8 ms·

I agree with all of this, but the same argument can be made for being overweight. If we ban smoking, we should also ban being fat. I don't have the numbers to

I agree with all of this, but the same argument can be made for being overweight. If we ban smoking, we should also ban being fat. I don't have the numbers to compare, but I suspect banning being fat might even save the US healthcare system more money, if not now - at least at the current trajectory. If you think "You can't ban being fat, my body my choice".. well, then I don't think you should ban smoking.

kingofheroes 4y ago
I generally agree. Though I would imagine banning a specific activity (smoking) is significantly easier than banning a pattern of behavior (overeating).
teh64 4y ago
How do you ban being fat without banning all foods? Banning smoking is easy, just ban sales of cigarettes. How would you even enforce banning being fat? Random checks for weight? Everyone needs their weight checked periodically and if you are too fat you have to ...idk pay a fine or go to jail? That is some true dystopian stuff. Even just banning unhealthy food would not work, because there is a lot of healthy food that can cause people to being fat if they eat enough. I guess you could make some food stamp type program where you can only buy a set number of calories per week (i.e. WW2 style rationing), but that would be another very intrusive solution.
- humbleMouse 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- wyre 4y ago
  Eliminate the subsidizes that allows for processed and fast foods to be dirt-cheap and funnel those subsidies to whole foods. >there is a lot of healthy food that can cause people to being fat if they eat enough Okay, but unhealthy food is unhealthy because it is easy to eat large quantities of it. No one is getting fat because they are overeating fruits and veggies.
  - teh64 4y ago
    Well look at what the worlds strongest man eats: https://www.businessinsider.com/brian-shaw-the-worlds-strongest-mans-daily-diet-has-12000-calories-2018-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/brian-shaw-the-worlds-strong... You would agree that that is mostly healthy food? And he is eating very large quantities of it. He is not fat, but people who do not do a lot of exercise could eat the same amount of food (or even half, he eats 12,000 calories a day) and gain quite a lot of weight. Also a diet needs more than fruits and vegetables to be healthy at all. I agree that there should be less focus on processed and fast foods, but that alone does not eliminate the problem of people eating a lot of food. I could eat a big mac and medium fries for every meal and not gain a lot of weight (3x big mac (563 calories) = 1689 calories + 3* fries (333 calories) = 2688 calories. Which is around the 2500 calorie range for an adult man. That would in no way be healthy, but I would not gain weight quickly.
    - wyre 4y ago
      What? The average person is not anything like Brian Shaw. The article also quickly points out eating that much is the hardest thing about his lifestyle. My brain can’t do these mental gymnastics to understand what you’re trying to say. I never said a diet of only fruits and veggies was healthy. It is significantly closer to being a healthy diet than the average American diet. Add nuts, seeds, legumes, and maybe some meat or starch and then it’s a healthy diet. The problem is processed foods are heavily subsidized and whole plant based foods are not. I bet if you ate a Big Mac and fries 3x a day, you’re going to be hungry all day too. Some foods are more satiating than others. Eliminating calorie dense foods that are not satiating is something that every healthy diet is going to do.
- int_19h 4y ago
  The simplest would be requiring all ready-to-eat food to have a certain proportion of fats & carbs, and no higher. And yeah, this is true dystopian stuff. But that is exactly where this line of thinking inevitably leads. Once you accept that costs of public healthcare are a valid reason to regulate lifestyle choices, practically nothing is off-limits.
- barry-cotter 4y ago
