Chronic metabolic conditions disproportionately cohere along lines of race, gender, class, and citizenship. Despite overwhelming evidence that racism, gendered violence, so cial and economic disparities, trade regulations, lack of food sovereignty, and land and livelihood dispossession play the biggest roles in chronic disease, the biomedical explanations given for why people become sick are often firmly rooted in personal behavior or "lifestyle". We consider the massive proliferation of metabolic illnesses as a combination of structural and intimate violences. The concept taught us to look at social structures and not individuals; this special issue brings the slow chronicity of metabolic disasters to bear on the question of how structures work and how they can be changed. In this Vital Topics Forum, The Nutrire CoLab, a project of seventeen people who identify mainly as cisgender women, feminists, and anthropologists, draw on our empir ical research carried out on slowly emergent and devastat ing metabolic illnesses to revisit the question of how to both conceptualize chronic disease and theorize violence and its structures. Citing our fieldwork in Latin America, Australia, Africa, the Pacific Islands, the United States, Canada, and Western Europe, we show how the global rise of metabolic illness is reshaping what it means to be human. As with other approaches to studying violence, we ask how the historically formative and long-lingering effects of war, slavery, and genocide structure the possibilities and framings of human health. We also insist on the importance of caring about the quieter, banal, nonscientific, and often mother-centered spaces in which racism, sexism, and economic inequality come to grip people's lives. The repeated insistence on behavioral interventions functions to "reproduce whiteness" in both scientific and culinary ideals of health, as argued by Natali Valdez. Yet, those with wealth and status are often spared, leaving vulnerable communities to bear the burden of the disaster. We draw upon decades of fieldwork carried out in sites across the world to offer suggestions for how to ameliorate structural violence through responses that are nonindividualized, activist, and driven by communities.