If the goal is to increase the average level of health in the world, an easy way of decreasing obesity would be a godsend. Does this bother you? If so, why?
(As I've been asked to mark it: YES, that's sarcasm)
Perhaps if the face stuffers ate less and exercised more, there might be more food to go round. But no, carry on being greedy, cost money and resources, then use more money and resources for some sort of lazy, likely over priced, medical solution. Such a scheme is a disgusting indictment of modern humanity. Too damn lazy to do the obvious, while many people cant get enough food to survive, and pop a pill, or whatever.
Bothered? No, it makes me very damn angry.
Que the usual excuses..........
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23127-abnormal-gut-bac...
This research does not mean "take a pill, become slim". It means "Take some pills, and eat less and move more".
Some people have gut flora that help them stay slim. Some people have gut flora that help them stay fat.
You can see that not having the slim flora, and having the fat flora, is the worst combination and would make "eating less, moving more" harder.
Taking a pill to modify the gut flora would support the attempts of those people to eat less move more.
I realize that you're angry. My tip to you would be to go to some weight losers meetings and meet these greedy face-stuffing bastards. I bet that would learn a lot from that and gain a different perspective about what they're dealing with.
But, I guess you won't, because it's a bit more comfortable to just hack away at your keyboard writing smug comments on HN.
People generally make the choices that their circumstances dictate. If many people are falling into obesity because it is easy to do so, writing them off as "lazy" doesn't help anyone; it just makes you sound like an asshole.