According to some sources, at least 1 in 8 of the world population is classified as ‘obese’. Since nobody in any government seems to have thought up a working solution, what do you believe can be done to solve the epidemic?
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Cheap access to fresh fruit and veg
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Education for healthy eating starting in childhood
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Public outdoor spaces that are enjoyable to exercise in
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Cheap, frequent public transit to allow everyone to access food and public spaces
If those don’t take care of most of it we can keep going from there.
And not just fresh fruit and veg, but a variety of good quality fresh fruit and veg. Red delicious apples are cheap fresh fruit, zucchini is cheap fresh veg, but you won’t enjoy eating your fruit and veg if all you’re getting is nasty apples and zucchini.
I feel like we could do a lot by simply removing the sales taxes from raw vegetables and non-exotic fruits.
That would be a government subsidy, but it would be a subsidy primed to go towards the consumer.
Can’t hurt. The state with the least obesity is Colorado, and they don’t have a sales tax on groceries, but do with candy and stuff.
Only 11 states charge sales tax on groceries as it is. And all but 3 of the ones that do, have a reduced rate.
But zucchini is delicious
I like red delicious apples. I like all varieties of apples. The hate comes from familiarity and snobbery. It’s like coffee, cigars, and wine--marketing and price is the only real difference. One isn’t worse than the other, we’re just taught that. Every variety of apple can become mealy if left tool long, but people associate that with RD because that’s the apple they had as kids and sometimes they were mealy, and kids are very sensitive to differences in their food.
Bro what are you talking about zuchcineine and appel GOOD you are the avatar of the demiurge
A thing most people don’t get is that knowledge of how to prepare food and the time to actually do it are also key. My parents could cook 3 meals between them and poorly at that. I didn’t know anything about how to use a knife including the most basic things like sharp knives being less dangerous than blunt ones. I have learned later in life and I am fairly accomplished in the kitchen, including making a roux, making passata from scratch, fermenting and pickling vegetables, making yoghurt, making adaptable stir fry dishes, making stews and soups, and all manner of other things like breads and pâté. None of those things were taught to me by my parents or through schooling. All the access in the world wouldn’t make me able to use chicken liver without making it chalky and nasty, or cook a steak without ruining it.
It’s a very good suggestion, but do you think any government right now would push for that? Not disagreeing with you, just wondering about the feasibility of such ideas?
Those are two separate questions, without a strong public push for those things it’s unlikely governments will do it of their own accord unless they’re specifically trying to cut healthcare costs. But there are places with the things listed; you can’t go anywhere in Central America without running into a fruit cart, cities with good public transit exist, and places with public spaces that encourage exercise exist, programs to educate the public about healthy eating exist. Each thing is individually accomplishable.
Nah. There’s not really any significant benefit to making such changes from a government perspective.
Nah, can do stuff like the UK did - taxing sugar - so that instead of getting less income from removing sales tax, it’d be more income from new tax
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Eating the rich has been shown to have a positive impact on weight loss and health in general.
Seriously though, this is the answer. Obesity is a systemic problem.
This sounds a little… cannibalistic
Also terrible for cholesterol. Have you seen what they’ve been eating?
Eating cholesterol doesn’t raise average blood cholesterol levels, it only spikes it for a few hours. The body adjusts.
The rich are taking better care of themselves these days, because they’re hoping to live long enough to reach longevity therapies, and eventually, immortality therapies, which they will very much keep to themselves.
But what does that mean in terms of real actionable steps though?
Organize, educate, advocate
And when that fails, kill.
There’s not a single, one-size-fits-all solution, there’s a lot of factors going into this
In no particular order, off the top of my head, a couple things that would need to change
- Better nutrition/health education- a lot of people have almost no idea what eating healthy means
- Better labeling requirements, there’s a few weird loopholes in how food and such can be labeled, and companies get away with using some pretty misleading labeling, and we need to be tightening that down so that people can actually make better informed decisions about what they’re eating.
