Talking about my post history is fine and dandy, but what you did is just add more anecdotes with an imaginative story in a long comment that gives zero evidence and many suppositions. I could tackle some of those suppositions by citing that black people with higher income who obviously have both higher possibility for vehicular movement or moving to a different area altogether actually have higher and not lower obesity than poor black people which are more affected by all the things you write about (and it would be true, since that is what the literature says), but you have started with a foregone conclusion and only want to discuss why it's true, instead of discussing WHETHER it's true in the first place.

But guess what, again, this is r/science, the burden of proof is on the people making these claims and not me. Notice no one is giving even one piece of evidence for the very specific question asked, only anecdotes around it. That, my friend, is a sign of a religion, not a well thought out scientific theory. And it's not just to my comment, because your next move would obviously be to say that they don't want to humor me (while humoring me, like you did).

I must not be articulating myself very well, although I'm not so sure how I can do better. I'll give it one last go and then if it doesn't work take the L to save everyone some time.

I understand the concept of food deserts. Now, what evidence is there that specifically institutional racism is causing it to occur more often [if it does] for black people, or to go back to the broader question, what evidence is there that institutional racism is causing obesity in the black community?

Put another way, if I were a statistician (and I am not, so give me some leeway in the terminology please), the null hypothesis should be that we don't know what's causing black obesity (or maybe that it's something much more trivial such as personal choice), and the alternative hypothesis should be that institutional racism is causing black obesity. But the null hypothesis is that we don't know, so we should cross a good enough evidentiary threshold to reject the null hypothesis to think about "accepting" our alternative hypothesis (I know we don't rigorously accept the alternative hypothesis in statistics - I'm just trying to pass a barrier here, to say that something should at least go in the direction of convincing us it's specifically institutional racism).

Well, not to put too much focus on winning the internet argument, but I did say it makes sense only with really good proof. You wrote about a lot of different things, but not about whether there's good proof institutional racism specifically causes people to get fat. This is r/science, so science me.

Unless you mean ALL culture is institutionalized racism - then no.

For example, can you really blame racism for people's eating habits? Is "the man" forcing anyone to eat less healthy? Because that, in part, explains the brain aging.

Before you say yes - do keep in mind there are cultures all around the world with similar levels of wealth and dissimilar levels of obesity. It does not make sense (without really, really good proof) to think that specifically in America obesity in the black population is caused by racism, while in other cultures and countries it's just "naturally" the way things are.

Edit: many responses, I don't see even one that tackles institutional racism equalling obesity as a direct cause. Especially considering other poor groups don't fare as badly in the obesity department. Guys, gals, remember what sub we're on. If you want to make a claim that something is causing something else, the burden of proof is on you, not on the person asking whether a certain claim is right or not.