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Comment by SubmarineClub | Hacker News Reader

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As someone who has experienced so many different sides of this, you have zero clue the degree to which your appetite and ability to suppress it is hormonal until you get hormonally compromised (and then fix it, in my case, happily)

Blaming individuals for a public health crisis affecting 40% of the population is absolutely silly. There are a lot of individuals like me, who overeat behaviorally, but that doesn't explain the scale of the issue. maybe 8-10% of the population has some sort of eating disorder, the other 30% are just regular people eating an american diet.

40% in a specific country

Japan is literally the only country in the developed world that doesn't see their trends following the path of America. Even culturally similar countries like Korea are seeing a rise in overweight and obesity similar to the trends that happened in America and other countries in the west. And Korea has one of the largest shame-industrial-complexes around people being fat, with it being the norm for everyone from your friends and family to strangers pointing out the fact that you're overweight, one of the most insane beauty industries in the world, a 'show up and get GLP-1 medications same day' complex that puts America's compounding industry to shame when it comes to ease of access, etc.

If other countries avoid getting as fat as America was at her fattest, it will be because of GLP-1 medications, not because they are morally superior with a better work ethic.

Don't worry, everyone else is getting there:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-adults-defined-a...

I think this is easy to say as a healthy eater (I am one too, always have been). However, unlearning a lifetime of bad habits is hard. But yeah, it's costing nations billions that could be better spent.

It's not just habits. It changes the composition of your gut microbiome, hormones, etc. All of that can make changing your diet much harder than one might think.

If it’s not too hard why are people not doing it?

Because not doing it is even easier.

Well now we’ve just moved the goal posts with the “easy” and “hard” labels on them, and nothing of value was said.

It's really not hard to not drink. It's really not hard to not do heroin. It's really not hard to...

Those are easier in many ways as you don't need heroin or alcohol to survive and can avoid it completely

If it's hard or not is more of a philosopical question about how much free will we have as people. Statistically they're all hard and not over-eating is the hardest.

Culturally and individually we do a lot of things that probably make the food one even harder

If you drink too much, the common answer is that you need to stop drinking. If you eat too much, we are very reluctant to talk about how you need to eat less. We prefer to talk about how it's someone else's fault and how powerless we are to do anything about it, including comforting lies about how eating less wouldn't work anyway, or how being overweight isn't bad really.

It can be very hard to eat a healthy diet if you're poor or if you live in a food desert, or you have a dietary restriction, or some allergies...

And it becomes even harder when you mix any of those two criteria, let alone more. Then factor in your environment. It is way easier to eat healthily in Italy than in the US. (Maybe that is what you meant with Food desert.)

Food Deserts are a concept that can exist anywhere but yes, I think they are more common in the rural USA. They are places that don't have nearby access to decent grocery stores, basically. Instead they have to buy all of their food from convenience stores. Imagine doing all of your food shopping at a gas station store because that's the only groceries around. That's a food desert.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert

Not just a rural thing. Plenty of poor areas in big cities have a dearth of affordable grocery stores.

I disagree on the “if you’re poor”. I find eating healthy cheaper.

You can prepare healthy meals from basic and cheap foodstuffs like vegetables, whole grains and legumes, eggs, low cost meat cuts etc. You can prepare delicious meals for under $1 each.

Buying prepared unhealthy foods is what is expensive.

> I find eating healthy cheaper.

Being poor is very expensive.

> You can prepare delicious meals for under $1 each.

If you have the time and resources to do so.

And also are located near a grocery store with those kinds of cheap prices.

Many poor people literally do not live near a grocery store, the only place they can get foodstuff is a convenience store. Those always have high markups

Ignorant comment.

i feel like close to half the adult population having an eating disorder has to be chocked up to a bug in the human brain at some point.

we evolved to eat caloric foods, in case of a famine that will never happen in the modern world.

I think we are too soft on people and we let dirtbags get away with way too much in the US but saying "its not that hard" is a cop out.

we get it you're a macho conservative. nobody cares.

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