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Comment by frankc | Hacker News Reader

Well, I don't think that is going to "solve" the underlying problem. It might help the government pay for things, but it's not going to solve the obesity epidemic. There are already huge intrinsic and extrinsic negative impacts to your life if you are obese. One more negative impact is not likely to suddenly make you thin. What we need to do is figure out why people are getting fatter despite how much they don't want to be fat.

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You're right, having them pay more, isn't going to make them thin. People are going to do what they want regardless, just like smokers. People will smoke, while they are hooked up to oxygen keeping them alive. However, the cost of that shouldn't be redirected to people who have made an effort to live healthy their entire lives.

Sedentary lifestyle, cheap food (and not just junk food, calories in general are insanely cheap), eating too much of said cheap food.

Those are hypothetical causes but they don't actually line up with all the observations. For instances, poor people are fatter than rich people. Shouldn't rich people be fatter since they 1) don't have to work as much manual labor 2) have more access to food.

You can try complicate the explanations to account for this but the fact is that it shows that the 'obvious' reasons most people surmise are not so clear cut and need to be tested like any hypothesis. It's a hard problem to test and there are several other competing hypothesis. The best I can say for my own beliefs is that we need to have more studies that need to be done before I'm convinced of any of them.

I suspect there is no one-size-fits-all solution for obesity: some people experienced sustained weight loss only after undertaking a vegetarian diet, some only by a ketogenic diet, some only by getting into sustained exercise, and some only by a laproscopic band. For some people, obesity isn't even associated with poor health.

What? It makes perfect sense.

I explain this here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14353914

It's cheaper to not exercise.

Sorry, but exercise doesn't require a gym membership, that's just nonsense. Look at the guys in prison. Go run around your block, do pushups, and pull-ups in your house. I've never spent a dime in a gym, and I exercise five days a week.

Also exercise is not for weight loss, it's for exercise.

There have been poor people throughout the history of time, why is it that obesity rates have been going up? Shouldn't they stay the same, or decrease, as more people move away from the have not, to the have something? Spent a month in India, tons of poor people, very few fat ones. The majority of overweight people were the affluent, that just didn't care, because they were well fed, and had essentially slaves working for them to do all of the hard physical work.

I'm not sure this sort of calculus is helpful: Eat less and exercise more, duh!

Also works for saving: earn more and spend less, duh!

Making friends: be nice more and mean less, duh!

Stress: sleep and relax more and worry less, duh!

Marriage: communicate and date more and fight less, duh!

Fat people want to be thinner. There are plenty of negative incentives to being fat. There's something subtler and more complex going on here.

Hyper levels of advertising with the primary messages being lack of self discipline is the definition of having fun, and sensible time preference judgment, or application of any judgment at all, is for boring low social status people because cool people live for this instant only and never judge anything ever.

Not too surprising that being immune or actively avoiding that toxic culture, results in both wealth and fitness.

Advertising Kills.

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