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
if all you’re getting is nasty apples
Growing up I thought I didn’t prefer apples. It turns out I just don’t like the most common apple that was fed to me. “Red Delicious” is false advertising. Fuji, Jazz, Honeycrisp, Yellow Delicious, Pink Lady, are all far far superior. I’ll even eat a Gala apple even thought those are just okay. Red Delicious apples are trash tier apples.
Bro what are you talking about zuchcineine and appel GOOD you are the avatar of the demiurge
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.
I posted my comment before seeing yours and my experience is a close match to what you describe.
One isn’t worse than the other, we’re just taught that.
Hard disagree. Even as an adult a Red Delicious is a disappointment. I don’t turn down free apples when offered. I always turn down Red Delicious.
Nah, the hate for Red Delicious comes from the fact that they’ve been bred to look good and have a long shelf life instead of having good flavor. They used to taste better, but due to the industrialization of farming, orchards were paid more for better looking apples. Eventually, the cultivar developed into the modern Red Delicious, which has a thick skin and starchy texture that resists bruising during machine handling.
To add to that, if weight loss peptides like Ozempic are working, let them work.
My mother, in her late 60s is obese. She was forced to retire early due to this, she has had lifelong self image issues due to this, and she’s very aware that it’s both robbing her ability to enjoy her later years, and years of her life. Until this year, she was staunchly against taking Ozempic due to potential side effects, but the reality is that the side effects of Obesity are so much worse.
For an analogy, there is a lot of evidence that the quantity of people who need to wear glasses has increased because in infancy, children are not looking at distant objects, and irreversible damage is occurring to their vision as a result. Of course this is something we want parents to consider in how they realise their children, but it would be monstrous to then deprive that person of glasses because the fault is societal.
Everything on your list is the equivalent of encouraging children to exercise their eyes, and is absolutely the best way to treat obesity, but medication should be considered as a treatment beyond this.
And cheap non processed food overall.
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
Cheap access to fresh fruit and veg
Won’t work. In my hospital cafeteria at lunch, med staff is lined up at the salad bar, patients line up at the deep fryer. People get a plate of fries and pour gravy over it and call that a meal.
Why does your hospital have a deep fryer to begin with? I’m sure if they set out a pile of low cost cocaine they’d consume that as well, it’s silly to offer people addictive foods and then turn your nose up at them when they eat them; especially in the context of being in the middle of what is probably one of the most stressful events of their lives and likely wanting familiar comfort food.
Anyway, the only difference between you/your colleagues and your patients is covered by my second point: education.
Why does your hospital have a deep fryer to begin with?
Because the cafeteria needs to stay open and patients demand it. If we didn’t have shit to feed idiots, idiots would order shit in. You cannot force people to eat well.
If you’re just reading the first sentence of everything I type I don’t see a reason to continue
I have an 11 word tolerance for stupid. No idea what you are talking about.
Fruit and vegetables are already cheaper than whatever atuff their faces with.
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There’s no one single approach.
- Stop overincentivizing HFCS; as a sugar replacement, its main feature is suppressing natural hormones that tell you “I’m full, let’s stop eating”. It’s a corn product, which often makes it a very “American” thing to support.
- Design walkable communities. Many people can’t schedule out time to get exercise, but should get it regularly through their job or community.
- Make programs designed to promote home cooking, ensuring people have time in their day to do it, adequate kitchen space, and buy-in from their family or lifemates. Many people live off take-out or ready meals, which means they don’t know what goes into it, and also don’t socialize with family.
When my kids were younger we subscribed to a meal kit service. They would select from a limited menu, then we would get ingredients and instructions. It was great at teaching my kids how to cook. It was also much more efficient than trying to do the same from scratch: we already had the right amounts of all ingredients and simplified step by step. We saved time.
However it was expensive. I wonder if some sort of subsidized service like that would help people learn how to cook and develop the habit
A localized meal service like that would be really awesome. Locally sourced ingredients where available, pick up or drop off within X miles. It might be hard to match price at scale bring smaller, but with a subsidy it absolutely could work.
Yeah, I know it’s just reinventing the soup kitchen.
A coop for meals not groceries would be nice
This is gonna be an unpopular take, but I vote for federally subsidized meth rations. I bet I’d be super productive and who needs sleep?
this guy meths
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.
The education system needs to be redeveloped from the ground up. It’s a 19th century system in the 21st century.
Physical Education needs to be prioritized as does social engagement.
This will be unpopular, but: just stop caring. Let people be whatever size, treat them equally, and don’t sweat it. You may not like that but one way to solve an issue is to realize there is no issue.
Would people be healthier if they weren’t obese? Possibly. The evidence is a little mixed. I’m in the middle where I think not being obese is healthier but the effect is overblown by related factors. People would be healthier if no one drank alcohol but I don’t think banning alcohol is worth it.