- Better pay and work/life balance- Planning and preparing a healthy diet takes time and money. Same with going to the gym. We need to free people up to be able to make those better, healthier choices for themselves
- Addressing food deserts- In some places people just may not have easier access to healthy food. If you don’t drive and public transit is spotty around you, and the only stores within walking distance of your home are gas stations and convenience stores, it’s going to be hard to eat a healthy diet.
- Pedestrian and bike friendly infrastructure- In a lot of cases, people don’t walk or bike places because it’s just not safe for them to do so. If you provide that opportunity for them, a lot of people will actually use it, they’ll get more exercise, and save money on gas that can in turn be used for other healthier choices.
- Healthcare- In some cases it may mean getting things like glp-1 drugs or surgeries to aid in weight loss, in other cases it might just be checking in with a doctor or nutritionist to come up with a weight loss plan to make sure you’re going about it safely and effectively. Maybe you need blood work or other tests to identify other underlying health problems, maybe you have depression or anxiety that are making it difficult for you to be motivated to go to the gym or some sort of trauma you need to work through to address an eating disorder. Whatever the person’s specific needs are, they need to be able to access them.
People don’t realize* that processed food is engineered to make you eat more of it. You’ll also feel like shit for at least 3 days if you start eating fresh foods and you will crave the junk (cuz it’s made to be that way), but it’s worth it. The price is about the same to eat if you make it from scratch, but it’s so much easier than you think. Your body will thank you. Also, if you’re craving something sweet, drink water.
Examples:
Soup
- boil a bunch of veggies and you get veggie stock.
- Boil the bones of your rotisserie chicken and you get chicken stock.
- Microwave a potato and put it in a pan with your sauteed veggies, then add milk. You now have cream of type soups
Grill
- veggies
- meat
- seafood
Baking
- cut up your veggies and put a whole chicken in there. Cook for awhile, then you have 3 or 4 meals of different varieties. Here’s an example recipe, but you can do any herb or veggies you like. https://simply-delicious-food.com/oven-roasted-whole-chicken/
These are just few.
Sounds like the detox diet in that spurlock film
Do you mean the opposite? You must not have seen it.
lol. I meant his wife’s vegan detox diet at the end (the one above’s obviously not vegan, it just reminded me of the concept) obviously I didn’t mean the main diet of that film…
In any case, I much preferred Tom Naughton’s Fat Head
“Honey, I have chest pains! Quick! Get a tripod!!!” XD
Oh sorry, lol, I didn’t understand what you were saying. You can have junk in moderation, but processed food companies make it really hard on everyone to do anything in moderation.
Have you seen Fat Head by Tom Naughton? If you liked the Spurlock one, watch that one (it’s kind of a refute with comedy)
No, we’ve been looking for new things to watch. I’ll look for it. We just got done with Widow’s Bay. Boy does that deserve the hype.
It’s on Tubi. Just stick an American VPN on (unless you live in America of course)
We’ve invented the cure to obesity. We should be dancing in the streets and throwing parades for scientists. Again. We invented the cure to obesity. It’s just a distribution problem at this point. We just need to work on getting the drugs out to everyone that wants them at a price anyone can afford. Do that, and the obesity crisis is solved.
It turns out that when you give humans calorie abundance, it just breaks a lot of our “full meters.” And we can fix that with a simple shot or pill. Generations fretting and brow-beating people over morality and gluttony. Generations of forcing people to painfully starve themselves to achieve a healthy weight. Generations of shame, guilt, and cruelty. But all along, the real issue wasn’t moral. It was medical. Or perhaps, historical.
The reality is that many of us just have a part of our biology that isn’t calibrated for the modern world. We have satiation systems that are designed for ages of famine. It’s only in the last few centuries that food has become cheap and abundant, and it’s still not that way everywhere. You take a satiation system that is evolved for an age of famine, but require it to live in an age of abundance? Obesity is the inevitable result. Sure, you can always starve yourself into a healthy weight. But the point is human beings aren’t evolved to have to maintain their weight through painful conscious self-denial. We’re supposed to simply eat when we’re hungry and stop when we’re full. That’s how human beings have lived for most of history and pre-history. And until the era of modern cheap calories? Our ancestors never really had to worry about eating themselves to obesity. There was only so much honey you could get a hold of, and it required taking quite a few bee stings to get it. Maybe the Lord in his castle had to worry about obesity, but this is a burden our ancestors never had at scale. We guilt ourselves for failure to maintain healthy weights, when that’s just not something humans should have to consciously do.
