This is a common misconception - very few people in the west are actually doing hard labor consistently for such a long time that they would burn enough calories to balance crappy diet full of bad calories like raw sugar in sodas.

I mean how many do daily effort on the level of running 1-2 marathons to burn all those calories? If you look around you will see plenty of older manual workers being overweight in the US, and not only there.

I’m pretty sure fries are very bad for you in ways you can’t work off. Maybe if you put a bunch of antioxidants in the spice mix.

There is not enough labor in the day that can work off a soda.

300 ml of soda is 120 calories. An hour of proper swimming could burn a lot more. And the fast sugar actually helps in those situations.