Comment by californical | Hacker News Reader

Comment by californical | Hacker News Reader

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For one, we can start to treat city planning as a healthcare issue.

Limit zoning restrictions that currently make driving everywhere the most convenient choice, stop all freeway expansion projects, and make as many walkable, bikeable, friendly neighborhoods as possible.

If people want/need to go outside and walk or bike to accomplish their daily chores, they won’t need to think about exercise as much because it’ll just be an automatic part of their routine. The best kind of health outcomes are based on societal changes, not personal responsibility (“you need to go to the gym and punish yourself” has been failing us). And people will be happier too, if they are more connected to their community (after the initial grumbling about how “hard” it is). It’s so hard to walk/bike around in the US that I don’t blame people for not doing it more (as an avid walk/run/biker myself).

That doesn’t mean we get rid of all current development and suburbs, but just eliminate the current restrictions which enforce that lifestyle, and let people’s communities start transforming slowly into healthier ones.

People will literally rezone entire cities rather than saying we need to eat less food and workout more.

My point was that making it a personal choice seems to be failing us. We’ve been telling people to do that for decades, and they’re not — make it a societal choice so that it’s individuals are automatically enrolled in a system that promotes their health rather than forcing them to sit in a car seat for hours per week

I find it fascinating, from an social science perspective, that in other critical areas of society social shaming is encouraged, but when it comes to human fitness we will invent PhD theses worth of reasons for why that's not allowed.

I 100% agree with you though, the physical structure of (most) US cities makes this difficult if you yourself don't prioritize it, or you can't afford to.

Fat shaming just doesnt work, the only provable outcomes are mental illness and weight gain.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4236245/

It's also a huge glaring actor/observer asymmetry issue, you think between the 50's and now human beings innately changed to be lazier, more prone to overconsumption? Why opt for blaming the individual multiplied by 70 million rather than looking at the conditions of their shared environment?

>you think between the 50's and now human beings innately changed to be lazier, more prone to overconsumption? Why opt for blaming the individual multiplied by 70 million rather than looking at the conditions of their shared environment?

Subdivisions basically didn't exist in the US in the 1950s; they were only just being invented then. People lived in smaller towns and cities and walked around a lot more. Even in the 80s, kids were walking around outside a lot, without adult supervision. Now that's basically illegal in most places, so kids stay in their suburban homes all day playing video games.

And, as usual, you can compare to other countries. In other places, there's less of a car culture, people walk around a lot more, and there aren't many obese people.

I'm not certain but I think we're in perfect agreement here. The environment in which people live has changed and I think that should be the obvious first target to change.

I think this urge to blame people for the effects of their environment seen in the one of the parent post is an example of a very dark part of our attitude toward change. It is very easy and tempting to short circuit into ridiculing positive changes in favor of instead attempting to fix it by punishment/shaming ("People will literally rezone entire cities rather than saying we need to eat less food and workout more")

The "you are beautiful no matter how you look" social campaign probably doesn't help here. There are literally visual cues that you 're doing something in excess and your doctor tells you to lose weight but Instagram says it's ok to be obese. I wonder if there's a limit to it, is it still ok to be twice your normal weight overweight?

Do you live in the US? Fat people are routinely discriminated against in employment and healthcare. A few Instagram influencers and ad campaigns don't negate that.

I have never met a fat person who wasn't aware they are fat. I do know two people who have failed to lose significant weight even after bariatric surgery physically restricted how much they could eat.

After even the most extreme medical intervention fails and you are still obese, what can you do? Stay inside your home forever so that thin people are not forced to look at you? Never eat a piece of cake in public? Never go shopping, never date, never dance?

Of course not. In the end the only choice is to live your life anyway, in spite of your reduced opportunities and the judgment you receive from others.

If you're brave, you might even dare to post photos of yourself on Instagram.

> I have never met a fat person who wasn't aware they are fat.

"Today, 7 in 10 Americans are obese or overweight, but only 36 percent think they have a weight problem. In other words, close to half the people who are overweight or obese don't think they're overweight or obese."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/12/01/nearl...

I live in Europe. For employment that demands physical stamina it makes sense that fat people would not be favoured at the extreme level of obesity. My healthcare provider differentiates between overweight and obese and you can't treat triage as discrimination. There's a whole lot of middle ground between staying in your home not eating cake and promoting yourself on Instagram. Date and dance as you see fit.

The kind of discrimination I am talking about is refusing to hire fat people for desk jobs (or not promoting them, or paying them less) because of stereotypes that they are lazy or lack self-discipline or simple distaste for the way they look. [1]

Categorizing a patient as overweight or obese is not discrimination. Dismissing their health concerns or providing lower-quality care because they are fat is. [2]

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4853419/

[2] https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/weight-bias-hea...

