensively about the implications of this cultural shift on the way we eat today. To the extent we outsource our food, first we eat less healthy food, more salt, fat and sugar, but we also eat more food because processed food is often designed as snack food and marketed to us as a way to eat continually through the day. The changes in the way we as a society ate led to the emergence of obesity as a recognized chronic disease with well-defined health consequences, and medical recommendations were made to try and address this growing health crisis. In the second half of the 20th century, a lot of attention was focused on reducing saturated fat and total fat in our diets, and the processed food industry responded by giving us what we wanted, but they still had a vested interest in selling their products, so they found other ways to make the reduced-fat products taste good. One way they did this was by adding significantly more sugar and other forms of sugar like corn syrup to almost everything we ate. This not only made the reduced-fat foods more appealing, but it also increased their shelf life, so the food industry had a huge incentive to add corn syrup and other sweeteners to packaged foods. The resulting increase in our intake of simple sugars fueled our modern epidemics of obesity and diabetes. These shifts in our food consumption patterns have led us to a point in history where a physiological adaptation, our ability to store energy as fat, has become maladaptive. The balance between food availability and energy expenditure has been disrupted, and it's left us with an exponential increase in the incidence of obesity over the past 60 years. An epidemic that the World Health Organization has labeled a worldwide public health crisis.