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On June 22 2023 20:17 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On June 22 2023 20:11 Magic Powers wrote:
The obesity epidemic only started in the late 20th century. This cannot be explained by people lacking discipline. It is best explained by the fact that a significant portion of people were always genetically predisposed to become obese given a specific set of circumstances. That set of circumstances has arrived with the advance of tasty calorically dense foods being made available to the population at large - something that wasn't the case at any point before in human history. The fact that you make a leap to genetic predisposition lying dormant for millennia instead of just the fact that 'we' eat more fat and unhealthy food then ever before is so weird to me.
This.
Some people get fat way "easier" than others but they don't became fat because of that. I'm overweight myself and I know the reasons. Blaming my genes would do exactly nothing because they are not the cause, but it would be a very easy cope and morons all over the internet (and sadly mostly the left) even support such utter bullshit just to make sure not to hurt any fat slobs feelings.
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On June 22 2023 20:23 Simberto wrote:Show nested quote +On June 22 2023 19:22 BlackJack wrote:On June 22 2023 19:04 Simberto wrote:On June 22 2023 18:10 BlackJack wrote:
fwiw I don't think the gas stove ban is done for efficiency purposes but health purposes, e.g. triggering asthma. Or at least that's how they are selling it. Electric stoves are still considered fine and as far as I know they are pretty comparable to gas stoves in energy efficiency. I've lived in Florida most my life and we don't even really have gas stoves there (only 8% of homes from what I just googled). We don't really need to heat our homes so we don't have gas hookups in the first place. I've used gas stoves while living in other parts of the country and I generally find them much nicer to cook with, but it's generally not something I care about in the least. A big advantage of electric compared to gas, even when at simiar energy efficiency, is that you can power electric stoves with renewables. You cannot power gas stoves with renewable energy. I don't think they work with hydrogen, and using renewable energy to synthesize methane is another massive energy inefficiency that usually makes it prohibitively expensive. Edit: regarding obesity On June 22 2023 18:36 BlackJack wrote:On June 22 2023 18:14 Magic Powers wrote:
Not being conservative doesn't automatically make a person pro-science. This should be fairly obvious.
Regarding the obesity crisis, it is definitely correct that it's caused in very large part by genetics. What is not true is the claim that that's the only cause or the claim that individual cases of obesity cannot be combated with diet and exercise. I don't believe these claims were being made though, because the precise phrasing is important.
“The number one cause of obesity is genetics,” she said. “That means if you are born to parents that have obesity, you have a 50 to 85 percent likelihood of having the disease yourself, even with optimal diet, exercise, sleep management, stress management.”
This quote pertains to the genetic desease, NOT to the process of weight gain or weight loss. The part of the quote "[...] even with optimal diet, exercise, sleep management, stress management." refers to the genetic desease. The disease itself will be present regardless of lifestyle choices, and it's caused by genetics. That's what it says, and that's completely true.
Furthermore, an individual finding it within themselves to lose weight is not the same thing as a population doing the same. The process for an individual is indeed mainly diet and exercise. But people wrongly assume that that's all there is to it.
There are a number of factors, among them being 1) accessibility of (especially cheap and tasty) calorie-dense food, 2) environment (family etc.), 3) occupation, 4) mental state, and several others. Note that I haven't even mentioned genetics. I'm demonstrating how complex weight loss really is for obese people.
We can tell a person to change their diet all we want, it will only happen if the circumstances are conducive to the necessary behavioral changes. Just explaining to people why diet and exercise helps them lose weight and encouraging them to do it isn't going to do anything to solve the obesity crisis by and large. This is what Cody Stanford says (paraphrasing "willpower is not the answer") and once again it's completely true.
I know some people have a hard time believing this. But the data strongly suggests that individuals are not at fault for being obese. The crisis started during the latter half of the 20th century and it was NOT because people suddenly lost their willpower. The truth is that many years ago the types of food that cause obesity weren't available in large quantities, for cheap and at convenient distances to the population at large. What does that even mean? Are you implying that even people that have good diet and exercise and are in really good physical shape still have a genetic disease of "obesity" that they inherited from their obese parents except that it's just in a latent form? Also yes obviously it's hard for people to avoid cheap and tasty food and exercise and do all the right things. Almost nobody wants to be fat. If people could snap their fingers and will more discipline upon themselves I'm sure they would have done that already. It's not about assigning blame or shaming individuals that are obese. It's about accepting reality and not lying to people by telling them that they have no responsibility for the shape they are in and they just got dealt a shitty hand genetically. You're right that people didn't just lose their willpower in the latter half of the 20th century and Drone is right that there wasn't some sudden uptick in fat genes in the latter half of the 20th century. One thing i notice almost completely missing from this discussion is societal change beyond the individual. We can greatly reduce the probability of people getting fat on a societal policy level. Make healthy food cheaper, make calory-dense stuff more expensive. Make softdrinks more expensive. Make water cheaper. Put less HFC and sugar into fucking everything (limit this by law or whatever). Make biking to places an easy, cheap and efficient way of short-distance travel. Have walkable cities. Both "willpower" and "genes" are pretty obviously stupid as approaches, and almost certainly being lobbied for because they don't cut into company profits. Availability and incentives simply work. If sugarwater is cheaper than healthy drinks, a lot of people will buy sugar water. If every processed food contains 10% sugar, it becomes really hard not to get fat if you don't want to put in a lot of extra work. If high-sugar and high-fat processed crap is cheaper than fresh veggies and fruit, people will by the processed crap. And start in school. Every school lunch needs to be healthy. Any food sold in schools needs to be healthy and cheap. Have restrictions on sugar advertisements aimed at kids. There is a lot of stuff we can do as a society. But it is hard, because corporate lobbying wants the opposite. Hm... Is the renewables thing even relevant anytime soon though? Don't we still require mostly fossil fuels to power our grids and the allocation of the power is somewhat fungible? In other words we would still use up all the renewable energy to power other things and it's not like we would have extra renewable energy going to waste because our stoves only use gas. I think it is, especially when considering goals like being climate-neutral in 2050 or earlier. Stoves last a pretty long time. Getting people to change out a working stove for a different one is hard, and people tend to get very angry. A much better solution is for people who would get a new stove or replace their old one to get electric ones instead of gas stoves. But that takes a long time, because people don't exchange their stoves often. So you need to start early. If you only start with this once we have the necessary renewable capacity, you waste the 10-20 years it takes for people to actually change their stoves naturally or you make everyone angry by forcing them to exchange their working stoves. It takes even longer if you consider that you need different building infrastructure for electric stoves compared to gas stoves. You no longer need to lay gas pipes, and instead you need high-current power lines. You also need to prepare municipal power infrastructure to take the additional demand that accumulates from electrifying more and more things. Once those electric stoves are in place, nothing needs to change for the people in the houses anymore. Which is good, because people are pretty resistant to changing stuff. But once they have them, their electric stoves will just keep on working. You can change the source of the electricity without the people having to do anything, or feeling any impact on their lives whatsoever. Edit: Show nested quote +On June 22 2023 20:17 Gorsameth wrote:On June 22 2023 20:11 Magic Powers wrote:
The obesity epidemic only started in the late 20th century. This cannot be explained by people lacking discipline. It is best explained by the fact that a significant portion of people were always genetically predisposed to become obese given a specific set of circumstances. That set of circumstances has arrived with the advance of tasty calorically dense foods being made available to the population at large - something that wasn't the case at any point before in human history. The fact that you make a leap to genetic predisposition lying dormant for millennia instead of just the fact that 'we' eat more fat and unhealthy food then ever before is so weird to me. I don't think it is that absurd. For millenia, storing lots of calories when you have access to them was a good survival treat. Getting calories irregularly was a problem that hindered individuals from reproduction, so dealing with that efficiently was good. Getting too many calories was never a problem in history, and especially evolutionary prehistory. So that genetic predisposition makes immediate sense to me. The problem and source of solution is still what we put into our bellies, because we cannot change our genetics anyways. But saying that we had the same genetics that lead to us getting fat when we eat too many calories for millenia is probably also correct. It just wasn't a problem, because we rarely had too many calories available.
