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Comment by anal_reactor | Hacker News Reader

I think Ozempic is just a symbol of what modern life looks like. Obesity is a problem that 100% could be solved with a cultural shift (see Japan), but instead we decide to use medicine. It's like, humanity at large grew such big brains because there was evolutionary pressure to be intelligent, but now we're using intelligence to remove that pressure. Which would make sense if we redirected that intelligence to something else, but we don't.

I think the reason why we don't see aliens is that intelligent life isn't sustainable long-term, and there's a long list of reasons why intelligence leads to self-destruction.

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The way Japan "solves" obesity is quite cruel on those it does not work for. Overweight natives are not treated kindly. I think creating a medicine to make this easier is a moral good, and a sign of kindness and intelligence. Hopefully the aliens also agree.

What is more cruel:

a) emotional damage

b) heart disease

I will not argue, there are benefits to the way Japan does it, if the alternative is doing nothing. Obesity is indeed bad.

But we're talking about a pill that can hopefully prevent both, so we don't need to make that choice.

Alternative A can have the opposite effect. Unhappy people tend to eat more.

Perhaps it is a "motivator" for people to stop gaining weight by controlling their diet before they are too obese, but once you are obese I think it has mostly negative effects.

Losing significant weight is incredibly hard, and gets harder the more you want to lose. If you have lost 20kg (with great benefits to health) and are still made fun of because you are still above average weight it will have a negative effect and the weight will quickly be gained back

Who does it not work for? (it being light eating and exercise, not some draconian torture)

Some people don't lose weight as easily as others, due to genetics, medical treatment, disability... And even some others have the freedom to not invest as much effort on losing weight.

Point being: there are overweight Japanese, despite the existence of the measures Japan takes to avoid it. These are the people I mean that it doesn't work for. And for those people, they don't have to deal only with the consequences of being overweight, they also have to deal with being treated very poorly. You can say it's for their own good, and the it incentives them to better themselves. Regardless, it still sucks for them.

Shaming people into losing weight may work, on aggregate. I'm not entirely convinced it's a good way to go about it, at the individual level.

Let's be generous and say that a person's body runs on 1600kcal/day, which is pretty low and the other 1800kcal/day which is kinda average. The difference in weight loss between these two over six months eating and exercising is negligible. The maths just doesn't math.

But to be fair It may be psychological. Eating is a very common coping mechanism and not taking care of your body is a common symptom of stress and depression.

Sure, a lot of problems could be solved with a cultural shift, but most people are in a rat race to survive

And those in politics are not interested in change since because (the cynical part starts here) they are selected / sponsored by billionaires who own the media, or go to politics as a job and not to help anyone but themselves

On a side note storing fat to feed the brain in case of bad times makes sense. In the past there were no convinience stores, nor refridgerators

> And those in politics are not interested in change since because

It's not about "big media", it's about the fact that average voter is an idiot. This a fundamental flaw of democracy.

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