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?

the alleged definition of obesity

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[–] 10 points 6 days ago (2 children)

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.

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  • [–] 3 points 6 days ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 0 points 5 days ago*

    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.

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