Not just fast food.

The size of dish here is very large.

I moved from Thailand and was surprised how big a Thai dish in US was.

There is some sort of default expectation that a dish needs to be large.

I'm sure that contributes to obesity to some degree.

Indeed, and I am comparing to Europe.

In Europe, I can usually get an appetizer and a main course and be kinda full, but not stuffed. In the US, the appetizer along would usually get me full.

That and all convenient food in the US doesn’t have much in terms of non-potato vegetables except as filler.

Fast food burgers are fine if you don’t eat the fries or soda.

And fries and soda are also fine if you are doing hard labor.

This is a common misconception - very few people in the west are actually doing hard labor consistently for such a long time that they would burn enough calories to balance crappy diet full of bad calories like raw sugar in sodas.

I mean how many do daily effort on the level of running 1-2 marathons to burn all those calories? If you look around you will see plenty of older manual workers being overweight in the US, and not only there.

I’m pretty sure fries are very bad for you in ways you can’t work off. Maybe if you put a bunch of antioxidants in the spice mix.

There is not enough labor in the day that can work off a soda.

300 ml of soda is 120 calories. An hour of proper swimming could burn a lot more. And the fast sugar actually helps in those situations.

Also by eating too much, and too much sugar. 2/3 of them are overweight. 12-14% of people are diabetic. That's crazy!