The best thing for yourself and the country as a whole is sleep, regular cardio, regular lifting, regular sunshine and fresh air, cooking all your meals from scratch with whole (ideally local and in season) ingredients and mostly elimination of all refined products like sugar. But we normalized obesity.
Imagine if the same thing happened in the 60s as we started to understand the risks of smoking - all the smokers got together and decided that the science was hateful and they were being discriminated against. To rephrase a line from the article, using that silly hypothetical:
"In the end, says Flegal, defining smoking by number of cigarettes/day promotes anti-nicotine attitudes and tobacco stigma."
One can't navigate conversations about obesity without topics like "attitudes" and "stigma" being part of the conversation, but I don't think the hard biology of the results of excess fat tissue really cares.
I'm aware this is a bit of a goofy tangent, but hopefully it highlights the silliness of the current obesity discourse.
[1] https://conscienhealth.org/2022/04/obesity-how-does-a-diagno...
Abstinence is easier than moderation.
That's part of the reason why we see more (adult) ADHD these days: people used to smoke a lot. (Chain smoking plus guzzling black coffee used to be the stereotype for eg journalists or editors.)
So nobody strictly _needs_ to smoke, but it helps some.
(Before you go and light one up: smoking is one of the worst ways to get nicotine. Use a patch or lozenge or vape instead.)
> The nicotine causes the receptors to release nitric oxide, which slows sensory inhibition causing a suppression of a subsequent stimuli
It seems unlikely that nicotine is the only discovered substance that causes this effect, meaning there should be a healthier method?
There's a lot of discussion on obesity and weight issues on hackernews that show zero shreds of empathy that it's just wild to me and this is not much different. I don't think anyone refutes that diet and exercise are great options to avoid/combat obesity, but statements like yours are as useful as walking up to a smoker and saying "just quit". You may be alienating the audience you are trying to help, given that is the intention
Just about any stimulant will work.
Eg adrenaline/epinephrine works fairly well. Your body produces that itself, especially when exercising or fidgeting. (And now you know one reason why ADHD people often fidget.)
Methylphenidate works, too. It's also known as Ritalin.
Nicotine is a generally safe substance, as long as it's not delivered alongside acrylamide, VOC-carrying particulates, and tar, as it is in cigarettes.
Amazon sells the stuff in lozenge form for only 7 cents per mg.
As a recently diagnosed & medicated ADHD person, who used to chain smoke and drink gallons of coffee daily, so much makes sense all of a sudden.
Thank you for making me aware of this!
Not to dismiss the ADHD connection at all, but I would be hesitant to hang too much of the blame on that given the coffee drinking.
Car-centric lifestyles and other trends that were not the norm fifty or a hundred years ago have made it nigh impossible for probably most Americans to live the way you describe.
Those lifestyle bits strongly shaped by the public infrastructure, how work gets structured etc are even harder to talk about productively than diet or home healthcare. People feel helpless to change any of it, so saying something like "If America had cycling infrastructure like the Netherlands..." just more or less falls on deaf ears.
The way America used to eat healthy was "wife and mom" (aka homemaker) was the primary role for a lot of women. With two-income couples and other trends, that just isn't a pattern we can rely upon anymore.
There is a proliferation of products, like meal delivery services, to address this widespread crisis but we need to more explicitly recognize and grapple with some of the root causes and we don't seem to doing a great job of that.
It is unfortunate that you’re having a difficult time but where you live and work is completely up to you.
And layoffs are a reality of the economic cycle, not merely because some “greedy corporation” decided to fire ppl on a whim.
If there is less work than workers or business outlook changes, what would you do? Keep on employees to dig ditches and fill them in out of the goodness of your heart?
At least I have a consistent logic: if the issue is that we have an unhealthy population we should prioritize the health of the population. Give people the time to exercise and cook. Give people the healthcare they need. Give people who fall down a way to get back up without crushing humiliation, debasement, and poverty trauma.
When people say they don't "have time", examine their television, video game, or social media habits. You'll find that 99% of the time they are liars.
We all have plenty of time, it's just a matter of priority. For many, imposing an unnecessary burden on the healthcare system is a small price to pay for having watched plenty of TikTok and knowing the minutiae of Game of Thrones. On their (premature) deathbeds, they'll all wish they'd finished Season 6 of The Expanse and clicked on more heart icons.
That's a patently false statement for a huge number of people now and the vast majority of people throughout history.
There's a kaleidoscope of possibility around people's behavior, station, and life between "Fully Self Actualizing Superman" and "Lazy schmuck who gets what they deserve."
The blanket statement "Where you live and work is completely up to you" is a deeply naive and insulting opinion of the same flavor as "let them eat cake"
There's just no data ... one day you'll feel a little off, a month later a routine checkup will detect advanced stage cancer, and you've got no time left.
We know much about how exercise and diet plays into long term health in the same way that wearing a seatbelt keeps you safer.
I don't have a citation on hand, but I remember reading a while ago that when it comes to general health outcomes, it was about 70% genetics and 30% personal choices (don't quote me on that, can make that number even 60/40 or 75/25, the point will still stand).
Which makes sense, a lot of people here probably know someone who did everything "right" in terms of their health choices and still got hit with something nasty (e.g., active lifestyle, eating healthy, etc., and still got cancer or covid or something else), as well as someone who did a lot of things wrong and still had a decent outcome (e.g., my grandfather who has been smoking a pack a day since middle school, been doing hard manual labor, and is still kicking in his 80s).
And sure, it seems daunting that your health choices can affect only that 30% (rather than 70%). In blackjack, however, the house edge against an average player is about 2%, and about 0.5% for perfect strategy pro players. People spend countless numbers of hours practicing memorizing (and executing) perfect strategies just to give themselves that extra 1.5%. While with just basics of taking care of your health, you can take charge of the 30%.
That's quite a massive effect that taking care of your health can have on your outcomes (and your life), even though your genetic health predisposition still has the edge.
Cutting subsidies to factory farming and encouraging plant-based diets would save billions in healthcare reduce pollution and water usage, yet people kick and scream for “mah bacon!”. We will get what we deserve no more nor less.
That being said, the vaccines worked. The Covid culture war was dumb as fuck
In fact when the prime minister (quite a fat man) at the time caught covid and became quite ill he started talking about how people should lose weight to increase their odds of a quick recovery
Feeling hungry all the time is not a life choice.