[flagged]
The options are to fix what are probably a whole bunch of problems across multiple domains at a cost of $(enormous sum) with a project spanning many decades (and which may easily be derailed and set back years and years at any time), so that living in the US doesn't make people gain weight, or... drugs, that work today. From a policy perspective, those are the only options. There's no good reason to think that reversing "moral decline" or whatever will help, since that doesn't seem to be why some other countries are skinnier.
- economics. Junk food is more available because processed foods last longer and can be stored at mini marts and gas stations. It is true that beans and rice are cheaper than junk food, but junk food is a very cheap way for a dopamine hit.
- time: people have less time to cook due to working and commuting
- urban planning: walkable neighborhoods are few in the US. Lots of daily exercise is foregone for this simple reason.
- culture: the US has a very pleasure-seeking culture. Given the choice of having healthy food vs gratifying food, we tend to the latter.
All of these factors conspire to get us where we are.
It's not a question of decline. There's no reason to think that humans today have less self control than in the past. We're dealing with obesity now because tasty, cheap food didn't exist until the second half of the 20th century.
Self control is a skill which requires practice. A huge amount of our time and practice is devoted to chasing immediate gratification. Doom scrolling, tv, ect. This is all practicing the opposite.
So another hypothesis that seems totally in keeping with the data is that either 1) some group of people have always had this problem in history, they just haven't had access to food like we do now, and/or 2) something about modernity is pushing those chemical triggers up to overdrive in more people.
Self-control really sucks as a solution to anything. When was the last societal problem solved by a national campaign of personal self-control?
unless we start dosing children with GLP-1s preventatively for weight and medicate them for attention we should probably think about how we relate to our environmental conditions long term and prevent patterns from repeating.
There are lots of people out there not living their best lives
It's not just the West.
"Obesity in India has reached epidemic proportions in the 21st century, with morbid obesity affecting 5% of the country's population" [1]. (It's about 7% in America [2].) Meanwhile in China, "the incidence of overweight and obesity among school-age children...was 15.5% in 2010, rising to 24.2% in 2019 and soaring to 29.4% in 2022" [2]. Same story in Vietnam: "The prevalence of overweight among children aged under 5 years increased from 5.6% in 2010 to 7.4% in 2019. For overweight and obesity among children aged 5 to 19 years, prevalence rose from 8.5% and 2.5% in 2010 to 19% and 8.1% in 2020, respectively" [3].
OP is right. "If everyone just..." is shorthand for wishing upon a star that the world were different. It's not a serious solution for reality as it is. (To the degree there is a social trust variable at play, it's in folks doing mental gymnastics to reject the clinical data.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_India
And you think that addiction is a moral/spiritual problem? Nope, it is an endocrinological problem. And precisely drugs like Ozempic have made it very clear, because it doesn't just treat obesity, but many other addictive behaviors like compulsive shopping or gambling. By "merely" altering hormonal balance in the target organism.
People once thought that smallpox was divine punishment for sins. It is 2025, we are on Hacker News, and yet the very same pattern of thinking emerges here, against all the scientific knowledge.
Interesting point. Addiction needs a drug. Drug needs dealers.
Thankfully, dealing drugs is forbidden.
Selling unhealthy and bordeline addictive "food" is défini legal though. Should we regulate this more?
Treating addiction as a disease would probably be less violent and less likely to produce major human rights violations.
There is a middle road of simply taxing highly processed foodstuff more without banning it outright, but that also creates perverse incentives for governments which now have a source of income that they don't want to jeopardize.
> Thankfully, dealing drugs is forbidden.
This is an example of equivocation: Insofar as there is a definition of "drug" for which "Thankfully, dealing drugs is forbidden" is (well, minus the subjective judgement "thankfully") categorically true, it is not one for which either "Addiction needs a drug" or "Drug needs dealers" is also categorically true.
Your buzzwords are useless.