Sure, but there’s still the issue of the bureaucrats who are advocating for the bans saying their reasoning is health concerns related to indoor pollutants, not energy concerns. So we have to take them at their word because we don’t want to be conspiracy theorists.
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On June 22 2023 20:42 BlackJack wrote:Show nested quote +On June 22 2023 20:23 Simberto wrote:On June 22 2023 19:22 BlackJack wrote:On June 22 2023 19:04 Simberto wrote:On June 22 2023 18:10 BlackJack wrote:
fwiw I don't think the gas stove ban is done for efficiency purposes but health purposes, e.g. triggering asthma. Or at least that's how they are selling it. Electric stoves are still considered fine and as far as I know they are pretty comparable to gas stoves in energy efficiency. I've lived in Florida most my life and we don't even really have gas stoves there (only 8% of homes from what I just googled). We don't really need to heat our homes so we don't have gas hookups in the first place. I've used gas stoves while living in other parts of the country and I generally find them much nicer to cook with, but it's generally not something I care about in the least. A big advantage of electric compared to gas, even when at simiar energy efficiency, is that you can power electric stoves with renewables. You cannot power gas stoves with renewable energy. I don't think they work with hydrogen, and using renewable energy to synthesize methane is another massive energy inefficiency that usually makes it prohibitively expensive. Edit: regarding obesity On June 22 2023 18:36 BlackJack wrote:On June 22 2023 18:14 Magic Powers wrote:
Not being conservative doesn't automatically make a person pro-science. This should be fairly obvious.
Regarding the obesity crisis, it is definitely correct that it's caused in very large part by genetics. What is not true is the claim that that's the only cause or the claim that individual cases of obesity cannot be combated with diet and exercise. I don't believe these claims were being made though, because the precise phrasing is important.
“The number one cause of obesity is genetics,” she said. “That means if you are born to parents that have obesity, you have a 50 to 85 percent likelihood of having the disease yourself, even with optimal diet, exercise, sleep management, stress management.”
This quote pertains to the genetic desease, NOT to the process of weight gain or weight loss. The part of the quote "[...] even with optimal diet, exercise, sleep management, stress management." refers to the genetic desease. The disease itself will be present regardless of lifestyle choices, and it's caused by genetics. That's what it says, and that's completely true.
Furthermore, an individual finding it within themselves to lose weight is not the same thing as a population doing the same. The process for an individual is indeed mainly diet and exercise. But people wrongly assume that that's all there is to it.
There are a number of factors, among them being 1) accessibility of (especially cheap and tasty) calorie-dense food, 2) environment (family etc.), 3) occupation, 4) mental state, and several others. Note that I haven't even mentioned genetics. I'm demonstrating how complex weight loss really is for obese people.
We can tell a person to change their diet all we want, it will only happen if the circumstances are conducive to the necessary behavioral changes. Just explaining to people why diet and exercise helps them lose weight and encouraging them to do it isn't going to do anything to solve the obesity crisis by and large. This is what Cody Stanford says (paraphrasing "willpower is not the answer") and once again it's completely true.