(Revealing my biases: I’ve been extremely fit, I’ve also been technically obese, and I’m on a GLP-1 inhibitor because I want to lose weight. But I’m not interested in telling other people how heavy they should be)
Bring on the downvotes, my body is ready.
I disagree. Obesity is medically proven to be unhealthy, and many obese people might just give up trying to improve their health, especially if they are told that there’s “no issue”.
Even if we didn’t care about them or their health, society at large still pays for the extra inevitable medical bills, since we can’t really just stop providing healthcare for medical issues caused or exacerbated by obesity.
So you agree that alcohol and automobiles should be banned because they are harmful to health and society pays substantial costs due to their negative impacts?
I didn’t say anything about banning anything in my previous comment, so I’m not sure where you’re getting that from. But anyway:
Automobiles have negatives, but also positives. In my opinion we shouldn’t ban them, but if we can encourage reduced usage where unnecessary it could help people’s health and the environment. But it would be silly to ignore the benefits that they did and do provide.
As for alcohol, I wouldn’t outright ban it, but I would lean towards banning advertising it.
As you’ve been both fit and technically obese, I suspect you also realize exercise is much harder to do when you’re obese. Not just because moving your body is harder, but because you have less energy and thus it might be much harder to motivate yourself. It’s a vicious cycle where gaining weight is even easier when sedentary and being obese makes it harder to not be sedentary.
And with socialized healthcare in most countries, everyone’s paying the price. I say this as someone currently technically obese as well.
Luckily most people don’t WANT to be obese, so GLP-1 inhibitors are a bit of a godsend. Forcing anyone to lose weight I can’t condone, but giving people the best possible chances to be healthy seems like a no-brainer.
Thanks for this sane comment.
Switch to Scientific Socialism where people aren’t overworked and in deep debt over shitty capitalism.
Whats the link? Stress, obviously.
Obesity was essentially nonexistent in Ukraine during the 1930’s and China during the 1950’s, before unscientific capitalism came along and screwed everything up
Hard to be obese when there’s no fucking food.
People were also severely stressed in the centuries past (remember, the 8 hour workday is a recent invention). Less stress helps for sure, but the availability of calorie-dense food engineered to be delicious is probably even worse.
Did they have long hours before industrial revolution though?
I mean farmhands would work from sunup to sundown. That was the profession of a lot of people pre-industrial age. I’m not sure what white collar workers would’ve be working but I doubt less than 10 hours on average.
What needs to be done and what will be done are unfortunately never going to align as long as someone stands to get rich on it.
What needs to be done:
- Healthier food options
- Healthier work/life balance
- Education on what is healthy and unhealthy
- Encouragement to daily physical
Why this will never be done:
- Too much money to be made on “tasty” premade meals, which “tasty” and “profitable” require lots of flavor enhancers and preservatives, both very calorically imbalanced / dense and also toxic in large quantities (toxicity is how preservatives work). If you don’t flavor enhance, your competitor will for cheaper and people won’t buy your option. Also each growing industry insisting their food in solo is the healthiest when it is not. I’m pointing at you corn and grain industries.
- 40 hr 9-5 8/5 work week is only office workers. Servicemen and retail sales often work 10-12+ hours per day or have all hours on call.
- points at every part of the American education system and its exported policies other countries sometimes take up
- Point 2 is the reason a lot of people don’t exercise. There is no time to do so.
- Healthcare is expensive. When there is money to be made, it is always in healthcare. If you can’t afford a consumer product, you don’t buy it. If you can’t afford a surgery or medicine to save your life, you die. This simple fact makes it nearly impossible to have any say in how much a treatment costs.
This is not just an American problem. Other western countries have this issue as well, and I hope people in other nations see the danger and keep themselves healthy.
Treating it like the multifaceted issue it is instead of a moral failing would be a start.
In the US that would mean labor laws which favor the human instead of the business. With hours that allow more daily personal time and pay that allows prosperity even at minimum wages. These things would take care of most people.
It would also mean medical treatment being available without burdensome cost, and with consideration to it being a mental hurdle like addiction and destigmatizing seeking aid for it in that manner. Universal healthcare removing the need/demand for private and employment tied insurance would help this as well.
There are many more facets, and facets within facets to all of this, but from a mile high view I think this would help a lot.
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
his wife’s vegan detox diet
detox diets are bullshit. Just stop eating crap. Spurlock’s wife stopped being vegan and the cult almost crucified her.
And he died of cancer. They say it didn’t have anything to do with the diet, but it could have
He had testicular cancer, but he was also a huge alcoholic. He didn’t die of cancer but his publicist would only admit to “cancer related complications”.
Interesting. I’ve never heard what kind of cancer he had, can you provide me a link that says it was testicular?
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)
give them all ozempic or GLP-1. almost every method, they want quick fixes, or dont want do dieting or exercising or they dont want to do it. glp-1 has a side benefit in helping with other addictions.
