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Comment by KittenInABox | Hacker News Reader

I find obesity a weird problem societally because literature to get people to stop being obese on a population level just kind of sucks. All we know is stuff that doesn't really work. Shaming fat people, pointing out their fatness, or other public pressure doesn't do anything. Strict diets like keto or OMAD don't work on a population level (individuals can get great results but I'm talking enough to statistically move the needle as a population). Ozempic and other injectables seem like the best widespread treatment, but that doesn't tell us any causes.

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We're not making movement on this because we're not calling it what it is -- an addiction.

We dance around it and call it 'obesity' but the real medical cause of obesity is an addiction to unhealthy food.

This is compounded by the fact that it is completely legal for people to make their food more addictive and therefore unhealthy and advertise it to addicted people with underhanded marketing techniques that take advantage of their addiction.

Until we recognize this as an addiction issue that is compounded by dealers being able to operate with impunity we won't make any headway -- short of technological advancements like Ozempic that allow people to side step their addiction.

To the best of my knowledge, there's actually no diet that has been proven to yield long-term weight loss. (There are of course individual success cases.)

There are tons of diets that have been proven to work. Getting people to adhere to them long-term is the problem.

The issue is that people able to keep doing them long term end up in hospitals diagnozed with eating disorders.

As in, inability to keep them long term is biological defense of organism that does not have genetic predisposition toward anorexia.

> Shaming fat people, pointing out their fatness, or other public pressure doesn't do anything.

Says who? Are you implying that true societal shame is still being enforced right now, without hundreds of refuges in the form of safe spaces and social justice advocacy groups? I'm pretty sure that such shame worked pretty well in the past, and still does in countries like Japan.

In the end, you'll just have to realize that the root issue you're facing is decadence, and that's there's no fighting it.

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