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Comment by hbn | Hacker News Reader

There was a moral panic over fast food that was really taking off at the time, and cashing in on it clearly paid off for him.

It did make McDonald's put more effort into rebranding with "we care about the health of kids" - I was a kid when the documentary came out and I remember frequent McDonald's ads on kids channels that were just Ronald McDonald teaching you how to do exercises. But I don't think it really made as much of a difference for people binge eating their food as much as the past few years where their prices for all their food have shot to the moon.

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Calling it a "moral panic" feels almost offensively wrong to me.

McDonald's is very legitimately a serious problem in America today. Obesity and related conditions- Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, etc are at mind boggling epidemic levels. Americans today are living shorter, sicker lives than their parents despite tremendous improvements in medicine, working safety, automobile safety and less smoking almost entirely due to obesity related conditions. Childhood obesity is setting millions of children down a path of suffering before they're old enough to understand that they're being harmed or having the agency and autonomy to correct it.

This isn't a "moral panic" over something harmless like kids playing dungeons and dragons or listening to rock and roll, this is arguably the largest health and wellbeing concern in America today. If anything, as a society we probably have too much moral panic about stigmatized things like opioids and guns that impact a pretty small percent of people and have not enough concern about the unfortunately normalized things like 3/4ths of people being overweight and 4/10 being obese.

Americans have solved this by making fat into an identity which is taboo to criticize.

You're being downvoted, but this happened to me. I mentioned at work some years back something about raising my kids and emphasizing healthy eating to maintain a healthy weight, and a co-worker took me to task for "body shaming" my children. I pointed out that I was really approaching it from the health angle, but that didn't land. Really weird experience that stuck with me.

People at work bug me about drinking water instead of soda. I'm overweight, BMI of 28, so to me it seems obvious why I shouldn't be drinking sugar water. But try explaining this to them, some of them are 3x my weight at least and are offended by the notion of somebody smaller than them wanting to avoid becoming like them. It's a very delicate subject, trying to explain my desire to be healthier to people who are morbidly obese and see nothing wrong with it.

I very much agree on there not being enough concern and "moral panic" about obesity, but just feel like noting that for opioids specifically though they may be affecting only a relatively small percentage of people, last year alone there was something like 70-100k dead from fentanyl overdoses.

In that respect I'd argue that at least compared to guns or abortion as common political obsessions, opioids, especially high potency ones like fentanyl, are a lot closer to obesity in causing catastrophic death and suffering in the US.

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