People on ozempic loose around 7 % of their bodyweight and gain it back when they stop. Not a great solution to a non existent problem.
obesity a non-existent problem, you must be smoking something. obviously people were joking on surely on it.
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.
Free healthcare including counseling, free gyms, shorter work weeks to give people more time for activities, and subsidize healthy foods so they’re more affordable.
Thanks for highlighting counseling. I think people kind of ignore/underestimate the mental aspect of trying to be fit. A true long-lasting healthy life needs its ground work to be based on sustainable habits. It needs to be taught that fitness isn’t what you do for 1 hour in the gym, but the full 24 hours in your day. At the same time, fitness isn’t torturing your body. You need to reward yourself from time to time (but within limits).
I’d like to add that this education and building of habits should start in grade school.
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.
If you reduce obesity, how will healthcare insurance companies survive? Won’t someone think about the poor billionaire CEOs?
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.
It means a hell of a lot healthier than they were before! We’ve seen that these drugs improve a myriad of health issues. The idea that they don’t help with health is just cope. And no, it really isn’t a half solution. Your health improves the same whether you lose weight via dieting or drugs. Because ultimately you’re doing the exact same thing - eating less.
You’re stuck in Christian cultural thinking. Instinctively you think any boon must have a terrible price associated with it. And we can’t know the side effects? I’m sorry, but that is not how side effects work. There are not medications that never show a side effect for years and then suddenly have it show up decades later. A side effect can become more common with time, but it will show up in some people in the short term. People have been using these drugs for years. We’re not going to see mysterious terrible effects show up decades from now.
By your logic, we could never implement any new medication. There would always be the risk of unknown effects decades down the road. If we followed your methods, we would have never been able to deploy the covid vaccine and hundreds of millions of people would have died. But thankfully that doesn’t happen. We can test drugs in the short term and be reasonably confident of the long term risks.
I challenge you to find a single medication of any kind that showed no side effects in early studies, only to have them be widespread after decades of use. Show one medication. Just one medication that has ever worked the way you’re speculating. You will not find it. The closest I can think of is thalidomide and its negative effects showed up very quickly. Thalidomide was the result of improper testing, ignoring test results, and it resulted in the complete overhaul of the drug testing process.
Drugs simply do not work like you’re suggesting. Side effects don’t just show up mysteriously after decades. That has literally never happened.
You’re stuck in a Faustian mindset. Any boon must have a terrible cost. You simply can’t accept a wonder of modern medicine when it’s right in front of your eyes. It’s not surprising. It’s the same underlying belief structure of every anti-vaxxer.
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.
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Non shitholes teach children how to eat in schools.
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no one reads.
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people have hours to sit in front of screens
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i don’t buy this. just lazy
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Never will happen in USA.
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No one can afford that in USA.
1,2,5, & 6 - yes, I’m saying that these are issues that need to be addressed. What do you think you’re adding to the conversation here?
3&4- yes, because after working, often in excess of 40 hours a week, commuting, running errands, and with little money left over to show for it at the end (ties into point 6) what else is there for them to do? People do not have unlimited energy or money. People are tired and need time to relax and enjoy themselves as well, if they spent hours reading or knitting, or tinkering with electronics instead would you still begrudge them that? As far as physical health goes, that’s about the same. Planning and preparing a proper, balanced meal takes some time and energy, and a lot of people are running on empty, and if they want to have any time to enjoy their lives that may mean microwaving a frozen dinner or ordering takeout.
My wife has lost a lot of weight over the last year, getting up at the ass crack of dawn to hit the gym, and sometimes again after work, she’s often leaving the house before 5am, and doesn’t return home until 5 or even 7pm if she hits the gym twice. That leaves her with about 2-4 hours to herself when she gets in to have dinner, prep her breakfast and lunch for the next day because she won’t have time for it in the morning, and do whatever other chores she needs to do.
Imagine trying to squeeze that in if you also have kids or other obligations you need to take care of after work, or if you work more than the 40 hours a week she does.
And sure, if you stick to a diet of beans and kale or something, it can be an affordable diet, but most people aren’t going to last long eating such a limited diet, and a lot of the more diet-friendly foods can get pricey fast.
And food deserts are absolutely a thing, I live in one. It’s a solid 15 minute drive to a grocery store, there is no public transit in my area, it would be the better part of an hour one way to bike there, and close to 2 hours if I needed to walk, and those roads are absolutely not friendly to pedestrians and bikes. If we didn’t have cars, it would be pretty hard for us to get groceries, especially if I didn’t have friends I could get a ride from, and borderline impossible if we were elderly or disabled (especially since I work night shift which further limits when I can get to a grocery store while I’m awake.) I can get a couple things from a convenience store and CVS that are in a somewhat more reasonable walking distance (though those roads aren’t exactly pedestrian friendly either) but that’s mostly going to be prepackaged junk food, if I’m lucky maybe I can get a couple fresh apples and bananas or an overpriced premade salad.
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We can start by not eating highly processed, industrially made food-like substances.
