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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31057 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023

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I think there’s a bit of a difference between shaming and simply not going along with the problem. Watching your kids eat themselves into weighing well over 100 lbs before they hit double digits and not even saying anything is borderline abuse. Watching someone you care about eat themselves into morbid obesity and saying nothing isn’t being kind. And I think as far as the media goes, it shouldn’t promote unhealthy lifestyles. You could also consider taxing foods that cause obesity.

I'm not sure taxes are that effective here - it's analogous to the sin tax problem, addicts really want alcohol / cigarettes, and raising the price reduces their consumption, but doesn't stop them from eating them. And there's a lot of cheap awful food.

There aren't really any legal options here because any law that would 'work' would require a different legal system/culture that'd be willing to enforce it. Analogous to how even if all of the legislature and SCOTUS were possessed, they couldn't actually make infidelity illegal, nobody would follow or enforce that.

So imagining legal solutions is just larping, but anyway: Not allowing selling unhealthy food to fat people is an option, but they (probably?) care enough about eating massive amounts of food and you just get the war on drugs but worse because you can buy the drugs at walmart.

And that leaves banning unhealthy food - just not politically viable, nobody supports it. Most on the far-right who claim to support it on twitter would probably revolt when it banned the unhealthy stuff they liked.

You can't ban "unhealthy food" because in the case of obesity, the dose makes the poison.

This just seems flatly untrue. Surely any quantity of e.g. fizzy drinks is net-negative for nutritional content.

Certainly not. It's not clear what "net-negative for nutritional content" would mean.

I mean that a fizzy drink is like tobacco or cocaine, in that there is no amount of it which is actually net-beneficial for the human body. It's not "the dose makes the poison": no quantity of it is good for you.

Ah, in that case it is not true. Nutritionally, assuming you mean sodas rather than champagne or something, a fizzy drink is basically just simple carbohydrates. They also usually contain salt which is not strictly speaking a nutrient. There's nothing inherently wrong with these things.

I eat literal packets of gelatinized sugar while running long distances. I would be irritated if I wasn't allowed to do so because other people lack self-control.

Not that this solves the many problems of bans, but I (vague guess) don't think people would get fat off of sugar packets, for the same reason they don't just pour sugar into water and drink the sugar-water.

But they do do this in the form of soft drinks. Watch sweet tea being made some time and you will see the unlikely volume of sugar required. Then there's lemonade, whatever Kool Aid exists now, and of course most all fruit juices. There are other flavors besides sugar, of course, but basically yes you have sugar water being consumed with regularity by great numbers of people who then continue to be fat. Does no one else remember the con where people warned off of fat by the FDA would count the fat grams and ignore the massive sugar content (see SnackWells) and remain as unhealthy as ever?

While I don't think the FDA is as wild and woolly as some claim it is, it has enough problems that I would be very hesitant to blindly accept a sudden mandate with penalties if I didn't adhere to it. And if I would be hesitant, you can bet many of my friends actually living in the US would go berserk and have their guns out if someone threatened to take their fat kids to Child Protective Services because of too many breakfast burritos or whatever.

Politico article rather critical of the FDA

Not that this solves the many problems of bans, but I (vague guess) don't think people would get fat off of sugar packets, for the same reason they don't just pour sugar into water and drink the sugar-water.

They do, they just claim it's iced tea.

lol, thats's sort of what I meant - people seem to only like the sugar/fat/carbs in combination with other flavors. But maybe they'd just combine the raw materials and flavors themselves when they got hungry

Right; you wouldn't be banning unsweetened tea (since there's no reasonable way to claim that's unhealthy), so unless you banned the sugar itself people would still add enough sugar to the unsweetened tea to make the spoon stand up.

I don't think so? Certainly seltzers or non-nutritive sweetened sodas are basically neutral.

So imagining legal solutions is just larping

One solution can be going through children:

  • food ed classes about maintaining a proper diet (we had a topic covering this in our biology class, but that was like two lessons at most, I am thinking of a repeating module like sex ed)
  • do schools perform medical check-ups on their students every year? That would be an appropriate moment to screen them for extra weight or obesity
  • anyone who's technically overweight gets a second check-up to see if they really are. If they are, their parents get a brochure about feeding their children right
  • if anyone's obese, then the CPS is involved. The parents are given half a year to show progress, if they can't, the kid is placed in a foster family that has proven to be able to cook healthy and delicious meals.

Based on the quality of foster care and CPS... this seems like a major disaster for child welfare.

We've had government guidance about eating for decades. The problem is that while the public have followed this guidance diligently (eat more carbs, replace animal fats with seed oils, eat less red meat) obesity trends ever upwards. People have obediently replaced butter with margarine and lard with canola oil based on the spurious idea that this would protect them from heart disease, and yet people have never been fatter.

The current childhood obesity rate in the US is at about 20%. Do you want to rip 20% of children from their parents because they happen to be victims of a global epidemic?

The current childhood obesity rate in the US is at about 20%. Do you want to rip 20% of children from their parents because they happen to be victims of a global epidemic?

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The problem is that while the public have followed this guidance diligently

Citation needed. I doubt most people are diligently following FDA guidelines. How many of them really do stick to the diet of 50 grams of protein, 78 grams of fat, 275 grams of carbs, top up with 180 more calories of your choosing (please choose protein)?

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