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Comment by 0xcde4c3db | Hacker News Reader

Is anyone seriously engaging with the question of what to do about obesity from a public health standpoint instead of riding their dietary/urban planning/economic hobby horse or coming up with yet another vacuous PR campaign to promote "healthy choices"? As far as I've been able to find, there are zero examples of countries with an obesity epidemic that have managed to even halt it, let alone reverse it. Every major explanation of the epidemic I've seen fails to actually fit the data, often blatantly so (e.g. blaming things that spiked well before the epidemic in a given population, or trends that flattened or reversed decades ago while obesity continues to rise).

It feels like we're either not even trying, or are ruinously confused about what we're up against.

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I remember reading a Twitter thread (i know) where someone who's done a book or something on this subject realized that all the studies bacically say the same thing.

Nobody knows the reason, but the data all shows when it started.

https://twitter.com/mold_time/status/1412827749828513800?t=e...

A note on that twitter thread's author, have another twitter thread* about them failing to address severe flaws in their pet theory (lithium): https://twitter.com/natalia__coelho/status/15419003170416271...

* I know too; but it's not like the actual replication-crisis-suffering capital S Science reviews are that much better than twitter randos on certain topics... It's useful to reserve judgement and be skeptical about a lot of things. And demand base rates in addition to risk factors.

There is only one reason possible: we eat more than we need. A lot more.

Why we do this is maybe up for debate (personally my guess is because we can and food is tasty), but the basics of thermodynamics is not up for debate.

The reason is obvious: carbohydrates are addictive. The more you eat them the more you want to eat them. Brain scans show that carbs gives you the same kind of pleasure that other addictions gives you. To maximise the addition even more, you mix carbs, fat, and salt. The food industry knows this and does everything it can to turn consumers into addicts of their products. They have succeeded spectacularly.

This is an annoying take that comes up every time. It’s like saying people die because a critical organ stops functioning. It adds nothing to the discourse and tends to imply that it’s lack of will power.

How is this analogy even supposed to work?

When you eat too much, you can choose to eat less. When your critical organ is about to stop functioning, what can you even do? Use that organ less?

Either I am missing something major in that analogy, or it is just bad.

I think you're missing the point of the analogy; it's not about assigning culpability for health problems, it's about illustrating the kind of comment that centers proximate causes when the surrounding discussion is about root causes.

It wouldn't have to come up every time if lots of people wouldn't deny it.

It seems we’ve moved into the “acceptance” phase and phrases like “healthy at any weight” and different “body types” have become the norm. We just have no idea what to do.

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