Coexistence of food reward and carb theories of obesity? pt 2

Our own observations and reading of the literature strongly support the hypotheses that:
1. significantly reducing carbs, especially wheat and sugar leads to weight loss
2. wheat and sugar can have severe adverse health consequences, especially when excessively consumed

That said, obesity as a macro phenomenon (no pun intended) seems obviously a result of behavioral and fundamental biological factors. (Behavior is highly influenced by biological factors as well as other sensory inputs but is an emergent phenomenon). If food reward factors contributes significantly to high carb intake, then it seems reasonable to see the increase of availability of highly palatable food as a major "cause" of obesity.

It has been argued that, absent any other serious health conditions, one cannot become obese without eating a high carb diet.  This may be perfectly true but is it a sufficiently useful conclusion if it requires the caveat that “high” needs to be defined individually based on their genetics, individual history, and level of food addition (people who are following an on-average low carb diet who occasionally binge may do more damage to themselves than people on a higher average carb diet– negative convexity!)

So it seems that the debate boils down to whether the complex system involved has some natural regulation so that the behavior associated with food reward are only associated with high carb intake or whether other factors can significantly contribute to and perhaps exacerbate the food reward behavior.  It is generally assumed that there is effective regulation and so something has to fail (metabolic damage) in order to transition into the vicious cycle of weight gain and food reward.  However, this failure may be an abstraction in itself: perhaps there is a range of regulation effectiveness across the population and by moving into a new regime of food consumption we are seeing that variation in the form of the ‘obesity epidemic’. Alternatively one could hypothesize that on an individual level regulation is only effective within some range of inputs. When the frequency of exogenous shocks to consumption (of something) crosses some tipping point, the market feedback effect of making more highly palatable food leads to a systemic effect.

Our overarching point is that it may not be very fruitful (another unintentional pun) to try to isolate food reward from carb consumption as an underlying cause as they may reinforce each other in very complex ways.