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?
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.
Be different animals or require life to be more physically demanding. The problem isn’t food, it’s just how we are, literally any other animal in an ecological setting like humans would have the same problem. There is no requirement in the modern world that requires humans to not be fat.
It’s not healthy, but to survive in human society physical fitness is 100% not a requirement. This is just us now.
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
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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.
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, 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
Nah. There’s not really any significant benefit to making such changes from a government perspective.
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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)
One of the best available interventions is mandatory cooking classes in high school. Cut the necessary time out of other classes and do it.
People eating unhealthy food is partially related to their situation, it could be mental, it could be physical, or simply convenience.
The main thing is to have some form of exercise that people can do and that caters to their energy levels. Granted not everyone can, not everyone wants to. And sometimes, it’s not feasible.
I wrote this in another post; growing up I would eat 5000-10000 (spring vs winter) calories a day and never could get past 125, but I also had gym and track in school, swimming practice, martial arts classes, and a military style torturous daily workout… every day. And I would still go ride bikes with my friends on the street or play tag or whatever. In the winter I would shovel the snow, which would probably be considered child abuse these days. Now I’m not saying do everyone should do that. I even toned down how much I did when I started college but I still practiced to be able to do a triathlon. It’s a shame I broke my leg before being able to try one.
I would eat breakfast, two school lunches, have snacks, eat when I got home, and have second supper. I could easily eat a dominos pizza to by myself (probably did a number on my gut since I learned I can’t eat wheat) and wash it down with some soda.
Now I bring this up because I worked in education briefly and ate lunch with the kids during lunch duty; I can tell you if anyone was as active as I was, I would need at least four lunches to make through the day. Sure it was the healthy lunch implementation, but I the result that I saw was that kids were lethargic and sure it made the classes easy to do since everyone was so docile but I think that was a terrible way to go about it. And I tried their “healthy” lunches out intentionally; if it we’re not for drinking a whole pot of coffee a day, I wouldn’t make it through the 14 hour day (school, after school, and commute).
Also, it’s been so hot this year that my only exercise was mowing the lawn before feeling cooked. I wouldn’t mind going to a pool but it’s more of a hot tub. YMCA has an inside pool but I can’t afford $95 a month. I can’t run anymore because of the metal. And my two bicycles collect dust since I have to go to a trail or a park for biking unless I want to be roadkill, even then I can only do that maybe two to three months out of the year because of how hot it gets.
Even recognizing that people have dietary restrictions is a great start. I can’t eat wheat or lentils, and certain fruits.
Quality, cost, and availability of food is very high on the list. And I’ll be honest, food in America is some of the worst I’ve eaten and it’s even worse lately; I’ve had MREs that tasted better than frozen food that I used to eat as a kid in the US. Mmmm, textured soy protein and emulsifiers.
I felt great and lost weight in Japan, Korea, Ireland, European countries. I was 165 pounds when I got back from Japan. I’m back to 200ish. Sigh. I don’t eat out much and generally cook at home. The issue for me is that meat and dairy have become expensive. And eating rice and beans and vegetables barely gets me by to do daily tasks.
And none of the countries I’ve mentioned are perfect by any means but there is a bigger focus on food health and safety instead of spin the wheel for today’s recall! It’s like I can eat all the raw fish, beef, eggs, raw pork in Germany lol, shellfish and so on but this last year has been wild for food recalls. I mean ice cream? Can’t even trust lettuce or a pepper.
Kill corn subsidies.
What worked for me was living somewhere I could do a lot of outdoor labor. So I say replace all excavators with manual labor.
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.
1 fix bmi. Its completely wrong for people who are very tall or very Short making insurance more expensive among other things.
2 glp1 for all
Yeah the glp1 drugs are very promising for a number of things but absolutely clearly can solve the obesity epidemic.
Redefine obese.
I think that the definition of it is a BMI over 25 (though I’ve also heard the BMI system is flawed in its own right)
Could start with a system that works for anyone else besides young white men 🤷🏻
Two hundred years ago, you were considered smart if you could read. Now, it takes a lot more.
New day, new standard. 6’ tall men between 200-300lbs will from henceforth be considered “Big guys” and 300+ shall be obese.
Might not be the answer people want, but the most immediate fix is to increase the availability of GLP-1 drugs. They genuinely work well. It’s not the “perfect world” solution, but it’s looking at cutting the rate of heart disease dramatically, which means something.
The rest is systemic and will take a lot longer to fix. Not just making it easier to access quality healthy ingredients, but making it more advantageous to pick healthy options over junk. And part of it is also cultural, having to redefine an entire cuisine or adapt it to healthier formats. That type of change takes generations.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the GLP-1 solution more of a ‘plaster’ (or band-aid if you’re American) kind of solution? (Not saying it doesn’t work, but is it just a plaster kind of way of working)?
