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Comment by aaomidi | Hacker News Reader

HN when facing literally anything else that doesn't have a simple answer: oh wow so intriguing. So interesting.

HN when facing anything related to people with diabetes type 2, or having issues with their weight: lol eat less.

This is such a stupid fucking discourse because it prevents us from actually looking critically and seeing if there are causes beyond "lol u just eat a lot fatty" and treatments beyond "eat less lol".

This view is also why diabetes type 2 is very undercovered with health insurance, compared to type 1.

Doug, you are doing harm with this discourse that you are not a professional in, and you do not understand or can claim to understand all the complexity that goes into humans.

You are doing active harm, and take this as a callout on stopping this behavior.

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Your comments in this thread have broken several of the site guidelines egregiously. In particular: name-calling; sneering (including at the community); personal attack; snark; and more. Not cool.

Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules in the future?

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29601323.

Plenty of type II diabetics are thin. Fat mass is corollary but excess carb intake is causal. You’re conflating excess carbs and excess calories. One is a macronutrient and the other is a unit of energy.

The answer is simple… like most things, it won’t map to every individual diabetic but it certainly maps to the population at large.

The knee jerk reaction, feigning fat martyrdom, is what’s actually preventing us from looking critically at the causes behind type II diabetes. Our priors regarding what an acceptable human diet should look like have been shaped by a fifty+ year insurgence of processed food in the supply chain and marketing.

American health is in dire straights and we refuse to look in the mirror.

Have you ever considered that the bodily want and need to consume more carbs might not be something that's just inherent in us and might be caused by external factors?

Do you understand not everyone experiences hunger in the same way?

Have you also considered the fact that carb heavy food is generally so much cheaper than when it's not?

This is what I mean by its complex.

Carb addiction is real and the solution isn't to make people feel like shit about it and actually help them overcome it and then study why the addiction is becoming more common place. We've added so much random crap to our bodies and food intake, and any number of them can interfere with our natural hunger and food-seeking process.

So yeah, even if carbs are causal, telling people to eat less is not helpful.

Thankfully, we are now getting medication that directly addresses this feeling of extreme hunger that a lot of obese people experience. The causes of those feelings is still being studied.

If you agree to excess carb intake being causal, I think it’s quite a bit over the top to describe Doughs comment as harmful.

The comment isn't saying that excess carb consumption is causal but that it is a link in the chain of causality. We don't know what causes the increase in feeding behavior and choice of food. Free will is an illusion, the faster we admit this the faster we can examine this sort of chain of causality critically

Is it? That sentiment is

1. Delaying real solutions to a huge international health crisis

2. Mentally harming people who are in that situation and self-hate for having binge eating disorders, or other various conditions causing weight gain and excessive carb consumption.

3. Giving a pass to insurance companies to under cover, or not cover, diabetes 2 patients.

So, yeah, that sentiment is at least harming people, and at most killing people. I don't consider that over the top of a response and it's something an individual can think critically about and change their opinion on.

> delaying real solutions

Why is the solution in healthcare? Go after the food that’s actually killing us.

> mentally harming people

This type of thinking fares much better on Twitter. Good luck.

> give a pass to insurance companies

Sure let’s continue to further subsidize the ill-effects of processed food. Save money on cheap food today, spend it on healthcare later. Makes sense.

> Go after the food that’s actually killing us.

Did I say anything that was in contradiction to this? Actual solutions isn't exclusive to medical remedies.

> This type of thinking fares much better on Twitter. Good luck.

Maybe you should care more about the mental wellbeing of people.

> Sure let’s continue to further subsidize the ill-effects of processed food. Save money on cheap food today, spend it on healthcare later. Makes sense.

Again. You're assuming that I said we shouldn't do full solutions to this problem. However, there are also people who are sick and need help right now.

Maybe you don't care about people, I do.

You’re doing a lot of projecting. No one here is pointing at fat people and saying “fix yourself”. I outlined the external factors. The high availability of those foods alone is a major problem. Marketing normalizes it. And economics frames it as a necessity. That system is broken. And we are the casualties of that broken system.

Very bizarre watching people scratch their heads as if the cause of elevated hunger is a mystery. Eat a steak and watch your hunger disappear. I ate a cookie this morning and now I want six more. Again, none of this is a mystery. The food is performing exactly as its creator intended. Are their individuals who are extremely hungry outliers? Of course. Is 40% of the American population outliers? No.

I was overweight in childhood and still experience unwieldy hunger to this day. I am very aware that my hunger is not the same as someone else’s. My saving grace has been a decade of resistance training plus periods of intermittent fasting. In fact, the IF is pretty much the only method I’ve found that controls my hunger and shapes my behavioral patterns for the better. Otherwise I would certainly take full advantage of our empty-calorie-saturated environment. That’s my story and at no point am I suggesting that every individual has the means or will to do what I do. But what you’re suggesting is we ought not to discuss the core nature of the disease, but rather search for clandestine solutions in a pill, less someone infer that conversation as a personal attack.

Your comments in this thread have been breaking the site guidelines. Please don't do that, regardless of how wrong another commenter is or you feel they are.

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