I know some people have a hard time believing this. But the data strongly suggests that individuals are not at fault for being obese. The crisis started during the latter half of the 20th century and it was NOT because people suddenly lost their willpower. The truth is that many years ago the types of food that cause obesity weren't available in large quantities, for cheap and at convenient distances to the population at large. What does that even mean? Are you implying that even people that have good diet and exercise and are in really good physical shape still have a genetic disease of "obesity" that they inherited from their obese parents except that it's just in a latent form? Also yes obviously it's hard for people to avoid cheap and tasty food and exercise and do all the right things. Almost nobody wants to be fat. If people could snap their fingers and will more discipline upon themselves I'm sure they would have done that already. It's not about assigning blame or shaming individuals that are obese. It's about accepting reality and not lying to people by telling them that they have no responsibility for the shape they are in and they just got dealt a shitty hand genetically. You're right that people didn't just lose their willpower in the latter half of the 20th century and Drone is right that there wasn't some sudden uptick in fat genes in the latter half of the 20th century. One thing i notice almost completely missing from this discussion is societal change beyond the individual. We can greatly reduce the probability of people getting fat on a societal policy level. Make healthy food cheaper, make calory-dense stuff more expensive. Make softdrinks more expensive. Make water cheaper. Put less HFC and sugar into fucking everything (limit this by law or whatever). Make biking to places an easy, cheap and efficient way of short-distance travel. Have walkable cities. Both "willpower" and "genes" are pretty obviously stupid as approaches, and almost certainly being lobbied for because they don't cut into company profits. Availability and incentives simply work. If sugarwater is cheaper than healthy drinks, a lot of people will buy sugar water. If every processed food contains 10% sugar, it becomes really hard not to get fat if you don't want to put in a lot of extra work. If high-sugar and high-fat processed crap is cheaper than fresh veggies and fruit, people will by the processed crap. And start in school. Every school lunch needs to be healthy. Any food sold in schools needs to be healthy and cheap. Have restrictions on sugar advertisements aimed at kids. There is a lot of stuff we can do as a society. But it is hard, because corporate lobbying wants the opposite. Hm... Is the renewables thing even relevant anytime soon though? Don't we still require mostly fossil fuels to power our grids and the allocation of the power is somewhat fungible? In other words we would still use up all the renewable energy to power other things and it's not like we would have extra renewable energy going to waste because our stoves only use gas. I think it is, especially when considering goals like being climate-neutral in 2050 or earlier. Stoves last a pretty long time. Getting people to change out a working stove for a different one is hard, and people tend to get very angry. A much better solution is for people who would get a new stove or replace their old one to get electric ones instead of gas stoves. But that takes a long time, because people don't exchange their stoves often. So you need to start early. If you only start with this once we have the necessary renewable capacity, you waste the 10-20 years it takes for people to actually change their stoves naturally or you make everyone angry by forcing them to exchange their working stoves. It takes even longer if you consider that you need different building infrastructure for electric stoves compared to gas stoves. You no longer need to lay gas pipes, and instead you need high-current power lines. You also need to prepare municipal power infrastructure to take the additional demand that accumulates from electrifying more and more things. Once those electric stoves are in place, nothing needs to change for the people in the houses anymore. Which is good, because people are pretty resistant to changing stuff. But once they have them, their electric stoves will just keep on working. You can change the source of the electricity without the people having to do anything, or feeling any impact on their lives whatsoever. Edit: On June 22 2023 20:17 Gorsameth wrote:On June 22 2023 20:11 Magic Powers wrote:
The obesity epidemic only started in the late 20th century. This cannot be explained by people lacking discipline. It is best explained by the fact that a significant portion of people were always genetically predisposed to become obese given a specific set of circumstances. That set of circumstances has arrived with the advance of tasty calorically dense foods being made available to the population at large - something that wasn't the case at any point before in human history. The fact that you make a leap to genetic predisposition lying dormant for millennia instead of just the fact that 'we' eat more fat and unhealthy food then ever before is so weird to me. I don't think it is that absurd. For millenia, storing lots of calories when you have access to them was a good survival treat. Getting calories irregularly was a problem that hindered individuals from reproduction, so dealing with that efficiently was good. Getting too many calories was never a problem in history, and especially evolutionary prehistory. So that genetic predisposition makes immediate sense to me. The problem and source of solution is still what we put into our bellies, because we cannot change our genetics anyways. But saying that we had the same genetics that lead to us getting fat when we eat too many calories for millenia is probably also correct. It just wasn't a problem, because we rarely had too many calories available. Sure, but there’s still the issue of the bureaucrats who are advocating for the bans saying their reasoning is health concerns related to indoor pollutants, not energy concerns. So we have to take them at their word because we don’t want to be conspiracy theorists.
Oh damn, i nearly thought we were having a reasonable conversation, when you just wanted to find some way to pwn the libs or whatever. Why can't you just talk about the thing we were actually talking about, instead of trying to meander somewhere else so you can still "win" or whatever it is you are trying to do?
I have zero interest in talking about indoor pollution from gas stoves, simply because i know nothing about it. I was talking to you about something else, so no need to quippantly jump somewhere else immediately when you fear that you might need to actually agree with me.
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On June 22 2023 20:35 Magic Powers wrote:Show nested quote +On June 22 2023 20:17 Gorsameth wrote:On June 22 2023 20:11 Magic Powers wrote:
The obesity epidemic only started in the late 20th century. This cannot be explained by people lacking discipline. It is best explained by the fact that a significant portion of people were always genetically predisposed to become obese given a specific set of circumstances. That set of circumstances has arrived with the advance of tasty calorically dense foods being made available to the population at large - something that wasn't the case at any point before in human history. The fact that you make a leap to genetic predisposition lying dormant for millennia instead of just the fact that 'we' eat more fat and unhealthy food then ever before is so weird to me. I've been reading about the obesity epidemic for years. It's been well established in the scientific literature that only a tiny fraction of the population used to be obese, and the rise in obesity correlates perfectly with the commercialization of processed and ultra-processed food items. Ice cream, chocolate cakes and cookies used to be luxury items that few people could afford. The working class ate bread, potatoes or rice, and they were lucky to be able to afford cheese with every meal. Accessibility of such foods was also not granted to the working class. There's a reason why bread crust used to be "only for the poor" (even though it contains more micronutrients). I don't believe individual choices are the reason for the obesity epidemic. That just makes no sense. I think humans are largely predisposed to behave the way they do, and the environment is the triggering element for most of our behaviors. Really? You don't think its the individual choices to eat processed and ultra-processed food items?
You said it yourself, the difference is that we now have access to all this garbage food. The problem is the eating of the garbage food. Not genetics.
If people didn't stuff themselves full of crap then there wouldn't be an obesity epidemic.
Sure you can make points about how our brains are generally wired to really like the way all that bad food tastes and that it keeps telling us to eat more and more of it but in the end its still an individual persons choice what they decide to eat.
(ignoring for the moment how much cheaper such processed food tends to be and that for people who struggle to make ends meat it can, in certain parts of the world, be much cheaper to stuff yourself with bad food rather then eat healthily)
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On June 22 2023 21:10 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On June 22 2023 20:35 Magic Powers wrote:On June 22 2023 20:17 Gorsameth wrote:On June 22 2023 20:11 Magic Powers wrote:
The obesity epidemic only started in the late 20th century. This cannot be explained by people lacking discipline. It is best explained by the fact that a significant portion of people were always genetically predisposed to become obese given a specific set of circumstances. That set of circumstances has arrived with the advance of tasty calorically dense foods being made available to the population at large - something that wasn't the case at any point before in human history. The fact that you make a leap to genetic predisposition lying dormant for millennia instead of just the fact that 'we' eat more fat and unhealthy food then ever before is so weird to me. I've been reading about the obesity epidemic for years. It's been well established in the scientific literature that only a tiny fraction of the population used to be obese, and the rise in obesity correlates perfectly with the commercialization of processed and ultra-processed food items. Ice cream, chocolate cakes and cookies used to be luxury items that few people could afford. The working class ate bread, potatoes or rice, and they were lucky to be able to afford cheese with every meal. Accessibility of such foods was also not granted to the working class. There's a reason why bread crust used to be "only for the poor" (even though it contains more micronutrients). I don't believe individual choices are the reason for the obesity epidemic. That just makes no sense. I think humans are largely predisposed to behave the way they do, and the environment is the triggering element for most of our behaviors. Really? You don't think its the individual choices to eat processed and ultra-processed food items? You said it yourself, the difference is that we now have access to all this garbage food. The problem is the eating of the garbage food. Not genetics. If people didn't stuff themselves full of crap then there wouldn't be an obesity epidemic. Sure you can make points about how our brains are generally wired to really like the way all that bad food tastes and that it keeps telling us to eat more and more of it but in the end its still an individual persons choice what they decide to eat. (ignoring for the moment how much cheaper such processed food tends to be and that for people who struggle to make ends meat it can, in certain parts of the world, be much cheaper to stuff yourself with bad food rather then eat healthily)
I think that the population is made up of a mix of different genetic abilities. There's an advantage to being slim and slender, but there's also an advantage to being big and bulky. The former are better at running, jumping and climbing, the latter are better at pushing heavy stuff and surviving in cold weather or during famine. These different abilities are genetically encoded in the human species to varying degrees to ensure the survival of the species at large. While slim people are good at hunting prey and escaping predators, big people are good at building houses and surviving various harsh conditions. Many types of beneficial genetics pass on to the next generations, and the genes that make people more likely to become obese is a part of that.
