It’s sad seeing the crazy downstream multigenerational damage that massive sugar consumption is causing as obesity rates reach 50%.
Good luck future humanity.
Good luck future humanity.
https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED050960.pdf#page=10
"The time has come to ask what level of population growth is good for the United States. There was a period when rapid growth made better sense ks we sought to settle a continent and build a modern industrial Nation. And there was a period, in the 1930's, when a low birth rate was cause for concern. But these are new times and we have to question old assumptions and make new choices based on what population growth means for the Nation today."
None of the authors of that paper were elected officials, and that view never became policy of any state.
Not officially anyway: https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
If you fuck up the gene pool to get to that result I don't think you can call it "desired".
Hopefully, gene editing obviates the these concerns.
Type 2 diabetes is an acquired and reversible disease that follows insulin resistance and it is caused by excessive amounts of glucose in your blood, which forces your pancreas to release an ever increasing amount of insulin which then is absorbed by fat cells until they hit insulin resistance, then it fills up muscle cells including your heart until they hit insulin resistance until the only place left for the glucose is inside your organs.
The easiest way to reverse diabetes or avoid heart surgery is to get a live glucose monitor and then do a ketogenic diet. It's non invasive and if done correctly is more effective than any surgery can ever hope to be.
As my endocrinologist put it, diabetes is a disease about decision making.
Right now, there’s little evidence that a CGM actually helps Type 2 patients make better decisions. More information doesn’t lead to better decision making. Better decision making processes and changes to lifestyle lead to better decision making.
From 2020:
“Although continuous glucose monitoring may benefit patients with type 1 diabetes mellitus, there is limited evidence that it offers similar benefits in patients with type 2 diabetes, regardless of whether they are taking insulin.”
“Until we have research supporting continuous glucose monitoring for patients with type 2 diabetes, especially those not receiving regular insulin injections, there are no patient-oriented benefits to justify its great expense and additional hassles for patients and physicians.”
What I will do is a simple web search: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18197594/ and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6463748/
To quote the later study: "Given that risk for diabetes and its complications is linked to both genetic and environmental factors, it is not surprising that there are now more than 1,000 articles that address the intersection of diabetes and epigenetics or epigenomics"
The case study that I remember was studies done on Indigenous populations when they got introduced to a west-style diet by being integrated into west society. The following generations had higher rate of type 2 diabetes compared to children of existing demographics. There has also been a plentora of studies done on children born after the dutch hunger winter (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transgenerational_epigenetic_i...), where one of the finding was increased risk of glucose intolerance in adulthood.
But it's not absolutes. Anyway yeah, some lifestyle choices need to be addressed to reduce pressure on the health care system. Like how for two years now we've had certain measures in place like social distancing and facial masks, not to eradicate the virus (that would require extended full stay-at-home mandate lockdowns) but to keep pressure on the health care system manageable.
My grandpa went through this in 2020. He was a tough navy guy, and even he said "This is a half-assed way to live", stopped the dialysis, and passed away a few weeks later. Once you're on dialysis, there's not much of a chance of going back to a life without it.
IInsurance for me should be very low. I am in great shape by anybody's measure. But all the drunks, junkies, fatties, make my payments so high I've debated dropping medical insurance.
I ask this as someone with a BMI of 23 who puts a reasonable amount of effort into not becoming obese or overweight again. The personal benefits of not dying from cardiac arrest at 55 are very obvious, but I'm not clear on why healthcare systems won't be able to cope.
I can understand the argument that diabetes resources, specifically, will be strained. If overall costs don't rise, that's not a huge problem.
https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/health-statisti...
Doctors are now seeing children come in fatty liver disease. That never used to happen.
In general, we live in a healthier world. We know more about nutrition, cancer-causing chemicals, etc. We continue to make progress automating some of the most body-breaking jobs. Most of us (western world, anyways) have access to clean water.
But, a substantial portion of the US (and world?) population is making bad decisions about their diet which have life-altering side-effects like diabetes. The question then is "why?" We know a lot about nutrition and it's impact on our bodies. Is it advertising? Is it cost (McDonalds is more sometimes more affordable on a time+money basis than home-cooked food)? Is it just our tiny lizard brains REALLY like salt and sugar and Nestle etc know how to manipulate that?
They used to die of malnutrition of all kinds. Not just because of being poor, but because of us not knowing this or that is necessary in food.
The physical work people used to do was body breaking fairly often. The chemicals people used to be in daily contact with were body damaging too.
It is missing Iodine which is now commonly added to salt.
You can be overfed in calories and still suffer from malnutrition. Especially without science we have now. And whole classes of sicknesses caused by malnutrition don't exist anymore.
Corn is a subsidized crop by the US Department of Agriculture—we pay farmers to grow it. See the documentary "King Corn" about two guys who didn't know the first thing about growing corn but still made a profit on 1 acre of corn [1].
It's often said your zip code is a huge indicator of many demographic stats and what food you have access to is one of them.
I've lived in food deserts and I can tell you getting healthy food can be quite an arduous task, especially if you rely on public transportation.
Recent data shows that 80%(!) of black women in the United States are obese [2].
This isn't an organic phenomenon; this level of obesity is the result of a system—some intentional and some not—at work.
[2]: https://minorityhealth.hhs.gov/omh/browse.aspx?lvl=4&lvlid=2...
Except for the fact that poor immigrants from Bangladesh or Africa do not suffer from the same problem in the first generation, because they are still used to buying staples in the market and cooking traditional meals at home.
The same can actually be seen in UK and Western Europe.
The deadly fact that is compounding the situation is that cooking skills haven't been passed down in a large portion of the Western population for almost two generations now. People who do not know how to cook rely on highly processed stuff that can be heated in 2 minutes in a microwave. Reliance on this highly processed stuff is strongly correlated with bad health outcomes.
People either feel that they don't have time to prepare and cook or they see it as inefficient since it is much faster and cheaper to dine-out or takeaway.
Give them a a couple years or so, and many of them will want to live the American lifestyle - eating out every day, and stocking their pantry with snacks they see on TV. The ones that don't face the consequences of being obviously foreign.
In America, marketing and psychological hackery are second only to law in terms of "forcing" people to do things.
That's what food desert means. As in, no food. Therefore food must be imported. Therefore it's expensive. Sugar just happens to be a well-preserving food.
The solution is quite simple: Don't live in a food desert.
For the people on HN who tend to skew towards wealthy white-collar work this is fine advice, but it's absolutely not possible for a lot of people from lower incomes. Not only can they not afford to move, they can't afford to leave their entire social support structures and build them anew.
I hate calling out privilege but this just smacks of privilege.