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Given that obesity is sorta culture war related and in the news a lot, I figured this story would be relevant: Weight-Loss Stocks Soar After Obesity-Drug Study Spurs Investor Frenzy
I am more convinced than ever that these drugs are not only the future of wright loss, but similar to Paxil, is also going to a part of culture too and another tool or crutch to mitigate the downsides of modernity, except instead of social anxiety , it's too much food. We're sorta collectively inflicted this on ourselves, as victims of our own success. The pendulum if progress has swung so far towards abundance that we need modern technology just to try to undo it.
Yeah this does seem like the inevitable future.
Honestly it was always felt absolutely absurd to me that people blamed individuals completely for their overweight status. Like yes, a portion of this is always going to come down to personal responsibility, but when the overweight proportion of America and the world so high, maybe there's something more going on.
There have always been poor people, there have always been low class people, there have always been those without personal responsibility and those who have terrible impulse control. But it's only in the recent decades that we've seen such a massive rise of country and international obesity levels. Is there somehow something so unique with modern Americans and modern humanity that we lack that simple impulse control as our ancestors did for millennia?
Maybe to some extent, but to this scale? Probably not.
I think it was always obvious the problem was that we are animals. Animals with genetics and a brain that was meant for a much different environment and world. Modern civilization is an artificial construct we've engaged for a blip in the time scale of our species. The problem was obviously the extremely easily available high calorie, extremely unnutritiousness foods found literally at every corner.
Do we blame the gambling addict completely if we transport them to Las Vegas and tell them to be smart? If they end up gambling, yes it's on them, but it's also partly on us for taking them to Las Vegas in the first place.
I feel like this reality was obvious to us at least by the mid 2000's. If you are a person who believes in sin taxes then we should have supported and pushed for the significant taxing of these foods and used that money to directly subsidize healthier food. If not for the betterment of the individuals in society, than for the fact that society has to face the huge costs of generations of obesity in things like ballooning healthcare costs, part of the contribution to the proliferation of incels, increased insurance liabilities, ect.
But since we successfully convinced everyone that fatness was a unique individual moral failing, jack in the box stays open and everyone and everything pays the huge negative externalities. On top of that we get another point of contention and divide between people in this country where everyone argues with each other and blames each other while those that profit off of this just walk around with the fortunes in their pockets.
Thankfully since that is politically untenable for multiple reasons, the pharma companies have come to the rescue and soon enough massive obesity will be a thing of the past.
I genuinely believe that obesity and the modern health crisis resulting from that have had a hand in a number of the biggest modern societal problems and I think on a much, much, much, much smaller scale we might notice in a decade or two where certain societal problems will have decreased and we might statistically be able to tie it to people no longer being as massively obese in the same way we tie lead in the paint with so many problems. Again, on a hugely smaller scale of course. Just trying to make the point that this is an issue that has an impact on a number of different issues and without it, a lot of affected things will change for the better.
I think really, we did have fat shaming in the past, at least among intimates. There was a culture of “not eating like a pig” of not getting seconds let alone thirds of your meal, and of not snacking all the time (or at least choosing better snacks). People in 1960 would definitely say something negative about you eating a quarter of a 16 inch pizza by yourself. They’d notice the kid dragging a 2L soda to class.
Some people have a problem, sure, I’ll agree. I’ll also agree that our food environment is more super stimulating than any other environment in the past. I don’t however think that humans are incapable of choice. In fact, I think the 21st century is one of abdication of responsibility for the choices made. We don’t push kids to study hard, or to achieve things. We don’t push people to be more resilient to stress. We don’t say or do anything about people falling into bad choices and in some cases addiction. I think we can improve the environment, and we should. I just don’t think that it’s only down to “environment” as humans have choices and make them all the time.
Well sure, but did I excuse personal responsibility completely?
I think it is understandable that when addicts for anything from alcohol, drugs, gambling, ect relapse, some of that is hugely on them for not being able to handle temptation and keep better self control. But I think we can all understand how it's much different for a person who's living in Las Vegas to fall back into gambling or someone living in LA to be more easily tempted with drugs than if that same person living in 1970's Salt Lake City.
In my experience a lot of handling self control and responsibility is understanding the importance of building the right environment around you.
In college I found out that I have a temptation to stress eat and when I gained 20 pounds over the course of a semester, I realized that having my kitchen stocked with easy to get snacks and food didn't help. I no longer bought snacks and so made it so that if I wanted to eat anything I would have to make a meal or at the least get up and walk to a store and buy something. I made it a chore and more of an inconvenience to eat food. That simple change made it so that I was back to my healthy skinny weight by the end of the following semester+summer. It worked because food was no longer a momentary snap decision made when I was studying and stressed. It had to be a deliberate action and decision which meant a number of times when I wanted to grasp for the comfort of food I couldn't.