In the developed world, by commercializing many calorically dense foods, we've created the perfect foundation for overweight people to use their advantage - but unfortunately without any of the benefits. We're not ensuring survival anymore, and other advantages of big people (like moving heavy stuff around) are also becoming obsolete because of heavy machinery.
So in the developed world there's not much use anymore for becoming big and bulky, but the phenomenon is now more prevalent than ever because of the massive societal leaps we've made over the last few centuries.
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On June 22 2023 21:10 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On June 22 2023 20:35 Magic Powers wrote:On June 22 2023 20:17 Gorsameth wrote:On June 22 2023 20:11 Magic Powers wrote:
The obesity epidemic only started in the late 20th century. This cannot be explained by people lacking discipline. It is best explained by the fact that a significant portion of people were always genetically predisposed to become obese given a specific set of circumstances. That set of circumstances has arrived with the advance of tasty calorically dense foods being made available to the population at large - something that wasn't the case at any point before in human history. The fact that you make a leap to genetic predisposition lying dormant for millennia instead of just the fact that 'we' eat more fat and unhealthy food then ever before is so weird to me. I've been reading about the obesity epidemic for years. It's been well established in the scientific literature that only a tiny fraction of the population used to be obese, and the rise in obesity correlates perfectly with the commercialization of processed and ultra-processed food items. Ice cream, chocolate cakes and cookies used to be luxury items that few people could afford. The working class ate bread, potatoes or rice, and they were lucky to be able to afford cheese with every meal. Accessibility of such foods was also not granted to the working class. There's a reason why bread crust used to be "only for the poor" (even though it contains more micronutrients). I don't believe individual choices are the reason for the obesity epidemic. That just makes no sense. I think humans are largely predisposed to behave the way they do, and the environment is the triggering element for most of our behaviors. Really? You don't think its the individual choices to eat processed and ultra-processed food items? You said it yourself, the difference is that we now have access to all this garbage food. The problem is the eating of the garbage food. Not genetics. If people didn't stuff themselves full of crap then there wouldn't be an obesity epidemic. Sure you can make points about how our brains are generally wired to really like the way all that bad food tastes and that it keeps telling us to eat more and more of it but in the end its still an individual persons choice what they decide to eat. (ignoring for the moment how much cheaper such processed food tends to be and that for people who struggle to make ends meat it can, in certain parts of the world, be much cheaper to stuff yourself with bad food rather then eat healthily)
Obviously individual choices are relevant here, and they are absolutely relevant for the results of an individual. And as a whole, those individual choices lead to a societal result, in this case a massive obesity problem.
But society can and regularly does influence the probabilities on individual decisions by changing the framework the decision is made in. As such, i find it much more fruitful to talk about the framework those decisions are made in rather than just saying "They are individual decisions", which tends to imply "nothing we can do about it".
Because we can change the framework. We (as a society) can shift the probabilities. We can make it more likely that people eat healthy. We can make it less likely that people end up obese. And we should. In the same way we can influence alcohol or tobacco consumption. We are not perfect at it, and we haven't found ideal solutions either, but we do manage to reduce the amount of people who smoke or who become alcoholics through setting up a framework which makes it less likely that people end up there.
And we should do the same thing for obesity. Figure out how to shift the framework that more people make the individual decision to live healthy, and fewer people make the individual decisions which lead to them becoming obese.
Fundamentally, the reason we have an obesity epidemic is multiple factors coming together. Saying "X is at fault" implying that only a singular reason exists is not that helpful. We have multiple factors where the removal of any of them would lead to there not being an obesity epidemic. Our evolutionary history and genetics. Fatty foods being available and cheap. Individuals making bad decisions.
Much more interesting is what we can change to combat said epidemic. And that is pretty clear. We cannot change our genetics. We cannot change each individuals decision. But we can change the societal framework in which the decisions are made in to incentivice more healthy decision.
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On June 22 2023 20:37 Velr wrote:Show nested quote +On June 22 2023 20:17 Gorsameth wrote:On June 22 2023 20:11 Magic Powers wrote:
The obesity epidemic only started in the late 20th century. This cannot be explained by people lacking discipline. It is best explained by the fact that a significant portion of people were always genetically predisposed to become obese given a specific set of circumstances. That set of circumstances has arrived with the advance of tasty calorically dense foods being made available to the population at large - something that wasn't the case at any point before in human history. The fact that you make a leap to genetic predisposition lying dormant for millennia instead of just the fact that 'we' eat more fat and unhealthy food then ever before is so weird to me. This. Some people get fat way "easier" than others but they don't became fat because of that. I'm overweight myself and I know the reasons. Blaming my genes would do exactly nothing because they are not the cause, but it would be a very easy cope and morons all over the internet (and sadly mostly the left) even support such utter bullshit just to make sure not to hurt any fat slobs feelings.
Gonna just say I'm super not on board with the fat shaming angle.
We talked in this thread at some length about why people need to get abortions, and how there are so many factors at play beyond just they were lazy and didn't use a condom. And also how it's none of our business why they need it and it's not our place to judge them for it. We also talk with some frequency about systemic injustice in America, and what shapes it takes because of how amorphous it is by design.
There are aspects of both of these discussions that apply to people being obese or overweight. You don't know why a particular person might be overweight, it might be by choice, or it might not. Not to blame it all on genes, there have seriously been major environmental changes in America, including a massive shift toward junk food, fast food, and processed food. We have food deserts all over this country, it doesn't mean they literally have no food to eat, but there's no place within 25 or 50 or 100 miles in places where you can go to a grocer and get fresh food that's good for you. We're getting advertisements constantly to go out and treat ourselves to this or that. The environment is downright nasty for certain groups if you want to eat right, instead of just eating processed cheeseburgers or whatever.
