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We also have a lot of data on ways to reduce cancer before it happens. Reduce obesity. Reduce pollution. Etc. Yet we really aren't doing an awful lot about

We also have a lot of data on ways to reduce cancer before it happens. Reduce obesity. Reduce pollution. Etc. Yet we really aren't doing an awful lot about those things. Imagine for example if we had an obesity tax - everyone obese must pay 30% of their earnings into a Medicare fund. Sure it would be unpopular, but obesity would very quickly be solved, and cancer rates would plummet.

hombre_fatal 4y ago
That will probably do nothing for obesity rates except fleece obese people. I’d be more interested in seeing appetite drugs like semaglutide become cheap and easy to get, something that helps instead of buying into punitive measures for absolutely everything.
- fuzzfactor 4y ago
  Exactly. There needs to be a reward system for healthy initiatives, not a punitive approach for unsuccessful accomplishments.
- copperx 4y ago
  It's ironic that you mention semaglutide, because it causes cancer.
DoreenMichele 4y ago
Those approaches -- reducing pollution, etc -- aren't popular in part because humans are terrible about not knowing how to count the deaths that didn't happen.
jodrellblank 4y ago
> "Imagine for example if we had an obesity tax - everyone obese must pay 30% of their earnings into a Medicare fund." Imagine for example if we taxed the shareholders of CocaCola instead, they're the ones who got wealthy from obesity. And before you say "it was the consumer's choice", what was CocaCola's $4b/year advertising spend for, then?
- pifm_guy 4y ago
  I'd totally be up for fining companies retrospectively for harming people's health even before the harm was well understood. That gives the companies an incentive to do the research ahead of time to minimize damages.
  - cj 4y ago
    “Fine company” will just turn into higher costs for consumers. If raising the price of Coke is the goal, I believe there are already proposals for a sugar tax in various jurisdictions. Let’s tax the hell out of processed foods so they become at least on par with the price of healthy food. It’s very tricky since taxes like that will hurt low income households the most. Another option: ban advertising of heavily processed food, and while we’re at it let’s also ban advertising prescription drugs (as is the case already in Canada)
    - rightbyte 4y ago
      > Let’s tax the hell out of processed foods so they become at least on par with the price of healthy food. Isn't processed food already more expensive than "healthy"? E.g. precut fries vs potatoes. Etc. What is cheaper to buy processed?
      - cj 4y ago
        Honestly you may be right. But walking into a typical US grocery store feels like a place where cheap, quick, processed foods are the focus with healthy food being secondary (perhaps because they’re optimizing their store layouts in response to consumer demand for sh*t food). Rarely is healthy food promoted on isle endcaps. I do 100% of my day to day shopping at a (very expensive) health food store for this sole reason. At the health food store, they don’t stock soda, chips, etc (or if they do it’s locally made, organic, etc… “healthy” junk food). You can’t buy things like Oreos or Coke because they simply don’t carry it. For me, removing unhealthy options when grocery shopping led to 40+ lbs of weight loss - with no other lifestyle changes and no additional exercise over 2 years. When I make the occasional visit to a normal grocery store, I’m always in awe at how much real estate “bad” food gets. It’s the majority of the store. All of this is to say, another place to look at are grocery stores themselves and the food they decide to carry and promote in their stores, including the layout of the stores, % real estate given to crap food vs. healthy food, etc.
RazvanS 4y ago
Obesity is caused by lack of access to quality food, being too scarce or too expensive. Sugar and fats are cheap, so most of the pre-made foods are just that. So increase the quality of the food available to the masses and do proper education regarding nutrition and healthy living, and the obesity rate will decrease. Most of the obese people are like that not because they choose, but because they cannot do better.
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  There is nothing wrong with fat. People were cooking with lard for 1000s of years until the US decided fat is bad and people started substituting fat with sugar because when you remove fat, you remove flavour.
  - Retric 4y ago
    Don’t forget people also died much earlier for thousands of years. There is a great deal wrong with very high fat diets, the issue is there’s also a lot wrong with very high carb diets.
    - philliphaydon 4y ago
      > Don’t forget people also died much earlier for thousands of years. Funnily enough not from obesity or heart disease. They died from violence, starvation, infections, plagues, travel, etc. Fats were not a cause.
      - shanebellone 4y ago
        This is a ridiculous point. If you halved today's average lifespan, you'd see a dramatic reduction in cancer.
        philliphaydon 4y ago
        > If you halved today's average lifespan, you'd see a dramatic reduction in cancer. Not sure where the comment I’m replying to, and onwards, ever mentions cancer. Lol
scriptproof 4y ago
You are surely aware of the campaign "Eat Five Servings of Fruits & Vegetables Per Day". People just don't care.
adamredwoods 4y ago
I know we want to believe it was somehow a blame or fault of someone who develops cancer. The reality is I've seen unhealthy people never get cancer and healthy people, children even, who get cancer. No one is to blame for getting cancer.
- pifm_guy 4y ago
  Many of those cancers might be caused by pollution... For example, UV in sunlight is thought to be the main cause of skin cancer. UV is far higher today than 100 years ago because we destroyed most of the ozone layer. But we don't actually know how thick the ozone layer used to be or how much UV used to reach ground level because we never measured it before destroying it. So possibly skin cancer was very rare 100 years ago. The same for cancer's from nitrous oxides from car exhausts. The same for particulate pollution. Same for microplastics. The same for all the kinds of pollution we don't yet know about or measure.
- jghn 4y ago
  You're conflating trends within aggregated data and individual data points. Moving towards a healthier population would reduce cancer rates across the total population. It would not remove cancer entirely. Likewise any arbitrary person might be in complete health & get cancer and vice versa as you say. The two are not contradictory. A similar example is with early detection. The data show that at population scale a lot of early detection efforts cause more harm than good. The problem is that any arbitrary person might have their life saved by said early detection. It's impossible to know who those arbitrary people will be.
- nickd2001 4y ago
  Well, possibly polluters are to blame? Amongst developed countries, seems like USA stands out as having had a pretty cavalier attitude for decades about polluting land and water with carcinogens, allowing all sorts of cr*p in food etc. The reactive attitude "we'll permit this chemical until we run into any problems with it". vs the EU's "this chemical is suspect , so banned until we find clear evidence that it isn't dangerous". Of course EU not perfect either, plenty of scare stories in other places too. But the attitude in the USA baffles me, why isn't there more public pressure to reduce exposure to dangerous chemicals. is it just people are uniformed, or they think lets just dump it in a poor area or something.... ?
mozman 4y ago
What about a tax where you pay 30% of your earnings for homeless?
FpUser 4y ago
Imagine if we had an idiot tax. Suddenly all world problems would go away.
rafaelero 4y ago
It's crazy how we are still not screening everyone for genetic susceptability to diseases and pairing them together with good early detection tests. A lot of missed opportunities here to decrease so much suffering.
melling 4y ago
Interesting enough, the person on Twitter seems fit and not very old. 15 years ago Randy Pausch was also fit a year before he died. So, instead of blaming people for poor choices imagine if 16 years ago, when the US National Debt was a mere $9 trillion, if enough people were inspired that on our way to $31 trillion in debt, we spent a few trillion of that on cancer research.
vorpalhex 4y ago
That would overwhelmingly be a tax on the poor and low income. It would probably not fix obesity anymore than taxing cancer patients would fix cancer.

