Well, yes. As a paleo dieter, I can tell you I can't be eating more sugar than someone from the 1850s. My guess is that anyone conscious enough to be on a raw-vegan diet, doesn't either.
> This alleged environmental cause seems to primarily affect the lower income people.
My understanding is that refined carbohydrates and vegetable oils are cheap. Who was it that said that if you have $1.5 to spend on food, you're better off (calorically) buying potato chips than broccoli.
> Also, Taubes' insulin nonsense has been debunked. Lets move on.
I do suspect that it's simplistic. It's much better than the popular notion of calories-in/calories-out, though. That's why I said that it's controversial, but that it's the kind of thing, that's more on-the-mark than simply blaming sedentarity as a primary cause in obesity.
> The fact that exercise causes weight loss has been borne out by numerous controlled experiments. Something I found via a quick search: https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.duke.car....
OTOH, exercise makes you hungry. What's more interesting is whether exercise is effective long-term to cure obesity. I'd suspect not alone, but that it certainly helps.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1914974,00....