Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

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The majority of healthcare spending goes to chronic diseases primarily caused by lifestyle issues. Collectively we are a nation of obese, sedentary substance abusers. If we could do better on prevention and delay the onset of chronic diseases like type-2 diabetes, hypertension, and heart failure then that would largely fix the demand problem and leave a lot more resources available for patients who randomly get cancer or multiple sclerosis or whatever. But this is a policy issue that goes way beyond the healthcare system and no one has a practical solution. Everyone loves to give health and nutrition advice to others, but we're all undisciplined and do unhealthy stuff even when we know we shouldn't.

https://peterattiamd.com/outlive/

As for the food supply, I have no doubt that many people are impacted by subclinical micronutrient deficiencies, whether it's sulphur or zinc or D3 or something else. But the evidence indicates that's less important than excess macronutrients for most people.

What's actually interesting is that there exists a model for solving obesity. Mostly it's a matter of having the will and prioritization to solve such a problem.

Japan has an obesity rate of 4%. By law they require every school to employ a professional nutritionist, which requires 3 years of additional training on top of their education degrees. In a particular example of 1000 kids, not a single child is overweight. Every nutritionist is required to design the school's food curriculum such that all meals are made from fresh foods and to be balanced according to all the food groups, and they forbid even the use of processed pastes. All meals are made from fresh foods on-site.

Then the kids are then taught how to eat well and to fully cover their nutritional needs from 6-18. This would be the non-ozempic way to influence a nation to eat well.

I'm a big fan of Attia and familiar with his work. That's fair that excess calories is among the major contributors to Healthcare and addressing that would probably be among the largest impact items we ought to tackle.

I wonder though if with the advent of GLP1 drugs, if obesity may already be a solved problem, but merely a matter of time?

I imagine, as with anything, perfect doesn't need to be the enemy of good enough. A huge multifaceted issue like obesity could be addressed from many angles.

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