Calorie counting is also a plaster. The fundamental problem is that people have satiation systems that are built for ages of famine, and we live in an age of cheap abundant calories. (For most people.)
Calorie counting is a cheap hack fix for a satiation system ill-calibrated for the modern world. Yes, you can count calories, stop eating while you’re still hungry, and forcibly starve yourself down to a healthy weight. And many do do this. I did. Many times. But in the end, life happens, some stressful event interrupts, or you just don’t have the energy to keep up with it and resist the hunger.
There’s a reason diets have such poor track records. They’re an attempt to apply conscious effort to a system that did not evolve to require conscious effort. And while that can be maintained for a time, it just plasters over the fundamental problem. And it usually fails in time. That’s what I experienced. Through conscious effort, self-deprivation, and calorie counting, I could starve myself down to a healthy weight. I was healthy, but miserable. You get an irrational hunger for a completely unneeded meal at 10 PM? Just have to go to bed hungry if you want to stay at a healthy weight. No matter how long I kept the weight off, I never reached a point where my hunger levels adjusted to match what I was eating. It was endless self-deprivation. I can only maintain that effort for so long.
But GLP-1 agonists? I’m on one. And it has completely solved my weight issues. I wasn’t even extremely obese or anything. I was at a BMI of 30. After a year and a half on tirzepatide, I’m down to a BMI of 22. And through this whole time, I’ve never counted calories. I deliberately did not do so. I wanted to see what effect the medication would have on my satiation system. And yeah, I found a dose that works, while the side effects are manageable, and it’s completely solved my weight issues. I can now maintain a very healthy weight with zero conscious effort. And the side effects have been quite manageable. I maybe get a bit of mild nausea in the first days after an injection. But even then usually not. And compared to how much better being that much lighter makes me feel? There is no comparison. I’m literally in the best shape of my life (relative to my age at least.) Not being stuck overweight also gave me the confidence to find a form of exercise that works for me. My partner and I have taken up powerlifting, so I’m truly in the best shape of my life, by any measure of fitness. Frankly, as far as I’m concerned, from my own lived experience? We have invented the cure for obesity. Ok, maybe it’s technically a treatment than a cure. But I would say it treats the underlying issue and by doing so cures obesity. Or maybe it’s a cure in the sense of, “knowledge is the cure to ignorance.” It’s an ongoing cure. 😂
And so what if I have to keep taking the drug? Most adults take long-term maintenance medications. Vitamins if nothing else. And if five years from now some supply disruption would cause me to lose access? It would simply put me back at the weight I was before, with the permanent benefit of having lived five years less under the cumulative health effects of an unhealthy body weight.
I also see no reason they need to be expensive. I couldn’t afford to pay retail, and my weight was never bad enough to get insurance coverage. I’m also a bit “chaotic good” in nature. So I’m taking the bootleg stuff. Just stuff from Chinese suppliers sold over the internet without a prescription. Sounds scary, but there are some reliable ones out there. And I’ve confirmed it’s the real stuff by using it. And I’ve continuously monitored my health. I’m the healthiest I’ve been in many many years. And the cost? About a dollar a day. For a dollar a day, I have simply solved my weight problem. I eat when I want. I eat til I’m full. And at least in terms of my body and weight, I am at peace.
And I see no reason these couldn’t get cheaper still. Wait until the patents expire! Wait until the massive generics really get going, making enough to supply billions of people. Oh, and they need not be injections either. Pills are in development.
The future is one where you can simply and affordably choose what weight you will carry. Want to be skinny? Want to be husky? Want to perfect your Henry VIII cosplay by becoming as fat as the old bastard? It’s all just a pill away. Another case of technology challenging a fundamental assumption of human existence.
I wonder what effect that will have on culture. We used to value being fat because only the rich could afford to do it. We now value being skinny and fit because only the rich can afford that. What happens when anyone can just choose whatever body type they want with no effort and little money?
Anyway, pardon my ramblings. But I really wanted to share a personal anecdote. Apologies for the length.
Those GLP drugs, the news about them keeps getting better and better. Price is the big barrier - if they were not so expensive, there seems to be a benefit to staying on them. Probably because they reduce blood sugar, they are very good for your brain and heart, improve overall health beyond the weight loss effect. So I wouldn’t call them a band-aid.
In a way. It reduces appetite, which reduces urge to eat lots of junk. But it doesn’t stop people from eating junk, they just eat a little bit of junk instead of a lot of it.
The end goal should be to make it easier to eat healthy foods over junk in the first place, but that’s a long way off. If we’re talking the most direct way to address obesity as an epidemic, namely reducing the adverse health effects it has across a large population, the meds are the most immediate and impactful short term solution.
