Hacker News Reader

Comment by TacticalCoder | Hacker News Reader

To be honest the world at large doesn't have an anorexia problem but an obesity epidemy.

50 millions children under the age of 5 are already obese (and I think 93% of obese children shall stay obese their entire life).

So... Anorexia may be a hill to die on and it's not fun for parents of anorexic kids but priorities, priorities and priorities.

The real eating disorder worldwide leads to obesity, not anorexia and I wish all the hate and energy spent thin-shaming was instead redirected towards fighting the more important eating disorder.

The numbers from the WHO here are scary and only ever growing:

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/obesity-and...

View on HN

Obesity is not due to an eating disorder, it's due to sedentary lifestyles, pedestrian hostile neighborhoods, and market forces in the food industry.

> Obesity is not due to an eating disorder

Wrong. Not in most cases, but binge eating disorder is a thing.

IME it is usually mental health related.

Honestly, most of the people I know who have serious problems with obesity have some kind of metabolic disorder. Diabetic or pre-diabetic.

And I think this has become far more common than people will admit. We're burning out our pancreases through processed & high sugar, low-GI foods because the industrial food supply is poorly managed and under-regulated.

That plus cars.

Obesity can take the form of an eating disorder, but I can tell you that teenage girls aren't "pinning" photos of morbidly obese people and ending up in a spiral that lands them in hospital.

But I hope parent commenter never has to live personally through finding out just how life destroying the predominant cultural attitudes around body form & food around us are. I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. Obesity is by far the least of concerns.

Though I think the original comment was in reference to teen-aged girls and not the world at large.

Clearly.

But the broader point beyond my specific snipe -- which is personal and driven by deep anger over a serious problem affecting me personally -- the broader issue is not only that Pinterest is on the whole an anti-social actor because of its garbage moderation and promotion of harmful content in its algorithms, it is more broadly a bad actor in the web ecosystem generally.

They hijack search results by scraping and stealing content, hiding the original link, and try to trap you in their circle of links.

In this day and age of people getting sued and slapped down for legitimate webscraping, it boggles my mind that Pinterest gets away with what they do.

On the whole a swamp of an unethical company. F*ck pinterest.

(But love that the commenter couldn't help but turn the thread into an underhanded comment against "fat people". Oh so typical.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com