hombre_fatal 4y ago

That will probably do nothing for obesity rates except fleece obese people. I’d be more interested in seeing appetite drugs like semaglutide become cheap and easy to get, something that helps instead of buying into punitive measures for absolutely everything.

fuzzfactor 4y ago
Exactly. There needs to be a reward system for healthy initiatives, not a punitive approach for unsuccessful accomplishments.
copperx 4y ago
It's ironic that you mention semaglutide, because it causes cancer.

DoreenMichele 4y ago

Those approaches -- reducing pollution, etc -- aren't popular in part because humans are terrible about not knowing how to count the deaths that didn't happen.

jodrellblank 4y ago

> "Imagine for example if we had an obesity tax - everyone obese must pay 30% of their earnings into a Medicare fund." Imagine for example if we taxed the shareholders of CocaCola instead, they're the ones who got wealthy from obesity. And before you say "it was the consumer's choice", what was CocaCola's $4b/year advertising spend for, then?

pifm_guy 4y ago
I'd totally be up for fining companies retrospectively for harming people's health even before the harm was well understood. That gives the companies an incentive to do the research ahead of time to minimize damages.
- cj 4y ago
  “Fine company” will just turn into higher costs for consumers. If raising the price of Coke is the goal, I believe there are already proposals for a sugar tax in various jurisdictions. Let’s tax the hell out of processed foods so they become at least on par with the price of healthy food. It’s very tricky since taxes like that will hurt low income households the most. Another option: ban advertising of heavily processed food, and while we’re at it let’s also ban advertising prescription drugs (as is the case already in Canada)
  - rightbyte 4y ago
    > Let’s tax the hell out of processed foods so they become at least on par with the price of healthy food. Isn't processed food already more expensive than "healthy"? E.g. precut fries vs potatoes. Etc. What is cheaper to buy processed?
    - cj 4y ago
      Honestly you may be right. But walking into a typical US grocery store feels like a place where cheap, quick, processed foods are the focus with healthy food being secondary (perhaps because they’re optimizing their store layouts in response to consumer demand for sh*t food). Rarely is healthy food promoted on isle endcaps. I do 100% of my day to day shopping at a (very expensive) health food store for this sole reason. At the health food store, they don’t stock soda, chips, etc (or if they do it’s locally made, organic, etc… “healthy” junk food). You can’t buy things like Oreos or Coke because they simply don’t carry it. For me, removing unhealthy options when grocery shopping led to 40+ lbs of weight loss - with no other lifestyle changes and no additional exercise over 2 years. When I make the occasional visit to a normal grocery store, I’m always in awe at how much real estate “bad” food gets. It’s the majority of the store. All of this is to say, another place to look at are grocery stores themselves and the food they decide to carry and promote in their stores, including the layout of the stores, % real estate given to crap food vs. healthy food, etc.