Anyway. It's a great big complex thing, and I don't want to overgeneralize. Yes, people can still make their own choices a lot of times. But sometimes they can't, and shitting on people for being fat is perpetuating the problem.
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"Sure you can make points about how our brains are generally wired to really like the way all that bad food tastes and that it keeps telling us to eat more and more of it but in the end its still an individual persons choice what they decide to eat."
I wanted to write a separate comment addressing this part, because what I'm going to say is being seen as controversial by a number of people in this thread and I want to separate it from the rest of my argument.
It's correct that humans like to eat tasty foods, and it just so happens that the tastiest food items are also the most calorically dense ones (as well as having gotten accessible and affordable to everyone in the developed world). Since throughout history it typically made a lot of sense to focus on calorically dense foods for survival reasons, people still demonstrate the same behavior today. The parts of the brain that light up when we eat chocolate cake are the same parts that used to light up when our ancestors ate honey and fatty meat. People competed for these foods with the animal kingdom, which also meant that they were scarce because people had to work hard and sometimes risk their lives to access them. More work and greater risk is not a good long-term strategy for survival, so there was never an abundance of such foods.
That was until humans became the dominant predator on the planet. Our urge to feast is still exactly the same, but now we don't have to compete with other animals anymore. We go to a nearby store and grab food items from the shelves, stuff it inside ourselves and become fat quickly, easily and risk-free.
The reason why people these days aren't restricting themselves is because... people never restricted themselves to begin with. We were restricted almost exclusively by external factors. We had competition in nature which doesn't exist anymore. So the reason why our urges control us (and not the other way around) is because they always controlled us all throughout human history. We were never in control.
The concept of being in control of our urges is a modern luxury. We're dealing with an unprecedented case and our brains are simply not prepared for it.
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On June 22 2023 21:32 Simberto wrote:Show nested quote +On June 22 2023 21:10 Gorsameth wrote:On June 22 2023 20:35 Magic Powers wrote:On June 22 2023 20:17 Gorsameth wrote:On June 22 2023 20:11 Magic Powers wrote:
The obesity epidemic only started in the late 20th century. This cannot be explained by people lacking discipline. It is best explained by the fact that a significant portion of people were always genetically predisposed to become obese given a specific set of circumstances. That set of circumstances has arrived with the advance of tasty calorically dense foods being made available to the population at large - something that wasn't the case at any point before in human history. The fact that you make a leap to genetic predisposition lying dormant for millennia instead of just the fact that 'we' eat more fat and unhealthy food then ever before is so weird to me. I've been reading about the obesity epidemic for years. It's been well established in the scientific literature that only a tiny fraction of the population used to be obese, and the rise in obesity correlates perfectly with the commercialization of processed and ultra-processed food items. Ice cream, chocolate cakes and cookies used to be luxury items that few people could afford. The working class ate bread, potatoes or rice, and they were lucky to be able to afford cheese with every meal. Accessibility of such foods was also not granted to the working class. There's a reason why bread crust used to be "only for the poor" (even though it contains more micronutrients). I don't believe individual choices are the reason for the obesity epidemic. That just makes no sense. I think humans are largely predisposed to behave the way they do, and the environment is the triggering element for most of our behaviors. Really? You don't think its the individual choices to eat processed and ultra-processed food items? You said it yourself, the difference is that we now have access to all this garbage food. The problem is the eating of the garbage food. Not genetics. If people didn't stuff themselves full of crap then there wouldn't be an obesity epidemic. Sure you can make points about how our brains are generally wired to really like the way all that bad food tastes and that it keeps telling us to eat more and more of it but in the end its still an individual persons choice what they decide to eat. (ignoring for the moment how much cheaper such processed food tends to be and that for people who struggle to make ends meat it can, in certain parts of the world, be much cheaper to stuff yourself with bad food rather then eat healthily) Obviously individual choices are relevant here, and they are absolutely relevant for the results of an individual. And as a whole, those individual choices lead to a societal result, in this case a massive obesity problem. But society can and regularly does influence the probabilities on individual decisions by changing the framework the decision is made in. As such, i find it much more fruitful to talk about the framework those decisions are made in rather than just saying "They are individual decisions", which tends to imply "nothing we can do about it". Because we can change the framework. We (as a society) can shift the probabilities. We can make it more likely that people eat healthy. We can make it less likely that people end up obese. And we should. In the same way we can influence alcohol or tobacco consumption. We are not perfect at it, and we haven't found ideal solutions either, but we do manage to reduce the amount of people who smoke or who become alcoholics through setting up a framework which makes it less likely that people end up there. And we should do the same thing for obesity. Figure out how to shift the framework that more people make the individual decision to live healthy, and fewer people make the individual decisions which lead to them becoming obese. Fundamentally, the reason we have an obesity epidemic is multiple factors coming together. Saying "X is at fault" implying that only a singular reason exists is not that helpful. We have multiple factors where the removal of any of them would lead to there not being an obesity epidemic. Our evolutionary history and genetics. Fatty foods being available and cheap. Individuals making bad decisions. Much more interesting is what we can change to combat said epidemic. And that is pretty clear. We cannot change our genetics. We cannot change each individuals decision. But we can change the societal framework in which the decisions are made in to incentivice more healthy decision. Absolutely. My point of individual choice was more in relation to genetic disposition towards obesity and genetics causing an obesity epidemic then in how to combat it.
Its not genetics that are making people obese. Its the food they eat and society has a lot of impact on what people eat.
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I'd like to give an example that shows how little control we really have over our eating habits.
Binge eating and similar eating disorders are relatively common, but it may come as a surprise to people that anorexic people in particular are at risk of this. I can describe one case. One of the members of a Korean girl group developed an eating disorder after leaving the group where she would randomly wake up from her sleep and go to the fridge to eat leftover foods like pizza. This can happen once or numerous times per night and it leaves her exhausted during the day, and she has to take medication (it doesn't seem to stop the eating disorder, but helps her get through the day). The thing is: she never remembers a single thing about it. She recorded herself so she could see what she was doing at night.
You can find examples of similar eating disorders all over the internet. One previously anorexic person describes it like this:
"I am siting here today at the exact same weight that pushed me over the edge into my anorexia. Four and a half years ago I developed anorexia and for the last year and a half I have been trying to recover. I have read countless books and attended numerous therapy sessions, but for some reason I can not stop bingeing."
