Yes, obesity is a problem that needs to be addressed. Yes, there is a growing rate of obese people in the world. These are undeniably true, and indeed should be confronted. But the claim that this is an epidemic is a hype that has inflated to a degree much higher than the implications of obesity, unset by two factors, nostalgic misinformation and societal pressures.
Obesity hype followers will give you a list of reasons why we're facing such a frightening epidemic of obese people in the world. One of them is rooted in nostalgic, good old fashion memories of lifestyles that seem sunnier than they really are. They will tell you that back in the old days, they came home from work or school and sat down to a wonderfully fresh, healthy meal prepared by their loving stay at home mother. I challenge anyone to spend 10 minutes flipping through a few "Old Fashioned" cookbooks and come back to still support the assertion that people in past days ate healthier food. Because, they didn't.
Looking through any "Old Fashioned" cookbooks of any types of meals will find lots of fat, butter, lard, and sugar in every recipe. The base of a meal for the larger part of human history was meat and carbohydrates. No, a hundred years ago food didn't have all the preservatives and modifications, greases and frying oils, but it still was fatty and filled with carbohydrates. But a hundred years ago people didn't have anywhere near the kind of access we have now to foods of every kind you can imagine. Now, you can pick any type of vegetable, fruit, meat, nut, bread, etc, and have it at any time you desire, for any meal of the day! They simply didn't have that option back a hundred years ago; they had to eat what they could afford and what was local at the time. This means there was never a wide variety of fruits and vegetables around, and meals were centered on fatty meats and carbohydrates.
Secondly, old-fashioned dreamers will tell you that people "now days" are so much lazier than the good old days, and it's the inactivity that's the problem. Thing is, people alive now have so much more to do to sustain there lives than those a hundred years ago! Our educational requirements have been increased massively, forcing older students in higher universities to juggle their grades and a part time job to keep from going into a hopeless debt. Working parents have 40 hour plus careers per week, while driving their children all over town to school, practice, lessons, and whatever else their children are involved in. We aren't any lazier; we're so much busier! Yes, people need to set more time aside to maintain a healthy lifestyle, but this isn't a cause for the call of an epidemic.
Society also has had an unquestionable effect on the inflation of the hype over obesity. The pressures culture places on each individual to be as skinny or fit as possible is eternally damaging. This is the one side of the story that you could take by defending past ages. The focus of societies in the past had a lot less to do with the physical appearance and weight of a person. Even 50 years ago, the accepted norm was a few pounds of what we in today's culture would call overweight, especially in females. Now that the norm has shifted to being completely fit with no noticeable extra weight, obviously this places a lot of pressure that pushes individuals in a lot of different ways. This focus on weight has not only driven to an increase in obesity, but to a massive increase in eating disorders, that either leaves a person dangerously underweight or overweight. In this way, the paranoia of obesity is actually quite self-sabotaging in that people who are overly concerned with their weight end up in unhealthier circumstances.
The "Obesity Epidemic" has been used as a sort of character assassination on the modern person. Blaming it on modern laziness and the modern lifestyle is a just confusing warp of nostalgic feelings fed by people's fonder memories of the past. Taking steps backwards to the "good old days" does not provide the key to a healthy body, and buying into the cultural paranoia of weight and self-image isn't going to help either.
It's unquestionably true that now, here in the 21st century we have every tool available to achieve and maintain a healthy body. We know more about the body that we ever did before, and this change is astronomical for a healthy society. Not only that, we now have access to an immense selection of healthy foods that people before us could have never imagined of having. You can get any kind of food you want, at any time of the year, by simply going into a store. This is untouchably advantageous to people that are lucky enough to be alive in today's world.
The tools for living a healthy life are all there for us to use here in the 21st century. It is now simply an issue of choosing a healthy lifestyle. Anyone can lead a healthy life with a little knowledge and perseverance!