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Comment by EamonnMR | Hacker News Reader

If we're going to treat calories as addictive and addiction as a disease rather than a personal failing it should follow that we treat the disease with a drug.

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The problem is that we are plausibly looking at the result of a change over the last thirty or fifty year in the quality of what's considered the normal diet, notably normalizing calories through the consumption of sugary drinks but also a variety of other things. This has had the side-effect of an obesity epidemic.

Now, what are we doing?

* Getting people to stop consuming sugary drinks and other very unhealthy items (maybe that would require drugs at this point)?

* Or offer people drugs so this side-effect of an unhealthy diet can be avoided?

If we're offer a way to continue a bad diet without this effect, it seems very likely further bad effects will appear X many years from now from a combination of the drugs and the bad diet. Because virtually all drugs taken forever accumulate side-effects over since the body did evolve to process them (these drugs may indeed be needed at times but the point remains).

This class of drugs does address the bad diet though, doesn't it?

Anyway, 'getting people to stop' turns out to be impossible for some. The drugs are meant to help with that.

Diet soda and bottled water exist and somehow people still keep choosing sugary drinks. In fact people often have a ready excuse for why they consider diet soda more unhealthy!

If we assume addictions as a disease then we mostly treat them with regulation. Smoking companies would have loved if we just made a pill that mitigates tar in your lungs instead of all but legislating them into obscurity.

At the end of the day you don't have to smoke, not that people won't.

At the end of the day, or maybe week, or possible even month you have to eat or you're going to die. Simply put you require caloric intake to survive. Yea, you can ban coke and candybars, and hell that's a good idea. But what about bread? Or do you monitor and watch to make sure everyone only eats two slices? Make sure foods at restaurants only have so many calories per serving and ensure they people can only buy one meal per meal?

At some point it still falls apart because it is human nature to massively overconsume since the vast majority of history we've been calorie short. You're dealing with an animal response here that is going to be very difficult to override to the under/normal consumption side.

Jury is still out on how food companies will take a situation where people can be prescribed a pill to be less hungry. I imagine they'd be more scared if it was OTC though.

But not only. It also follow that we need to regulate the industry and stop advertising for sugar for example

We do not - because it just codifies our misinformed populist views instead of actually solving the problem.

Sugar consumption is going down and it doesn't seem to have any impact.

Calorie equated studies show no difference between low fat or low carb diets.

It all boils down to excess calories.

They didn’t say calories are addictive. They clearly said certain foods are addictive. Those foods should be more regulated like cigarettes and companies take more responsibility as a first or at least concurrent step to everyone taking more drugs.

As far as I can tell, our social policies don't really work for managing addiction. We just hook up a vacuum cleaner to people's pockets and suck the money out of them if they smoke. Call it a "sin tax". But the problem is that people prioritize their next fix above other things; would you rather get some cigarettes or pay your rent, many people choose the cigarettes. I'm not sure how that helps anyone, and I'm not sure how expanding it to sodas or doughnuts would help anyone.

Regressive taxes also don't work well. I don't always eat super healthy. Making unhealthy food cost more wouldn't have any measurable impact, except maybe tanking my 401k because half the Fortune 500 goes out of business.

All the same arguments were said about cigarettes and yet in 2022 I almost never smell a cigarette burning outside and few young people smoke.

People complained about cigarette taxes wouldn’t be effective but they are.

The stock market didn’t crash either despite the multibillion dollar tobacco companies being affected.

I'm not sure I buy that argument though. The idea that you can squarely blame the obesity epidemic on some foods and not others.

Hell I'd be ok with banning all forms of food advertising and requiring that all foods be blank packages with nothing but the ingredients, nutrition facts, and a short description of how they were prepared. I'd prefer that world on general principle. But I don't think it would fix the obesity epidemic.

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