Same thing happened when in the past few years I found myself so easily grabbing my phone anytime things were slow to read some random post, article or book on it. Most of it was meaningless drivel that just helped me pass the time, but wasn't adding to my life and was distracting me more than I liked. When I finally got around to addressing this so that when I wanted to work without distractions and the temptation for a short break I put my phone and it's charger on the other side of the apartment. That way it would require me to get up and walk over to check it. It would have to be a deliberate action which did a lot to cut down on my phone use. Though the biggest help was switching to an iphone se with it's tiny screen which made it a chore to use outside of actual necessity. I would have switched to a dumb phone, but just out of social and work obligation I needed a smartphone and the tiny screen has really helped in cutting down on idle phone use because it's so suboptimal.
Now you could say that yes anyone can do these types of things, but I want to emphasize that I think myself of fairly conscientious and put together and I found it quite hard. It wasn't impossible, but it wasn't easy and I'm not saying that I have the greatest cravings for food as well. I think it's completely understandable in a modern society where people are bombarded and stimulated with food ads everywhere, the cheapness of all of this food, the slight extra difficulty that healthy food has versus fast food, it is more than understandable why many cannot handle the difficulty of managing these things on top of the rigors of life. Especially for those living in higher stress lower income environments where they're worried about their next paycheck, having enough to pay for rent, utilities, and food in general. For those people, having the luxury to add on a new thing to stress and watch about might be much more difficult than my incident in college.
I also think you need to factor in support systems into this. When I was trying to lose the weight in the summer back at home, I mentioned to my mom that I wanted to eat healthier and she was more than happy to help me. Replacing less healthy meals with more chicken dinners and such and we cut out having high calorie processed food snacks in the house. My sister grumbled, but she was understanding.
If you have a supportive family structure, something that generally overlaps more with middle and higher classes, the importance of healthy living and being in shape is taken much more seriously. Requests like mine are things that are understood and taken more seriously. Overweight people are generally lower class and often their families are also overweight. If say one of them decides that they want to be healthier, that plan is severely hampered and made more difficult if the people around them who also are probably overweight are unwilling to also join them. It's not impossible, but you can understand that if their families are not on board, chances are that unhealthy high calorie snacks and foods will still dominate their kitchen making it that much more difficult for the person trying to lose weight. It's easier to stick to a diet if you aren't staring the face of bags of potato chips everytime you get up to get water.
One pound of fat is about 3500 calories. 3500 extra calories is pretty easy to gain over the course of few days for most. I'd argue most won't even notice it significantly if they ingest 800 extra calories a day a for week. That's literally two poptarts a day. Weight loss is a slow gradual process that can be achingly slow. Gaining 3500 calories can happen without notice, but losing 3500 calories? Being on constant calorie deficit can be extremely frustrating. The person must deny themselves the food needed to sate their hunger and force their body to burn that fat inside. You can do everything right for a week and be on pace to lose a pound then on Sunday you go out with friends to watch the game at a bar and a few beers and a couple slices of pizza could mean that you've just ingested 2000 calories and much of the progress you made over that entire week is gone.
I say all of that to simply say that yes, it's doable. Millions of people workout and diet to lose weight and it works. It's a struggle, but it works both historically and the modern day. I did it, you might have at some point, many do it after the holiday season every year and it works out decently well for them.
My point is that I think the idea that the modern day is filled with people who are uniquely bad with self control and temptation out of a individual failing is a lie. Maybe we're worse than people were 80 years ago, but I think you take many of those people from 80 years ago and make them grow up in the modern day, most would struggle similarly. In the past extreme weight gain and obesity was probably more of a personal failing because of yes the environment that might shame them around them, but also just what they could eat to get fat. Advertising and yes human behavior has normalized the huge portions that would be unthinkable previously. The food itself has changed, oatmeal isn't terribly appetizing but honey nut cheerios is.
When the scale is as big as it is in the modern day I'm much more likely to see this as a industrial scaled problem where more of the blame should be on society than individuals. Some of these are people who might have fallen into this behavior, but most are probably people in previous eras would have had an extra piece of pie but would at worse just have slightly chubbier cheeks. I put the blame more on society for fostering a terrible environment where those on the edge to be led astray.
In my opinion obesity is a bigger health crisis than smoking ever was and we should implement the same kind of sin taxes on corporations that push these things. Society pays for obesity through healthcare, mental problems, lower productivity, less polite world, exacerbating class divides, insurance expenses, and a whole lot more. There are so many negative externalities and we should at the least ban advertising for fast food and unhealthy foods like poptarts, ect the same way we banned advertisements for smoking. If people want it then they can get it, but there is great benefit from keeping their messaging from barraging a population that does not need that temptation in front of them constantly. Society would be better for it.
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