[SeanAppleby]

I believe the point is that the answer begs another question of "why".

In their drinking example, alcoholism literally is overdrinking, but we accept that there is an underlying mechanism of physical and psychological dependency that exists outside of "they just consciously choose to drink all of the time and other people don't". At this point we generally recognize it as a disease with more nuance than "overdrinking". We recognize that there is a significant neurological component that is, at the point that they are an alcoholic, not under their total conscious control. Their subsconscious is pushing them to do things that the subconsciouses of people without the disease do not push for.

Similarly, you could ask the question, why do some people eat significantly more than they burn? And it then seems not implausible that the problem could be similar to that of alcoholism, that some neurological system is calling for the body to ingest more food, whereas other people's appetites are fundamentally more accurately calibrated at a subconscious level.

Much more speculative, but this would even seem to make sense from a wider lens. Almost our entire evolutionary lineage existed in a world of food scarcity, not overabundance. The selection pressure necessary to evolve a reliable safeguard against overeating would seem plausibly to not be old enough for that mechanism to have evolved to be as reliable and widespread as the one to prevent us from allowing ourselves to starve to death.

The health problems of the 20th and 21st century are still incredibly new from the perspective of the mechanisms that created our instinctual impulses.

[zamadatix]

Agreed, I'm not sure how any of this disagrees with:

"It is an explanation. The article does not propose an alternative to the imbalance explanation rather alternative focus of action to achieve said intake balance."

I understand the article wishes to point out we should focus on a different action but it spends its time attacking the current definition not because it has a problem with the definition but because it has a problem with the currently popular action associated with the definition.

The popular definition is fine, it's the popular "soluttion" to the definition they attack. The paper is much more clear on this.