That is actually a win, and far better than the bleak Population Bomb promoted by people like John Holdren and Paul Ehrlich just a few decades ago. Though there is still famine in parts of the world, they are parts of the world where groups opposed to science can manipulate people who don't trust outsiders or understand the technology, no differently than than distrust vaccines. The peaks and valleys of food have leveled out so famine is only going to decrease.
But the cultural manifestation of an evolutionary mandate - that food is a biological basic necessity - means that societies which long worried about having enough food now over-indulge because they can.
It's an entirely fixable problem, simple cultural maturity that will happen. It's certainly not a Big Tobacco-type food effort, no matter what trial lawyers at Center for Science in the Public Interest and conspiracy theorists like historian Naomi Oreskes allege. It is simply that the war on poverty has been won in developed nations. Science has made food so cheap that for the first time in history poor people can afford to be fat. And so they do.
But we have to be concerned in the short term. In the UK, obese people now outnumber smokers 2 to 1, so almost a third of the population is obese (a Body Mass Index over 30.) If they don't change their lifestyles, that population could face 1,900 cases of bowel cancer, 1,400 more cases of kidney cancer, 460 more ovarian cancer cases and 180 more cases of liver cancer. While 4,000 cases in a country of nearly 70 million doesn't sound like a lot, and plenty of normal weight people get cancer, for the most part it is preventable, along with numerous other diseases.
Smoking is a pediatric disease and once society tackled it there, the problem began to get solved, and we need to realize obesity is also more likely to become a lifetime problem if kids acquire those habits early.
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