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I believe that most American food, even seemingly normal food, is full of weird chemicals.
Brown bread with seeds that goes stale in a few days is better than the kind of cheaper, longer-lasting white bread. Why is white bread so much cheaper and longer-lasting? Because it's full of strange ingredients. I don't know what kind of bread you're getting of course but just look at what Walmart puts in theirs. This was the first American bread that came up in my search: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-White-Round-Top-Bread-20-oz/10315355?classType=REGULAR&athbdg=L1200
Likewise, there's cheese and there's cheese. Cheese can be minimally processed or intensively processed.
It all depends in what's in those corn tortilla chips. I reckon it would be processed, even ultra-processed depending on ingredients.
I just made myself dinner. I went through the ingredients, this is far and away my most common meal and I make this or a slight variation on this for probably 60% of my meals in a year. Butter - Cream(milk), Salt. Ground Beef - Beef, Barilla Brand Pasta - Semolina (Wheat), Durum Wheat Flour, Pasta Sauce - Water, Tomato Paste, Diced Tomatoes, Tomato Juice, Extra Virgin Olive Oil, Garlic, Onions, Basil, Black Pepper, Oregano, Dried Basil. Extra Virgin Olive Oil - Extra Virgin Olive Oil. I also added up the calories, the whole thing comes out to almost 4000. I normally make this for lunch, eat half of it, and eat the other half for dinner. It should be obvious to anyone why this combined with a sedentary life style will result in my becoming very fat without the need for any weird chemicals (Although maybe Semolina is full of weird chemicals?).
I think it is highly unlikely that these chemicals are very important in the broader picture of American obesity. These chemicals are just as common in all of Latin America, who do about the same as most of the EU on obesity, and Japan (who does better than basically everyone on obesity?) also puts this junk in all their, enormously popular, convenience store bread products.
Semolina is coarsely ground durum wheat (as opposed to "durum wheat flour" which is finely ground durum wheat). No more weird chemicals than any wheat.
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I mean, all the ingredients and cooking seems perfectly fine here.
As a fellow food enjoyer, the obvious problem seems to be portion size. You're going to eat everything because it's delicious, so just make less of it.
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? Latin America is a very fat region. Mexico is literally the fattest country in the world, moreso than the US. And in any case, a region where food insecurity is an actual problem that needs to be worried about(albeit not the normative experience) is not a fair comparison to the second richest region in human history.
But to your point- yes, if you eat 4k calories a day before accounting for breakfast, drinks, snacks, and desert, it does not take 'chemicals' to explain obesity. I will make a similar dish to what you do and eat leftovers for lunch for an entire week(with sides, of course).
Also, I don't eat breakfast, snacks, desserts or drink anything other than water(but I would eat desserts if I kept them in the house).
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I just looked at the Wikipedia list of countries by obesity. Mexico is 36% of adults with obesity, Hungary (hah) is a slightly higher 36, Ireland is 30, El Salvador is 29, Germany is 24, Colombia is 23. It is possible this data is wrong or misleading though?
Mexico at 36% just seems shockingly low to me.
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Hmm, well, I guess I consider this good counter-evidence against my theory.
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