  You don’t need to ban it. Just punish it. Tax people based on some combination of BMI and body fat percentage, to compensate the body politic for them extra healthcare costs of their life choices.
  - presentation 4y ago
    My Singaporean friend told me about a policy there that you get a (not huge) cash award from the government every year if you can pass a fitness test. It's not a ton of cash and he's well off, but nonetheless it's helped him motivate to stay super fit all the time. Sounds pretty good to me!
anigbrowl 4y ago
Proximity to a fat person has no impact on my calorie intake. I'm amazed how many people post arguments like this without being able to shift to a third person observer perspective.
- barry-cotter 4y ago
  It does impact healthcare spending. One solution would be to allow people to get as fat as they like as long as they give up the right to healthcare.
  - anigbrowl 4y ago
    It does, but that's a wholly different dynamic.
  - presentation 4y ago
    It doesn't need to be that extreme, giving up the right to healthcare would probably make things a hell of a lot worse (encourage people to not go to the doctor and then incur even more expenses). It seems that the incurred costs per capita for overweight/obese people is somewhere from $250-$2000 according to this study. [1] So we can use some combination of the carrot (reward people who are healthy) and the stick (tax/penalize people who aren't) and end up more or less in the same place. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2891924/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2891924/
- aiisjustanif 4y ago
  We technically do not know, > "We haven't developed the data yet to say that it's clearly dangerous, but it probably is," says Dr. Hays. [1]: https://newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discussion/mayo-clinic-minute-secondhand-electronic-cigarette-smoke/ https://newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discussion/mayo-clinic-mi...
boplicity 4y ago
> the same argument can be made for being overweight. What an ignorant and offensive comment. People do not choose their weight the way they choose to smoke or not smoke. Weight is an outcome that has many factors outside of diet and behavioral choices. And diet, when it is a factor, is not a simple factor. Many, many people make very good dietary choices and remain overweight. Many of those same people exercise regularly and remain overweight. Please don't judge people for being overweight -- and don't blame them either.
- whalee 4y ago
  > Weight is an outcome that has many factors outside of diet Thermodynamics disagrees with this assertion.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - wyre 4y ago
    Calories in == calories out. Right. Calories in is diet, yes. Calories out is influenced heavily by hereditary and lifestyle factors that are outside of diet.
    - brianwawok 4y ago
      Right. So if you are burning less calories and want to lose weight, you eat less? It's hard, I get it. I am losing weight right now. But I don't say I can't lose weight.
  - boplicity 4y ago
    It would seem pretty straightforward and intuitive that people get the same amount of calories from identical foods. However, that is not true. Once food enters our bodies -- especially our colon, it encounters our microbiomes. Everybody has a different microbiome -- little bugs/bacteria in our gut. Some of these bacteria convert undigestable foods into usable calories that are then absorbed by our bodies. (Short Chain Fatty Acids.) The amount of food converted by these bacteria varies depending on an individual's unique microbiome. So, it turns out that no, not all food results in the same amount of calorie absorption. This is something that varies significantly, and not just based on the microbiome, though this is certainly one of the factors.
pc86 4y ago
Smoking is a choice 100% of the time. There are at least some instances (a small minority) where being overweight, even extremely obese, is not entirely a choice. It's apples and oranges.
- boloust 4y ago
