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Comment by welanes | Hacker News Reader

Yikes. How sad.

Would be nice, for those who are overweight as well as those who suffer from the externalities of those who are overweight, for Governments to treat overeating/junk food like it does smoking and drinking - an addiction that should be discouraged through education and disincentives (tax etc.). Some do but it's obviously not effective.

Then there's the popular cultural angle. We disparage magazines, fashion Houses and websites that present clinically underweight models as the standard, the same should be applied for the clinically overweight.

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You're assuming some kind of independence of thought and action by the Government. The problem is Government supports many of the dietary and lifestyle changes behind the obesity epidemic. For example, in my U.S. community, the government builds miles and miles of roads but almost no sidewalks or bike paths. Zoning here encourages the creation of low density subdivisions that are completely car dependent. Nationally, historically the government food scientists have pushed foods like HFCS, trans fat, skim milk, and low fat/high carb diets that newer research shows is part (most?) of the problem. If government didn't subsidize roads, meddle in food choices, and allowed health care insurance companies to charge the obese their actual risk-based cost, the obesity problem might not be as profound.

Seeing how the free market tends to optimize for short term gains for private actors at the expense of long term costs to society I'd say government "meddling" is a must in this case. Coca Cola, the poster child for the free market, is selling sugared water which is one of the main causes of the obesity epidemic.

Obviously there are forms of government intervention that leave us better off than the status quo. The more interesting question is if the existing government intervention improved anything or if it is part of the problem.

The government has meddled in many ways: Fat is bad for you. Cholesterol in food is bad for you. Eggs are bad for you. Oats are good for you. No eggs are not so bad. The benefits of oats are not that great. Butter is bad for you. Here eat some vegetable oil and margarine instead. Transfats are okay for you. Oops cholesterol in food has no impact on blood cholesterol. Transfats are very bad for you (sorry about that.) Now we know margarine is worse than butter. But really we don't know which fats are bad for you. Or are carbs worse than fats? Who knows...

Really the government doesn't know enough about nutritional science. Neither do the scientists it seems. Nor can we trust the companies. Not sure who to trust.

And yet we can probably agree on a few things. Calorie heavy softdrinks with zero nutrients are probably one of the most unhealthy things, but incredibly beneficial to resturaunts due to high markup, long storage times, easy transport and so on.

Ordering water when you're out (in America) is often viewed as being cheap. I just prefer water, and not bottled water (it's bad for the environment). Even many waiters may treat you worse for ordering water (since they are paid by meal cost / commission).

Our social norms suck.

Sure softdrinks can be bad in excess. However the substitutes like fruit juice are no better (no pulp, sometimes more sugar added) and then there are things like tea and coffee to which people add excess sugar (hello Starbucks) to make it palatable. So it is not just softdrinks that are bad but a wide assortment of drinks with excess sugar.

Softdrinks and other calory-dense drinks with zero nutrients are bad in excess in the way that eating pure sugar is bad in excess. It becomes an excess very quickly. A small slice of chocolate cake contains more nutrition than a soda, but is more likely to be considered a dessert or unusual treat.

Part of the problem is that it becomes a standard part of many meals.

I could only support that idea if the taxes went towards publically funded nutrition research; the kind that drug companies won't do because prevention is not profitable.

It's not like the obese don't know they're obese and unhealthy; the problem is that it's really hard to fix, there's way too much misinformation out there, and for most people most weight loss approaches don't work. There is still a lot of fundamental research to be done to understand obese metabolisms and how to manipulate them so the body doesn't fight back against weight loss.

Weight loss approach (eat less than you need) works for everyone, people just don't do it.

It doesn't work for everyone if those people live in long-term hunger as a result. It's quite unreasonable to simplify it to that level.

But being hungry is something people should learn. I'm hungry all the time, most time also after I have just eaten. It is a sick mindset that you have to feel full all the time.

If you're hungry 24/7, that's not normal and you should probably go to a doctor.

I don't want to argue that the government can help to raise awareness but isn't it more like personal choice in the end? I'm not obese but with a BMI of 27.8 definitely overweight. How is anyone else is going to help me to lose weight if I don't realize myself that something is wrong and most important of all that I need to change something?

I can decide if I want to drive to McDonald's or to the grocery store to buy some vegetables or other healthy ingredients to prepare a more balanced meal. The first is obviously easier and kinda more convenient but if you look at what it does to your health then maybe not so convenient at all.

What I'm trying to say is that for example I used to love Coke and even drank some for breakfast. I'm not the typical coffee addicted developer but I pumped myself with energy drinks instead. After my brother forced me to get my sugar levels throughly checked this year I saw that I was close to be diagnosed with diabetes and figured that there is no other way than to change my diet.

The problem is that for a lot of poorer communities where obesity is most rampant, there is no "grocery store to buy some vegetables or other healthy ingredients" anywhere nearby and owning a car is not a given. So yes, making good choices is important, and most posters on HN are lucky enough to have healthy options easily accessible to them. But a lot of people, even in the US, do not have realistic healthy options available to them.

We can end the subsidies that make McDonalds fare so much cheaper than buying healthy ingredients, for one thing.

"The first is obviously easier and kinda more convenient but if you look at what it does to your health then maybe not so convenient at all."

Presumably for the same reason you drank too much sugary drinks, there was an immediate reward and you didn't comprehend the long term effects i.e. it wasn't an informed decision. I doubt that the doctor was very surprised with the outcome.

The latest episode of americas test kitchen radio touches on this topic and while I don't agree with everything they do have some good points.

> an addiction that should be discouraged through education and disincentives (tax etc.).

Reminds me of this story: http://time.com/3051380/dubai-gold-children-weight-loss/

> "Your Child in Gold" program will award two grams of gold for every kilogram (2.2 pounds) a child manages to shed over two months.

You're absolutely right - the only way to change behavior is to have governments aggressively manipulate the culture, possibly through public education (if any is left) in addition to using their police forces to make that behavior more uncomfortable and expensive for the people who engage in it through censorship, aggressive street-policing, border inspections, and tactical raids.

When you are talking about "overweight" and "obese", you are talking about the BMI.

Unfortunately your idea of disparaging the "clinically overweight" is based on arbitrary BMI cutoffs that are poorly chosen. Recent studies have shown that overall health outcomes (ie, not just heart-disease numbers) are actually better for "overweight" people than those of "normal" weight. And BMI does not scale with height correctly, so it imposes a much stricter standard of what's "healthy" on someone who's 6'3" as opposed to someone who's 5'3". The ratings for what's "normal" also do not take into account age or sex, much less things like frame size.

BMI was devised because height and weight are numbers that have been collected in medical records and studies for decades, whereas the other factors are far less likely to have been recorded at all. So while BMI is often used as a tool for doing large-scale historical research or research across large population groups, that's simply because BMI is a number we can easily figure out, and not because it's actually a good indicator of an individual's health.

Maybe if you are talking being overweight, but this article is about being OBESE.

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