When you say "we've been telling people to do that for decades" I'm assuming you're referring to the accumulated scientific wisdom that says eating healthily and getting exercise is good for your health, and not the trillions of dollars spent advertising addictive sugar water, alchohol, cigarettes, sugar coated cereals for kids, subsidized beef and corn syrup and attacking every health recommendation as lies if it threatened someones profits?

It might actually be worth telling people to eat healthily and excercise as a consistent message before we abandon the idea.

Exactly this. Not sure how much of the scientific messaging reaches the lower socioeconomic subsets of society either, I don't think kids' obesity is because they 've tried everything to lose weight and can't help themselves or rather their parents don't really understand the intricacies of how processed food works. There's something that defies intuition about a 50g mars bar having the same calories as a 300g potato even if most people vaguely understand that 'sugar is bad for you' but can't really put it in perspective, what does that mean in practice? The dosage makes the poison.

Working out more and eating less is a pain. Rezoning and rebuilding is fun!

Jokes aside, an environment that softly pushes people towards better choices has a far, far better chance to push them towards these choices than an oppresive self-discipline regime. In the long term, only the former works.

On the contrary, people have been saying we need to eat less food and work out more for decades. The "just educate people and they'll make better choices" approach has not worked.

Has worked for me. I find the UK food labels on most products quite informative as a rule of thumb. I remember initially being very surprised at some food contains when I started paying attention and how very small things like Mars bars can have so many calories comparatively of course. I think there's something sinister about not wanting the consumer to know what your product contains.

Libertarians are fighting for 'food freedom' and escape from these authoritarian rules forcing sellers to inform consumers:

https://reason.com/2022/06/18/mandatory-menu-labeling-still-...

This thread is full of people commenting along the lines of "I have been able to manage my weight successfully, so other people must be fat because they're lazy idiots."

HN is full of people who will accept nuance and complexity in technical discussions. Why not in this area as well, where individual biology, cultural expectations, economic incentives, and environmental factors intersect with personal choice?

There's plenty of victim blaming on technical topics too.

Any negative impact of tech on people will have comments saying “well they should have just..."

Look at this video with fragments from England and Ireland 120 years ago.

https://twitter.com/bo66ie29/status/1565100701755314180?s=20...

How many fat people you see?

Do you think human biology changed a lot the past 120 years?

I think just a bit of movement each day and eating healthy food is enough for 99% of people to prevent getting overweight.

The very point I'm trying to make is that human nature has not changed in the past 120 years. What has changed is the social and technological context in which we live.

Take a group of people from the 1900s and drop them in to the US in 2022, they would likely experience obesity at similar rates.

It's not that people made more virtuous choices in 1900, it's that food was scarcer, less palatable, and more nutritious, and physical activity was a part of daily life.

A busy suburban parent in a 2-income household did not need to squeeze in time to make a home-cooked meal and a Peloton workout around a 9-5 desk job with an hour+ car commute.

The whole concept of "workout" is absurd considering how much effort and energy we spent in removing any physical challenge from our day-to-day life, especially considering how bad for the environment (global warming) the consequences are. I am not saying that people should have to work hard for the simplest things in life, but just designing cities around short walking distances and cycling vs. driving even the shortest distances would mean better health and nicer and healthier cities.

I think you should really think about the connection between public infrastructure and public lifestyle choices. If you think that infrastructure cannot both positively and negatively affect its populace then I'd find that a very interesting opinion on a board of primarily engineers.

This dismissal would be more compelling if it was actually clear that most cities are zoned well.

Rezoning entire cities also has environmental benefits.

That would be nice but I don't see that happening outside of boutique cities like bentonville

you really need to start fresh or force it before hitting the inflection point

When things like tax revenue-per-acre starts adding up, it’ll also be more affordable to live in denser areas.

By removing zoning restrictions, some communities will start becoming more walkable & mixed-use than others. Since it’s more cost efficient, it’ll be cheaper to own a townhome in a dense area than an equivalent townhome in a sprawling area (after the market equalizes & we can keep up with demand, because it’ll be sky-high for those walkable townhomes at first). But if zoning is reduced, supply will start to catch up.

People in sprawling communities will start needing to pay more for taxes for things like road maintenance etc since they have much higher costs per person than a dense area, further starting to push people to favor dense areas. Are people willing to pay the actual cost of living in remote areas like suburbs?

It’ll happen slowly at first, but just removing the current laws that prohibit that sort of development may actually enable those changes to happen automatically

everything's possible it's hard for me to imagine how it would work in some sprawling places like texas eg. houston or austin

I could that happening new/growing suburbs outside of cities like that though like as you say if they commit to a sane design/zoning before it's to late

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