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Comment by r0s | Hacker News Reader

It's actually the health insurance industry. But thank you for your concern.

I firmly believe the American healthcare system takes a lot of blamed for problems caused elsewhere. American healthcare is inefficient but Americans have lots of money to throw at this inefficient system. The figure that most convinced me of this was healthcare spending ballooning from ~5% of GDP to a sixth and lifespans dropping.

You could fix every problem with healthcare and Americans would still die early. Eat crap from childhood and there’s nothing doctors can do. Preventative care starts in the cafeteria.

Preventative care starts with education. What you're describing is nutritional ignorance, which I agree is part of the problem.

There is a culture of crisis management in the US when it comes to all health issues. This is the direct result, along with all the inefficiency you mention, of private for-profit health insurance.

Schools have taught kids for decades and decades, sugar is bad, and people consume more of it than ever. Why do people continue this absolutely insane strategy of taking the same approach that led to the obesity crisis and expecting it to result in anything other than mass premature death? Which is educated people, wagging their fingers, and telling them it’s their individual responsibility to be healthy?

Have you seen what grocery store are stocked with? There’s not even enough food for everybody to eat healthy at once if everybody simultaneously saw the light.

If we really wanted to solve the problem in a major way, we would literally do things like cap the amount of sugar and HFCS producers had to work with, to pre-empt this educational revolution surely causing people to throw out their fruit loops and simultaneously adopt healthy eating. Most of the food industry is controlled by a small number of conglomerates, it would be easy, but we won’t instead we let PepsiCo kill by the millions.

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