  Propensity for addiction varies significantly between individuals. We've discovered a large number of genetic correlates of addiction susceptibility. Once you grant the existence of individuals that are outliers in susceptibility to addiction (which I think is reasonable because it's such a highly polygenic trait) I don't see how one could claim that obesity is sometimes not entirely a "choice", while smoking is always a "choice".
- brianwawok 4y ago
  What? It is a choice how much you eat. You might be bedbound and not in control of your own food. But, the staff could just give you less food. There is no medical condition that will cause someone in a locked room given a calorie restricted diet to gain weight. That is against the laws of physics. It's fine to say "losing weight is very very very hard". But it's incorrect to say "being overweight is not a choice".
  - karpierz 4y ago
    By your same logic, a broken leg doesn't stop you from jumping. It just makes it "very very very hard." It's incorrect to say jumping on your broken leg is not a choice. But you might find your health outcomes far worse if you jump with it vs. rest.
    - brianwawok 4y ago
      Sorry, I don't think this makes any sense. You (unless you are bedbound) choose what goes in your mouth. You, thus, have control of your own weight.
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      But by your logic, smoking either isn't addictive or there is no such thing as addiction. If obese people are strongly compelled to eat, I'm pretty sure we've discovered that smokers are comparably strongly compelled to smoke.
dfxm12 4y ago
Your comparison isn't apt. I don't think banning being overweight or fat (two separate poorly defined physical attributes) is the same thing as banning (e-)cigarettes (a specific type of product), so I don't think the same argument can be made. If you make this argument in the future, maybe you should think about comparing it to the banning of a particular type of unhealthy food (which is similar in scope to e-cigs and cigarettes). I think this entire line of thinking of you and the parent poster is flawed anyway. Denying health insurance to anyone would probably have negative effects for all of us anyway (the insured usually end up paying anyway at different levels, whether that's through higher premiums at the personal level, lower productivity overall at the national level, or dealing with an untimely death/sickness of friends/family at the local level).
- saiya-jin 4y ago
  I think it would be enough to give a nice tax on all food which contains X amount of sugars per weight unit per type (ie liquids and maxybe 2-3 more). HFCS should be hammered there so tightly there is no way around it. No exceptions apart from purely medical (=very expensive) stuff. Another may be trans-fats. All the revenue -> medical system. Your wallet would be telling you all the time how stupid your eating habits/disorders are. But good luck pushing this through society setup like US (aka impossible).
mitchdoogle 4y ago
Also being fat isn't a choice that anybody makes. It is heavily dependent on environment and genetics, both things that people do not control in their formative years
- windowsrookie 4y ago
  This is false. The world population becoming fat has only been a problem in the last 50 years. It is because we have an abundance of calories available for cheap now, which wasn't the case before.
  - wyre 4y ago
    Obesity rates also show high correlation with plastic and other chemical contamination. I think it's more nuanced than blaming it entirely on cheap calories/fast food (but that is the main impetus, I'll agree).
- xeromal 4y ago
  > Also being fat isn't a choice that anybody makes. This is a stretch. The difficulty of losing weight might be related to genetics and the environment and monetary capability, but it is 100% possible for every person on this planet to lose weight. Bodies cannot create calories.
- pc86 4y ago
  Of course it is. Plenty of people are fat because they like to eat food and don't like to exercise all that much. Environment and genetics do not change the second law of thermodynamics. There are absolutely some medical conditions that make it hard to lose weight, make you retain water, etc. and it's not as cut and dry as smoking (100% of the time it's 100% your fault), but "being fat isn't a choice" is objectively, laughably wrong.

