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Comment by acjohnson55 | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps we'll look back at the deterioration of the American diet as the greatest self-inflicted error of the past 50 years. But it wasn't an accident. The dietary guidelines have been heavily influenced by agribusiness. This been catastrophic for health outcomes and quality of life.

There's way more to the story than dietary guidelines, and there isn't complete consensus on what caused the onset of the obesity epidemic, but the dietary guidelines are at the very least an embarrassing artifact of the problem.

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Whether the correlated problems are the dietary guidelines, microplastic tainted junk food, the terrible healthcare system, or communities designed to rely entirely on cars for transportation the root cause is the way the economic and governmental systems in the US are set up to allow for-profit enterprises to control our lives.

The only real fix is to take back control from the companies and remake society into one where health and wellbeing are prioritized over profit.

>health and wellbeing are prioritized over profit.

Until the measure of success and quality of a society is measured by health and wellbeing, that won't happen.

A society is measured, first and foremost, by GDP, then first and foremost that society will prioritise profits (as a proxy for GDP).

Dietary guidelines are a red herring. Notwithstanding that the "Americanized" diet has shifted well beyond those, average people don't typically consult it. Rates of obesity have been shooting up for a century so I see no reason to believe guidelines play a substantial role. Guidelines have also recently changed (at least in my country) yet there is no sign of improvement in obesity rates.

There was a key turning point that is weirdly understated: women joined the workforce. New conveniences in the form of appliances and fast-food, canned food, ready-made food freed up more time for them to pursue careers (at least, part-time) and still raise kids. The US enthusiastically embraced these modernities and many families effectively threw away their knowledge of cooking over time.

After this the institutions that feed us garbage became entrenched, began to both lobby to protect their interests and increase their adoption rate as much as possible. It's not unlike the story of Tobacco companies.

I tend to agree with this take. Shifting from home cooked meals to processed meals probably has far more impact on diet and health than published guidelines.

The only nuance I'd add is that it doesn't follow that the optimal solution is for women to leave the workforce and get back in the kitchen. Domestic responsibilities can be shared by husbands and wives.

Also, when eating processed foods it's a good idea to pay attention to the nutrition information. Most people don't do much of this, which is why those published guidelines probably don't have much impact anyway. Those guidelines should be updated, and most people should probably start paying more attention to them.

Of course. We would not go back to that any sooner than working our own land, turning back the clock is no solution. The problem area is policy and culture rather than technology in itself. Between kitchen innovations and store-bought items (and other services) it's possible to eat healthy delicious food with increasingly less effort (and it's possible to have a horrifically bad diet).

I think the younger generations, starting from millenials on, are more health conscious than the previous, but you also notice a class divide in that sense.

The greatest self-inflicted error was the use of fossil fuels to warm the climate, not a horrible diet. Although, I suppose both come from a similar point of view: the manipulation of our instincts and a lack of a natural philosophy to respect life. In one case, it is indiviudual life, and in another, it is all life put together.

I'd argue that the initial use of fossil fuels was not a mistake. It propelled civilization into modernity. The big mistake was not phasing out fossil fuels as alternatives became available. We could have limited global warming to below one degree without hurting our quality of life if we had started acting decisively sometime back in the seventies.

The proliferation of microplastics may be a more intractable problem than climate change.

They said, while comfortably browsing HN and sipping their coffee

A rather insipid criticism. Of course, I will try and use every communications medium I can find to say what I think. I would MUCH rather have the world WITHOUT HN, without the internet, and without computers even, if it meant that the extinction rate were back to background. In fact, I would be absolutely overjoyed if I didn't have to use a computer at all (I use one for work and for spreading my ideas.)

But here's something: if computers and advanced technology did not exist, then I would have NO reason to write about what I write about.

And I don't drink coffee.

If you want to live without computers, you can. You've made your value judgement.

Not really, not if I want to obtain food or at least buy land to get food. I need to make money to do that, and in order to that, I need a job because it's very hard to live off the land, most of it being private property.

I don't aim to live without computers. I aim to change the world so that we can de-emphasize technology and take down this destructive society. We are killing animals and it's not right. It's a value judgement and it's one I intend to fight and defend until we stop our destruction.

Zooming out more, it an example of how the regressive nature of the US Senate fuels a variety of ills, both benign/passive and evil.

It’s a mockery of “one man, one vote” principles that improved state governance. We spend billions and create unaccountable misery and suffering because a few states with more sheep than people benefit to the tune of probably less than a billion dollars annually.

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