I once overheard a coworker give a doctor a right bollocking over the phone because he wouldn't prescribe antibiotics for her daughter who had the flu, and she then proceeded to tell rant how ridiculous that doctor was. I've rarely had to spend more effort to stop myself from saying some rather unpleasant (albeit true) things.
Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are more of an agriculturally-induced problem than a non-farmer-human-induced problem. Almost all commercial livestock are pumped full of antibiotics to make them fat, according to estimates ~2x the amount of antibiotics are used for animals as for humans.
Also, "livestock pumped full of antibiotics to make them fat" has been banned in the EU since 2006.
Exercise is health care.
Decent housing is health care.
Drugs and surgeries are medical care and I grew up with the weird idea that it's crisis management, not your first line of defense while acting like diet and lifestyle are annoying details you can stop worrying about if you can get the right prescription.
Designing exercise into our daily lives used to be part of the urban planning profession. Paris was redone to put a stop to health issues in overcrowded slums.
Nutritional value of produce has gone down for decades while we strip mine our soils and try to make up for it with chemical fertilizers.
I don't think the obesity epidemic is going to be solved with lecturing people like they aren't trying hard enough to starve themselves while we build "fuck you, pedestrian" environments all over the country.
1. there are plenty of obese people in rural areas where they have all the walkable space they might desire
2. do you even know how little energy humans need to walk? a single candy bar is enough for a three hour hike
3. pick a random chinese/japanese city, find a youtube video with visible crowds, and count the number of morbidly obese people you see. it would take you a while to find a single mobility scooter tier flesh golem, if you can find one at all
"lecturing people like they aren't trying hard enough to starve themselves" is the only solution for the obesity crisis, because the only reason for the obesity crisis is vast abundance of cheap, artificially tasty empty calories. 300+++ lbs blobs of fat virtually did not exist before Standard American Diet
Rural areas are much less walkable since stuff are so far away, and thus are significantly fatter than walkable areas.
When it is easy to walk to places you need to go to people often walk, and such areas have much less obesity.
Walking 1/4 mile to a coffee shop every day won't make people skinny.
No, they don't. Have you ever spent any significant time in rural American places? There's no place to walk at all, because:
1. everything is too far away for walking to actually be useful for going places, 2. there's no sidewalks even if you don't mind walking 2 hours to the nearest Walmart, and 3. there's no wild places to walk either, contrary to popular belief, because all the land is privately owned and "trespassing" is not allowed (and can get you shot).
Rural Americans can only walk places if: 1. they have a lot of land around their house, which granted is more affordable than in more urban places, or 2. they get in their vehicle and drive to a state or national park someplace and use the hiking trails there.
It's so weird how many people think rural America is some bucolic place that resembles the Shire of the hobbits, when in fact it's a car-bound hellscape even worse than the worst American car-centric city. It's not like the UK, where you have an absolute right to roam across rural lands.
It negatively impacts kids, seniors, handicapped people and those who could potentially afford housing if they only needed to pay rent but can't afford both rent and a car.
Like, I understand where you're coming from on the diet angle specifically, but some of this strikes me as painting with strokes that are just a bit too broad for the other thousands of reasons people need drugs or surgery.
It's part of why I have spent so much time thinking about this and feel so strongly about it.
What non-pharmaceutical intervention would you propose- something that could be rolled out as a program- that hasn't been done before, and would work, in say the next decade?
Because at a population level, these drugs seem to be doing more than the cumulative efforts of a million dietitians.
If there were a safe drug that can make people lose weight and put on muscle, I'd be actively telling people not to exercise unless they enjoy it. It's bad for the joints.