But we need not accept endless calorie counting and weight maintenance through intentional starvation. We also don’t need to return to an age of deprivation. We CAN have our cake and eat it to. We don’t need to accept obesity or starvation. We can build a world where calories are cheap and abundant, but people can simply modify their satiation systems to achieve whatever body weight they want without conscious effort. Find a way to get these drugs to everyone. That is how you solve the obesity crisis. Some may not want to take them or have medical reasons they can’t. But it doesn’t matter. Imagine lamenting if we only cut the obesity rate by 80%. Simply giving these drugs out free to as many people as want them will inevitably be the most effective form of obesity intervention a government could ever do. Forget public health campaigns and presidential fitness tests. Just get people the damn medicine they need.
We invented a miracle. Let’s share the wonder.
The drug stops people from getting fat, but that doesn’t mean they’re suddenly healthy.
Here’s what’s going to happen with that. They’ll take the drug and not exercise and still end up dying early. Because, keeping the fat off is, at best, only half a solution.
Also, the long term effects of the drug aren’t known, they can’t be, it hasn’t been around long enough to know.
Kill corn subsidies.
I’ve been proposing that we tax HFCS out of existence for years now. Tax the hell out of all calorie dense sweeteners. When Dr Pepper Zero costs half as much as the sugary stuff, you’ll see a lot more people making the switch
The opposite is happening though. HFCS only exists because of subsidies for corn, it wouldn’t be cheaper than beet sugar otherwise, especially if farmers had to pay a fair price for the water they use.
What worked for me was living somewhere I could do a lot of outdoor labor. So I say replace all excavators with manual labor.
I wonder if part of it is because food is less nutritious than it used to be. So we eat more to unconsciously fulfill our nutrition needs, inadvertently also eating enough to help increase weight. I’m not saying this is the answer, but it may be a contributing cause.
not really. It’s basically like smoking. The fast food gives you a nice feeling and you want more.
We know it’s bad for us. It feels too good to stop and is an emotional crutch and people lose the ability to self regulate the context for the cheap, high calorie foods.
Source: am fat
One of the best available interventions is mandatory cooking classes in high school. Cut the necessary time out of other classes and do it.
The issue has been pretty much solved. Now we just need to distribute the solution to the people that need it.
I’m not buying that the drug has solved this problem. That drug should only be for people who can’t seem to make any other solution work, the same way surgery is used. It should not be distributed willy-nilly to everyone who asks and can pay for it.
I think most problems with obesity will be solved like this:
If it weren’t taboo, people would for sure just buy mobility scooters and ride around in those all day.
Ban all cell phone chargers except for human-powered generators. If you want to use a cell phone, you have to work for it by generating the power with your muscles.
Home / office hamster wheels, treadmills, etc - these would be the only things with a phone charger cable under my brilliant plan.
I have thought abut this before… slightly appealing…
“You just eat less and exercise more.”
- Kronk, Crash Nitro Kart
(Or like, regulating the food industry and providing real grocery opportunities for everyone)
I can tell you what I did. I went from 92 kilos to 69 kilos in a year.
- Nearly removed all carbs from my diet
- Increased diet to include vegetables and chicken and eggs
- Removed artificial sugar
- Removed all apps which allowed food delivery
- Went to gym 5 days a week
- Told myself everyday “trust the process”
I started noticing changes after 3 months.
Now how do you convert this into government policy? That is a huge problem altogether. Long term thinking + strong regulations. Even if you try something like this, you will be ridiculed for suggesting government overreach. At the end of the day, a diet is a personal choice.
This works, I did it too. I lost 65 pounds in six months, and It’s been gone for over ten years now.
But, that doesn’t make profits for the rich and takes effort, so they made a drug instead.