[...]
"For the past three months the intense bingeing has come back and no matter how hard I try I can't seem to stop. I have gained more weight over this time. This has put me at the exact same high weight that I was four and a half years ago when my anorexia started. I look back at old pictures of myself and it doesn’t even seem real. I feel that I have lost my identity and the anxiety about disorders thoughts overwhelm me.I am wondering if anyone else has ever experienced this.I feel like everything changed so quickly and I am alone. I feel like I have lost all self control."
https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/binge-eating-after-anorexia#:~:text=Often after chronic anorexia, binge-eating is not unusual.,the triggers every time you want to binge.
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On June 22 2023 22:09 Magic Powers wrote:I'd like to give an example that shows how little control we really have over our eating habits. Binge eating and similar eating disorders are relatively common, but it may come as a surprise to people that anorexic people in particular are at risk of this. I can describe one case. One of the members of a Korean girl group developed an eating disorder after leaving the group where she would randomly wake up from her sleep and go to the fridge to eat leftover foods like pizza. This can happen once or numerous times per night and it leaves her exhausted during the day, and she has to take medication (it doesn't seem to stop the eating disorder, but helps her get through the day). The thing is: she never remembers a single thing about it. She recorded herself so she could see what she was doing at night. You can find examples of similar eating disorders all over the internet. One previously anorexic person describes it like this: "I am siting here today at the exact same weight that pushed me over the edge into my anorexia. Four and a half years ago I developed anorexia and for the last year and a half I have been trying to recover. I have read countless books and attended numerous therapy sessions, but for some reason I can not stop bingeing." [...] "For the past three months the intense bingeing has come back and no matter how hard I try I can't seem to stop. I have gained more weight over this time. This has put me at the exact same high weight that I was four and a half years ago when my anorexia started. I look back at old pictures of myself and it doesn’t even seem real. I feel that I have lost my identity and the anxiety about disorders thoughts overwhelm me.I am wondering if anyone else has ever experienced this.I feel like everything changed so quickly and I am alone. I feel like I have lost all self control." https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/binge-eating-after-anorexia#:~:text=Often after chronic anorexia, binge-eating is not unusual.,the triggers every time you want to binge. I'm sure this is a thing that exists and no one here has been denying that such things can happen.
But when we're talking about an obesity epidemic we're not talking about situations like this. They are tragic, sure, but they don't combine into an epidemic.
That is just people eating crap because its convenient, tastes good and cheap and at both an individual and a society level we can and should fight back against that and work to get people to eat better.
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I think when it comes to obesity one of the major contributions is general lifestyle change. Stationary/ "lazy" (in lack of better world) lifestyle became possible and after that cheap and easy. not so long ago if you wanted buy for example a fridge you had to spent entire day (or more) walking around town to find the one which suits you, now you just sit down in front of computer and are done with it (not mentioning that you most likely will be able to get it cheaper than someone shopping on high street), same thing with eating you had to make shopping prepare food, eventually go to restaurant, now you just order take away. People previously were forced to leave the house, to do things which now they can do sitting on the sofa. Additionally there was massive increase of "stationery" activities: we got internet, streaming services, social media, video games - one can literally never leave house and never get bored, fun physical activities (eg football/basketball with friends) on the other side kinda stagnated and pursuing them possibly even got harder. I guess what I am trying to say is that being lazy never been easier.
Junk food is another massive issue, as it tends to be cheaper and end of the day it is food, so you cant really go cigarettes/alcohol route and make it more expensive (particularly with inflation on) unless you make healthy food less expensive, not sure how you can that however. So it seems like education is only route to take.
Genetics - yes there is miniscule amount of people who dont matter what they'll do will end up very obese, this is however very rare. Yes 2 people with same diet and same activities may end up with different weight (although in most cases it wont be a massive difference) I wouldnt agree that genetics are to blame though. I would rather say that due to the 2 points above same person which would be fine lets say 40 years ago, today ends up obese.
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United States43203 Posts
On June 22 2023 15:35 Liquid`Drone wrote:
1: seeing how obesity rates have skyrocketed, even accepting that genes are a major factor on an individual level, meaning that two different people can eat and exercise in similar manners with different results, there shouldn't be any question that diet and an increasingly sedentary lifestyle are the main culprits. I doubt there was a massive uptick in fat genes from 1920 to 2020, but bodies have changed.
2: I definitely agree that a bunch of new age alternative medicine etc have been more prominent with leftists, but not really with the political left, rather with the apolitical left. By this I mean they've been fringe positions held by leftists, but they've been too few in number to get influence. Traditionally there was also an apolitical right but I feel they've now been courted and included, while the apolitical left is still more sidelined. Examples can be say, Jill Stein, who is clearly a leftist but has also had some anti science/ conspiratorial views, but who isn't part of the Democrat party, or the significantly more insane MTG who is an elected representative from the republican party.
Those “leftists” who are into alternative reality have mostly been co-opted by Russian psyops at this point anyway. They may have been hippies at some point but their organic food Facebook group got joined by someone posting about the dangers of processed foods, then about lowered fertility from eating soy or whatever, then about the great replacement, and finally the protocols of the elders of Zion.
They’re already primed to believe bullshit and the internet radicalizes them.
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United States43203 Posts
On June 22 2023 20:17 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On June 22 2023 20:11 Magic Powers wrote:
The obesity epidemic only started in the late 20th century. This cannot be explained by people lacking discipline. It is best explained by the fact that a significant portion of people were always genetically predisposed to become obese given a specific set of circumstances. That set of circumstances has arrived with the advance of tasty calorically dense foods being made available to the population at large - something that wasn't the case at any point before in human history. The fact that you make a leap to genetic predisposition lying dormant for millennia instead of just the fact that 'we' eat more fat and unhealthy food then ever before is so weird to me.
He’s saying that everyone got hit by the same change in diet but not everyone was impacted by it the same way.
A newt and a fox are hanging out together for millennia with neither of them drowning. One day there’s a flood and the fox drowns whereas the newt lives. Why did the fox die as opposed to the newt? It had shitty flood genes. While it’s obviously true that the fox died because of the flood that answer doesn’t explain why only the fox died.
