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Comment by ruraljuror | Hacker News Reader

> Nobody is forcing you to eat those.

No, I think force feeding junk food is pretty rare but that seems like a straw man.

Consider children. Their brains are not fully developed and they have little agency in determining the food they have access to. Childhood obesity is on the rise. So blame the children’s choices?

Ok, sure, blame the parents. I agree of course it is the parents responsibility, but the cards are often stacked against parents by big corporations with government subsidies (in the us).

It’s really weird to me to argue that this is completely a problem at the individual level and not a social one—and I see no other way to interpret your comment.

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The point is that the isn't some mysterious force we cannot comprehend. If the odds are stacked against us, change the odds instead of medicating everyone.

At the same time, we are all still individuals. We agency to make life decisions. I generally don't subscribe to the notion that people are helpless even in the face of a big scary corporation. There are two competing ideas. Either 1 there is some unknown force creating this problem(but doesn't extended to the entire human population for some reason) or 2 we know there are environmental causes. For #2, why systemically stack a drug on top if we know what the boogy man is? #1 we need to seriously buckle down on research on what the environmental/behavior factor is so we can bring everyone back to human baseline. Using drugs for people already in great suffering is one thing, but that is very different from widespread distribution as a preventative.

I think you lost the thread (literally the context of threads I was responding to), because much of what you’re saying aligns with my point. OP was mocking the idea that environmental factors should be taken into account and advocating a no-excuses policy of individual responsibility.

If you think I am advocating medication or implying that “people” are helpless against corporations, read again. I agree with most of what you say although I am not sure we need more research (although of course I don’t discourage it). Maybe one day we’ll prove that the government subsidizing corn so that big corporations (spun off from former tobacco companies as another comment pointed out) can super cheaply mass produce syrup which our evolutionary biology finds difficult to resist and market directly to children turns out to be bad for health outcomes and good for profits (for the medical industrial complex as well). Oh wait, we already know that.

> Consider children. Their brains are not fully developed and they have little agency in determining the food they have access to. Childhood obesity is on the rise. So blame the children’s choices?

Been there. It’s always bad parenting. I had to fix shitton of issues myself, because of idiot parents.

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