kingofheroes 4y ago

I generally agree. Though I would imagine banning a specific activity (smoking) is significantly easier than banning a pattern of behavior (overeating).

teh64 4y ago

How do you ban being fat without banning all foods? Banning smoking is easy, just ban sales of cigarettes. How would you even enforce banning being fat? Random checks for weight? Everyone needs their weight checked periodically and if you are too fat you have to ...idk pay a fine or go to jail? That is some true dystopian stuff. Even just banning unhealthy food would not work, because there is a lot of healthy food that can cause people to being fat if they eat enough. I guess you could make some food stamp type program where you can only buy a set number of calories per week (i.e. WW2 style rationing), but that would be another very intrusive solution.

humbleMouse 4y ago
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
wyre 4y ago
Eliminate the subsidizes that allows for processed and fast foods to be dirt-cheap and funnel those subsidies to whole foods. >there is a lot of healthy food that can cause people to being fat if they eat enough Okay, but unhealthy food is unhealthy because it is easy to eat large quantities of it. No one is getting fat because they are overeating fruits and veggies.
- teh64 4y ago
  Well look at what the worlds strongest man eats: https://www.businessinsider.com/brian-shaw-the-worlds-strongest-mans-daily-diet-has-12000-calories-2018-10 https://www.businessinsider.com/brian-shaw-the-worlds-strong... You would agree that that is mostly healthy food? And he is eating very large quantities of it. He is not fat, but people who do not do a lot of exercise could eat the same amount of food (or even half, he eats 12,000 calories a day) and gain quite a lot of weight. Also a diet needs more than fruits and vegetables to be healthy at all. I agree that there should be less focus on processed and fast foods, but that alone does not eliminate the problem of people eating a lot of food. I could eat a big mac and medium fries for every meal and not gain a lot of weight (3x big mac (563 calories) = 1689 calories + 3* fries (333 calories) = 2688 calories. Which is around the 2500 calorie range for an adult man. That would in no way be healthy, but I would not gain weight quickly.
  - wyre 4y ago
    What? The average person is not anything like Brian Shaw. The article also quickly points out eating that much is the hardest thing about his lifestyle. My brain can’t do these mental gymnastics to understand what you’re trying to say. I never said a diet of only fruits and veggies was healthy. It is significantly closer to being a healthy diet than the average American diet. Add nuts, seeds, legumes, and maybe some meat or starch and then it’s a healthy diet. The problem is processed foods are heavily subsidized and whole plant based foods are not. I bet if you ate a Big Mac and fries 3x a day, you’re going to be hungry all day too. Some foods are more satiating than others. Eliminating calorie dense foods that are not satiating is something that every healthy diet is going to do.
int_19h 4y ago
The simplest would be requiring all ready-to-eat food to have a certain proportion of fats & carbs, and no higher. And yeah, this is true dystopian stuff. But that is exactly where this line of thinking inevitably leads. Once you accept that costs of public healthcare are a valid reason to regulate lifestyle choices, practically nothing is off-limits.
barry-cotter 4y ago
You don’t need to ban it. Just punish it. Tax people based on some combination of BMI and body fat percentage, to compensate the body politic for them extra healthcare costs of their life choices.
- presentation 4y ago
  My Singaporean friend told me about a policy there that you get a (not huge) cash award from the government every year if you can pass a fitness test. It's not a ton of cash and he's well off, but nonetheless it's helped him motivate to stay super fit all the time. Sounds pretty good to me!

anigbrowl 4y ago

Proximity to a fat person has no impact on my calorie intake. I'm amazed how many people post arguments like this without being able to shift to a third person observer perspective.

barry-cotter 4y ago
It does impact healthcare spending. One solution would be to allow people to get as fat as they like as long as they give up the right to healthcare.
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  It does, but that's a wholly different dynamic.
- presentation 4y ago
  It doesn't need to be that extreme, giving up the right to healthcare would probably make things a hell of a lot worse (encourage people to not go to the doctor and then incur even more expenses). It seems that the incurred costs per capita for overweight/obese people is somewhere from $250-$2000 according to this study. [1] So we can use some combination of the carrot (reward people who are healthy) and the stick (tax/penalize people who aren't) and end up more or less in the same place. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2891924/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2891924/
aiisjustanif 4y ago
We technically do not know, > "We haven't developed the data yet to say that it's clearly dangerous, but it probably is," says Dr. Hays. [1]: https://newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discussion/mayo-clinic-minute-secondhand-electronic-cigarette-smoke/ https://newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discussion/mayo-clinic-mi...

boplicity 4y ago

> the same argument can be made for being overweight. What an ignorant and offensive comment. People do not choose their weight the way they choose to smoke or not smoke. Weight is an outcome that has many factors outside of diet and behavioral choices. And diet, when it is a factor, is not a simple factor. Many, many people make very good dietary choices and remain overweight. Many of those same people exercise regularly and remain overweight. Please don't judge people for being overweight -- and don't blame them either.

whalee 4y ago
> Weight is an outcome that has many factors outside of diet Thermodynamics disagrees with this assertion.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- wyre 4y ago
  Calories in == calories out. Right. Calories in is diet, yes. Calories out is influenced heavily by hereditary and lifestyle factors that are outside of diet.
  - brianwawok 4y ago
    Right. So if you are burning less calories and want to lose weight, you eat less? It's hard, I get it. I am losing weight right now. But I don't say I can't lose weight.
- boplicity 4y ago
  It would seem pretty straightforward and intuitive that people get the same amount of calories from identical foods. However, that is not true. Once food enters our bodies -- especially our colon, it encounters our microbiomes. Everybody has a different microbiome -- little bugs/bacteria in our gut. Some of these bacteria convert undigestable foods into usable calories that are then absorbed by our bodies. (Short Chain Fatty Acids.) The amount of food converted by these bacteria varies depending on an individual's unique microbiome. So, it turns out that no, not all food results in the same amount of calorie absorption. This is something that varies significantly, and not just based on the microbiome, though this is certainly one of the factors.