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On June 22 2023 22:40 Gorsameth wrote:Show nested quote +On June 22 2023 22:09 Magic Powers wrote:I'd like to give an example that shows how little control we really have over our eating habits. Binge eating and similar eating disorders are relatively common, but it may come as a surprise to people that anorexic people in particular are at risk of this. I can describe one case. One of the members of a Korean girl group developed an eating disorder after leaving the group where she would randomly wake up from her sleep and go to the fridge to eat leftover foods like pizza. This can happen once or numerous times per night and it leaves her exhausted during the day, and she has to take medication (it doesn't seem to stop the eating disorder, but helps her get through the day). The thing is: she never remembers a single thing about it. She recorded herself so she could see what she was doing at night. You can find examples of similar eating disorders all over the internet. One previously anorexic person describes it like this: "I am siting here today at the exact same weight that pushed me over the edge into my anorexia. Four and a half years ago I developed anorexia and for the last year and a half I have been trying to recover. I have read countless books and attended numerous therapy sessions, but for some reason I can not stop bingeing." [...] "For the past three months the intense bingeing has come back and no matter how hard I try I can't seem to stop. I have gained more weight over this time. This has put me at the exact same high weight that I was four and a half years ago when my anorexia started. I look back at old pictures of myself and it doesn’t even seem real. I feel that I have lost my identity and the anxiety about disorders thoughts overwhelm me.I am wondering if anyone else has ever experienced this.I feel like everything changed so quickly and I am alone. I feel like I have lost all self control." https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/binge-eating-after-anorexia#:~:text=Often after chronic anorexia, binge-eating is not unusual.,the triggers every time you want to binge. I'm sure this is a thing that exists and no one here has been denying that such things can happen. But when we're talking about an obesity epidemic we're not talking about situations like this. They are tragic, sure, but they don't combine into an epidemic. That is just people eating crap because its convenient, tastes good and cheap and at both an individual and a society level we can and should fight back against that and work to get people to eat better.
I think in order to even attempt to solve the obesity epidemic we have to first create a widespread understanding that individuals are not at fault. If people believe obesity is in people's own hands, then nothing will be done systemically to revert course - because what for? And on top of that, failure to adhere to a diet will be attributed to a personal shortcoming, even in the many cases where that's not true.
But if people believe that our environment triggers our behaviors, then something can be done both systemically and we can also tackle individual cases better.
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The US is fattening in so many ways, everyone has to drive around to do anything, its not walkable, the food is hideously unhealthy, I find it hard to blame people for not having it in them to overcome the kind of hurdles the US puts up when it comes to controlling one's weight.
I didn't appreciate how bad it is here until I lived in China where I dropped 60lbs in like 6 months. Didnt try really. Didn't go to the gym, didn't eat well, started drinking and going out to restaurants more.
Somethin' about the US.
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On June 22 2023 23:08 Magic Powers wrote:Show nested quote +On June 22 2023 22:40 Gorsameth wrote:On June 22 2023 22:09 Magic Powers wrote:I'd like to give an example that shows how little control we really have over our eating habits. Binge eating and similar eating disorders are relatively common, but it may come as a surprise to people that anorexic people in particular are at risk of this. I can describe one case. One of the members of a Korean girl group developed an eating disorder after leaving the group where she would randomly wake up from her sleep and go to the fridge to eat leftover foods like pizza. This can happen once or numerous times per night and it leaves her exhausted during the day, and she has to take medication (it doesn't seem to stop the eating disorder, but helps her get through the day). The thing is: she never remembers a single thing about it. She recorded herself so she could see what she was doing at night. You can find examples of similar eating disorders all over the internet. One previously anorexic person describes it like this: "I am siting here today at the exact same weight that pushed me over the edge into my anorexia. Four and a half years ago I developed anorexia and for the last year and a half I have been trying to recover. I have read countless books and attended numerous therapy sessions, but for some reason I can not stop bingeing." [...] "For the past three months the intense bingeing has come back and no matter how hard I try I can't seem to stop. I have gained more weight over this time. This has put me at the exact same high weight that I was four and a half years ago when my anorexia started. I look back at old pictures of myself and it doesn’t even seem real. I feel that I have lost my identity and the anxiety about disorders thoughts overwhelm me.I am wondering if anyone else has ever experienced this.I feel like everything changed so quickly and I am alone. I feel like I have lost all self control." https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/binge-eating-after-anorexia#:~:text=Often after chronic anorexia, binge-eating is not unusual.,the triggers every time you want to binge. I'm sure this is a thing that exists and no one here has been denying that such things can happen. But when we're talking about an obesity epidemic we're not talking about situations like this. They are tragic, sure, but they don't combine into an epidemic. That is just people eating crap because its convenient, tastes good and cheap and at both an individual and a society level we can and should fight back against that and work to get people to eat better. I think in order to even attempt to solve the obesity epidemic we have to first create a widespread understanding that individuals are not at fault. If people believe obesity is in people's own hands, then nothing will be done systemically to revert course - because what for? And on top of that, failure to adhere to a diet will be attributed to a personal shortcoming, even in the many cases where that's not true. But if people believe that our environment triggers our behaviors, then something can be done both systemically and we can also tackle individual cases better.
I think this is core.
We need to differentiate between two questions.
1) What can i personally do to not become obese? Here individual factors matter, and individual decisions do, too.
And 2) What should society do to reduce the amount of obese persons? For this question, individual decisions are mostly a deflection, because if you say that it is all based on individual decisions, society doesn't need to do anything. This is both attractive for people who don't like change, and for the people who profit from making society obese.
For none of these questions, attribution to genetics is very useful, because we can't really change genetic. So attributing obesity to genetics both on an individual level and on a societal level is mostly used as an excuse not to do anything. "It doesn't matter if i change my habits, i am only obese due to my genetic!" and "We don't need to change anything societally, people get obese due to genetics".
These factors are not necessarily irrelevant, but it is much more fruitful to focus on the factors you can influence, and to avoid attributions which are mostly just excuses not to do anything.
