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Comment by Reichhardt | Hacker News Reader

The simplest changes we could make would be to ban the addition of sugar to certain mainstream food categories (drinks, bread, sauces), and also to require nutritional information to be listed as per 100g, not per serving size.

Follow that by banning burning of coal and oil, we also remove a significant amount of noise and air pollution.

Next we can ban any hormone-disrupting chemicals (including as plastic additives) from being used in anything that will ever touch human food or drink, or ground water.

Finally we can legaize euthanasia for anyone aged 70 or older and with a terminal health condition.

With these changes you have a human population much healthier and less reliant on expensive healthcare.

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You missed maybe the most important thing: Allow cities for humans to be built. The American suburbia model is unhealthy on so many different levels. This only became apparent to me on my trips back stateside after living in Europe for a while.

Can you expand on that or provide an article please? Sounds interesting

This is an interesting series of videos:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0intLFzLaudFG-xAvUEO-A

Clearly, they mainly focus on cycling being the solution, but still, the overall analysis seems quite good.

https://youtu.be/y_SXXTBypIg

So, folks under 70 get out of suffering, but someone dying in their 30's can't get euthanasia? This seems cruel, especially so given the number of folks that suffer and die before they reach 70.

And it shouldn't be for financial reasons. I fully support someone's right to death, but I do not support creating systems that might encourage it. I also don't realistically care if the health condition is terminal: I care more that folks are suffering and want death to escape it.

On the euthanasia point I would agree that this should be a legal option (but on a humanitarian rather than a financial basis).

We definitely need do do a better job with end of life care/terminal diseases - in practice this would look like earlier/more hospice/compassionate care, less needless end of life treatments and interventions).

Sugar is a drug. Have you ever reflected on sugar cravings? It's actually as addicting as many scheduled drugs. But it's in EVERYTHING!

Most things have added sugar in them.

It blows my mind how hard it is to find basic ingredients without added sugar.

Things you wouldn't think have sugar, and are not sweet, have sugar!

Sauces, pickles, plain yogurt, it's ridiculous

Have you ever craved food? It's a drug too!

There is a difference between being hungry and needing something sweet to satisfy a craving even though you're full. The later is called hedonic hunger and is (IIUC) very similar to addiction neurologically.

seems symptomatic that you would rather give away some really basic freedoms and be treated like cattle just to avoid making the healthcare system public

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