pc86 4y ago

Smoking is a choice 100% of the time. There are at least some instances (a small minority) where being overweight, even extremely obese, is not entirely a choice. It's apples and oranges.

boloust 4y ago
Propensity for addiction varies significantly between individuals. We've discovered a large number of genetic correlates of addiction susceptibility. Once you grant the existence of individuals that are outliers in susceptibility to addiction (which I think is reasonable because it's such a highly polygenic trait) I don't see how one could claim that obesity is sometimes not entirely a "choice", while smoking is always a "choice".
brianwawok 4y ago
What? It is a choice how much you eat. You might be bedbound and not in control of your own food. But, the staff could just give you less food. There is no medical condition that will cause someone in a locked room given a calorie restricted diet to gain weight. That is against the laws of physics. It's fine to say "losing weight is very very very hard". But it's incorrect to say "being overweight is not a choice".
- karpierz 4y ago
  By your same logic, a broken leg doesn't stop you from jumping. It just makes it "very very very hard." It's incorrect to say jumping on your broken leg is not a choice. But you might find your health outcomes far worse if you jump with it vs. rest.
  - brianwawok 4y ago
    Sorry, I don't think this makes any sense. You (unless you are bedbound) choose what goes in your mouth. You, thus, have control of your own weight.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    But by your logic, smoking either isn't addictive or there is no such thing as addiction. If obese people are strongly compelled to eat, I'm pretty sure we've discovered that smokers are comparably strongly compelled to smoke.

dfxm12 4y ago

Your comparison isn't apt. I don't think banning being overweight or fat (two separate poorly defined physical attributes) is the same thing as banning (e-)cigarettes (a specific type of product), so I don't think the same argument can be made. If you make this argument in the future, maybe you should think about comparing it to the banning of a particular type of unhealthy food (which is similar in scope to e-cigs and cigarettes). I think this entire line of thinking of you and the parent poster is flawed anyway. Denying health insurance to anyone would probably have negative effects for all of us anyway (the insured usually end up paying anyway at different levels, whether that's through higher premiums at the personal level, lower productivity overall at the national level, or dealing with an untimely death/sickness of friends/family at the local level).

saiya-jin 4y ago
I think it would be enough to give a nice tax on all food which contains X amount of sugars per weight unit per type (ie liquids and maxybe 2-3 more). HFCS should be hammered there so tightly there is no way around it. No exceptions apart from purely medical (=very expensive) stuff. Another may be trans-fats. All the revenue -> medical system. Your wallet would be telling you all the time how stupid your eating habits/disorders are. But good luck pushing this through society setup like US (aka impossible).

mitchdoogle 4y ago

Also being fat isn't a choice that anybody makes. It is heavily dependent on environment and genetics, both things that people do not control in their formative years

windowsrookie 4y ago
This is false. The world population becoming fat has only been a problem in the last 50 years. It is because we have an abundance of calories available for cheap now, which wasn't the case before.
- wyre 4y ago
  Obesity rates also show high correlation with plastic and other chemical contamination. I think it's more nuanced than blaming it entirely on cheap calories/fast food (but that is the main impetus, I'll agree).
xeromal 4y ago
> Also being fat isn't a choice that anybody makes. This is a stretch. The difficulty of losing weight might be related to genetics and the environment and monetary capability, but it is 100% possible for every person on this planet to lose weight. Bodies cannot create calories.
pc86 4y ago
Of course it is. Plenty of people are fat because they like to eat food and don't like to exercise all that much. Environment and genetics do not change the second law of thermodynamics. There are absolutely some medical conditions that make it hard to lose weight, make you retain water, etc. and it's not as cut and dry as smoking (100% of the time it's 100% your fault), but "being fat isn't a choice" is objectively, laughably wrong.