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On June 22 2023 21:32 Simberto wrote:Show nested quote +On June 22 2023 21:10 Gorsameth wrote:On June 22 2023 20:35 Magic Powers wrote:On June 22 2023 20:17 Gorsameth wrote:On June 22 2023 20:11 Magic Powers wrote:
The obesity epidemic only started in the late 20th century. This cannot be explained by people lacking discipline. It is best explained by the fact that a significant portion of people were always genetically predisposed to become obese given a specific set of circumstances. That set of circumstances has arrived with the advance of tasty calorically dense foods being made available to the population at large - something that wasn't the case at any point before in human history. The fact that you make a leap to genetic predisposition lying dormant for millennia instead of just the fact that 'we' eat more fat and unhealthy food then ever before is so weird to me. I've been reading about the obesity epidemic for years. It's been well established in the scientific literature that only a tiny fraction of the population used to be obese, and the rise in obesity correlates perfectly with the commercialization of processed and ultra-processed food items. Ice cream, chocolate cakes and cookies used to be luxury items that few people could afford. The working class ate bread, potatoes or rice, and they were lucky to be able to afford cheese with every meal. Accessibility of such foods was also not granted to the working class. There's a reason why bread crust used to be "only for the poor" (even though it contains more micronutrients). I don't believe individual choices are the reason for the obesity epidemic. That just makes no sense. I think humans are largely predisposed to behave the way they do, and the environment is the triggering element for most of our behaviors. Really? You don't think its the individual choices to eat processed and ultra-processed food items? You said it yourself, the difference is that we now have access to all this garbage food. The problem is the eating of the garbage food. Not genetics. If people didn't stuff themselves full of crap then there wouldn't be an obesity epidemic. Sure you can make points about how our brains are generally wired to really like the way all that bad food tastes and that it keeps telling us to eat more and more of it but in the end its still an individual persons choice what they decide to eat. (ignoring for the moment how much cheaper such processed food tends to be and that for people who struggle to make ends meat it can, in certain parts of the world, be much cheaper to stuff yourself with bad food rather then eat healthily) + Show Spoiler +
Obviously individual choices are relevant here, and they are absolutely relevant for the results of an individual. And as a whole, those individual choices lead to a societal result, in this case a massive obesity problem.
But society can and regularly does influence the probabilities on individual decisions by changing the framework the decision is made in. As such, i find it much more fruitful to talk about the framework those decisions are made in rather than just saying "They are individual decisions", which tends to imply "nothing we can do about it".
Because we can change the framework. We (as a society) can shift the probabilities. We can make it more likely that people eat healthy. We can make it less likely that people end up obese. And we should. In the same way we can influence alcohol or tobacco consumption. We are not perfect at it, and we haven't found ideal solutions either, but we do manage to reduce the amount of people who smoke or who become alcoholics through setting up a framework which makes it less likely that people end up there.
And we should do the same thing for obesity. Figure out how to shift the framework that more people make the individual decision to live healthy, and fewer people make the individual decisions which lead to them becoming obese.
Fundamentally, the reason we have an obesity epidemic is multiple factors coming together. Saying "X is at fault" implying that only a singular reason exists is not that helpful. We have multiple factors where the removal of any of them would lead to there not being an obesity epidemic. Our evolutionary history and genetics. Fatty foods being available and cheap. Individuals making bad decisions.
Much more interesting is what we can change to combat said epidemic. And that is pretty clear. We cannot change our genetics. We cannot change each individuals decision. But we can change the societal framework in which the decisions are made in to incentivice more healthy decision.
It can be changed, but an integral part of that framework is US capitalism and its incentives. The lack of walkable cities, the plethora of consumption propaganda, food deserts, the mass production of food we know is killing us, and the rest all have clear links to capitalism and its incentives.
I think any reasonable assessment would conclude we can't effectively change these things while preserving US capitalism.
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United States43203 Posts
On June 23 2023 00:18 Simberto wrote:Show nested quote +On June 22 2023 23:08 Magic Powers wrote:On June 22 2023 22:40 Gorsameth wrote:On June 22 2023 22:09 Magic Powers wrote:I'd like to give an example that shows how little control we really have over our eating habits. Binge eating and similar eating disorders are relatively common, but it may come as a surprise to people that anorexic people in particular are at risk of this. I can describe one case. One of the members of a Korean girl group developed an eating disorder after leaving the group where she would randomly wake up from her sleep and go to the fridge to eat leftover foods like pizza. This can happen once or numerous times per night and it leaves her exhausted during the day, and she has to take medication (it doesn't seem to stop the eating disorder, but helps her get through the day). The thing is: she never remembers a single thing about it. She recorded herself so she could see what she was doing at night. You can find examples of similar eating disorders all over the internet. One previously anorexic person describes it like this: "I am siting here today at the exact same weight that pushed me over the edge into my anorexia. Four and a half years ago I developed anorexia and for the last year and a half I have been trying to recover. I have read countless books and attended numerous therapy sessions, but for some reason I can not stop bingeing." [...] "For the past three months the intense bingeing has come back and no matter how hard I try I can't seem to stop. I have gained more weight over this time. This has put me at the exact same high weight that I was four and a half years ago when my anorexia started. I look back at old pictures of myself and it doesn’t even seem real. I feel that I have lost my identity and the anxiety about disorders thoughts overwhelm me.I am wondering if anyone else has ever experienced this.I feel like everything changed so quickly and I am alone. I feel like I have lost all self control." https://www.nationaleatingdisorders.org/binge-eating-after-anorexia#:~:text=Often after chronic anorexia, binge-eating is not unusual.,the triggers every time you want to binge. I'm sure this is a thing that exists and no one here has been denying that such things can happen. But when we're talking about an obesity epidemic we're not talking about situations like this. They are tragic, sure, but they don't combine into an epidemic. That is just people eating crap because its convenient, tastes good and cheap and at both an individual and a society level we can and should fight back against that and work to get people to eat better. I think in order to even attempt to solve the obesity epidemic we have to first create a widespread understanding that individuals are not at fault. If people believe obesity is in people's own hands, then nothing will be done systemically to revert course - because what for? And on top of that, failure to adhere to a diet will be attributed to a personal shortcoming, even in the many cases where that's not true. But if people believe that our environment triggers our behaviors, then something can be done both systemically and we can also tackle individual cases better. I think this is core. We need to differentiate between two questions. 1) What can i personally do to not become obese? Here individual factors matter, and individual decisions do, too. And 2) What should society do to reduce the amount of obese persons? For this question, individual decisions are mostly a deflection, because if you say that it is all based on individual decisions, society doesn't need to do anything. This is both attractive for people who don't like change, and for the people who profit from making society obese. For none of these questions, attribution to genetics is very useful, because we can't really change genetic. So attributing obesity to genetics both on an individual level and on a societal level is mostly used as an excuse not to do anything. "It doesn't matter if i change my habits, i am only obese due to my genetic!" and "We don't need to change anything societally, people get obese due to genetics". These factors are not necessarily irrelevant, but it is much more fruitful to focus on the factors you can influence, and to avoid attributions which are mostly just excuses not to do anything.
On the contrary, attribution to genetics makes the problem wholly societal. If we have a population with a subset that have a genetic vulnerability to a trigger then we, as a society, should rebuild ourselves to reduce that trigger.
That kind of challenge is the essence of the idea of society. A problem may not be your specific problem but you work with others to address it and they in turn work to address the kinds of problems you face.
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EPT
