What do you suggest? Free access to Ozempic?
The real underlying reason for this is quite simple: Haber-Bosch enables us to have abundant and cheap food for everyone, and our evolutionary history hasn't wired us up to respond appropriately to that.
The real underlying reason for this is quite simple: Haber-Bosch enables us to have abundant and cheap food for everyone, and our evolutionary history hasn't wired us up to respond appropriately to that.
I'm not saying that ultra-processed foods are fine. They are bad and very much part of the story. But it is not the whole story either.
This is a great way to show you haven't visited those places in over a decade. They lagged behind in the takeover of addictive sugary crap. Now they're catching up in the same way. Korea is another great example that you didn't mention, the exact same has happened there.
The dissonance here is that your view of them being held up as such examples is from 2005, whereas your obesity statistics on them are from 2025. As soon as you update the former view to their situation as of 2025, you'll draw the exact opposite conclusion: an exact match.
Smoking down; office work up.
Eating is a quick dopamine hit which can be enjoyed WHILE working on boring shit at a desk.
Shoving potato chips in your face can make writing TPS reports less painful.
I would blame our monkey brains instead. India has no shortage of traditional sweets that predate capitalism (Indians even knew sugar far before Europeans did), but in the previous crushing poverty that lasted millennia, only a tiny fragment of the Indian population had the opportunity to eat themselves to gout, diabetes, obesity etc. Now, almost every Indian can eat to satiety and beyond, for the first time in history. And the aftereffects show.
Capitalism is fairly efficient at providing people what they want. If our monkey brains crave sugar, sugary treats it will be.
We need to get our monkey brains under control, and not just with regard to sugar. At least some HNers are probably working on digitally addictive products, and then there are the old-fashioned drugs like alcohol and opiates, too.
Why is social media shit? Well, “the platforms are incentivized to demonstrate growth in profit to their investors, so they optimize their system for maximal engagement and retention over time, transferring the same incentive to creators, so many creators who would have made better work before desperately churn out poorly made material about whatever is popular and other, more interesting content is ultimately less common on the platform, with the root cause being the constant need for a growth in surplus in all areas of social production” is a better answer, but “it’s capitalism” is still an alright start.
How does that "prevent it at source"? I was going to say "free access to meat and eggs" and then I read the rest of your comment. You are blaming metabolic dysfunction on the people setting low prices for food, did I read that right?
Therefore, grains are cheap, everything is pumped full of salt and sugar, and people eat overeat.
Also, famines were semi-regular occurrences across the world until very recently.
Your idea would work if meat and eggs took fewer resources to produce, but reality does not work like that.
People only overeat themselves into obesity once you process those carbs into high fructose corn syrup etc. Seems like a very different problem.
There are regions of the world that are doing better than others, and a wide spectrum of reasons for that, but it is only comparative/relative improvement. Obesity is getting worse everywhere, across the board, as people are uplifted into middle class incomes and able to purchase and eat whatever they want & as much as they want.
It maps about 1:1 with the amount of sugary, fatty, addictive shit they're consuming. Across the globe. So do the trends. Prime example being the rising obesity rates in countries like Japan and Korea, rising at the exact same pace as the supply and consumption of above crap in those countries. They still have lower obesity rates than much of the West, at roughly the same relative difference of the amount of such crap consumed.
This is a simple behavior shift; it can help people begin making other behavior changes to help improve their health overall.