RazvanS 4y ago

Obesity is caused by lack of access to quality food, being too scarce or too expensive. Sugar and fats are cheap, so most of the pre-made foods are just that. So increase the quality of the food available to the masses and do proper education regarding nutrition and healthy living, and the obesity rate will decrease. Most of the obese people are like that not because they choose, but because they cannot do better.

philliphaydon 4y ago
There is nothing wrong with fat. People were cooking with lard for 1000s of years until the US decided fat is bad and people started substituting fat with sugar because when you remove fat, you remove flavour.
- Retric 4y ago
  Don’t forget people also died much earlier for thousands of years. There is a great deal wrong with very high fat diets, the issue is there’s also a lot wrong with very high carb diets.
  - philliphaydon 4y ago
    > Don’t forget people also died much earlier for thousands of years. Funnily enough not from obesity or heart disease. They died from violence, starvation, infections, plagues, travel, etc. Fats were not a cause.
    - shanebellone 4y ago
      This is a ridiculous point. If you halved today's average lifespan, you'd see a dramatic reduction in cancer.
      - philliphaydon 4y ago
        > If you halved today's average lifespan, you'd see a dramatic reduction in cancer. Not sure where the comment I’m replying to, and onwards, ever mentions cancer. Lol

scriptproof 4y ago

You are surely aware of the campaign "Eat Five Servings of Fruits & Vegetables Per Day". People just don't care.

adamredwoods 4y ago

I know we want to believe it was somehow a blame or fault of someone who develops cancer. The reality is I've seen unhealthy people never get cancer and healthy people, children even, who get cancer. No one is to blame for getting cancer.

pifm_guy 4y ago
Many of those cancers might be caused by pollution... For example, UV in sunlight is thought to be the main cause of skin cancer. UV is far higher today than 100 years ago because we destroyed most of the ozone layer. But we don't actually know how thick the ozone layer used to be or how much UV used to reach ground level because we never measured it before destroying it. So possibly skin cancer was very rare 100 years ago. The same for cancer's from nitrous oxides from car exhausts. The same for particulate pollution. Same for microplastics. The same for all the kinds of pollution we don't yet know about or measure.
jghn 4y ago
You're conflating trends within aggregated data and individual data points. Moving towards a healthier population would reduce cancer rates across the total population. It would not remove cancer entirely. Likewise any arbitrary person might be in complete health & get cancer and vice versa as you say. The two are not contradictory. A similar example is with early detection. The data show that at population scale a lot of early detection efforts cause more harm than good. The problem is that any arbitrary person might have their life saved by said early detection. It's impossible to know who those arbitrary people will be.
nickd2001 4y ago
Well, possibly polluters are to blame? Amongst developed countries, seems like USA stands out as having had a pretty cavalier attitude for decades about polluting land and water with carcinogens, allowing all sorts of cr*p in food etc. The reactive attitude "we'll permit this chemical until we run into any problems with it". vs the EU's "this chemical is suspect , so banned until we find clear evidence that it isn't dangerous". Of course EU not perfect either, plenty of scare stories in other places too. But the attitude in the USA baffles me, why isn't there more public pressure to reduce exposure to dangerous chemicals. is it just people are uniformed, or they think lets just dump it in a poor area or something.... ?

mozman 4y ago

What about a tax where you pay 30% of your earnings for homeless?

FpUser 4y ago

Imagine if we had an idiot tax. Suddenly all world problems would go away.

rafaelero 4y ago

It's crazy how we are still not screening everyone for genetic susceptability to diseases and pairing them together with good early detection tests. A lot of missed opportunities here to decrease so much suffering.

melling 4y ago

Interesting enough, the person on Twitter seems fit and not very old. 15 years ago Randy Pausch was also fit a year before he died. So, instead of blaming people for poor choices imagine if 16 years ago, when the US National Debt was a mere $9 trillion, if enough people were inspired that on our way to $31 trillion in debt, we spent a few trillion of that on cancer research.

vorpalhex 4y ago

That would overwhelmingly be a tax on the poor and low income. It would probably not fix obesity anymore than taxing cancer patients would fix cancer.