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People want pills to fix their poor life choices. The best thing for yourself and the country as a whole is sleep, regular cardio, regular lifting, regular sun

People want pills to fix their poor life choices. The best thing for yourself and the country as a whole is sleep, regular cardio, regular lifting, regular sunshine and fresh air, cooking all your meals from scratch with whole (ideally local and in season) ingredients and mostly elimination of all refined products like sugar. But we normalized obesity.

nus07 4y ago
I used to do that until I moved to US. Now the stress of working long hours, constant anxiety of layoffs, working on next cutting edge tech, raising a kid without any family or community help, constant fear of losing healthcare insurance leaves me exhausted. I don’t have time to cook, exercise or sleep well. I guess that is the American dream.
- bequanna 4y ago
  I see what you’re trying to do, but everything you list is the result of personal lifestyle choices. It is unfortunate that you’re having a difficult time but where you live and work is completely up to you.
  - afarviral 4y ago
    It may not be a conscious choice but an unconscious belief about themselves, such as that they are not productive enough, or that their feelings are not valid.
  - SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
    This individualism logic is borderline propaganda. It is not a “personal lifestyle choice” to have children. Children are a biological necessity if we want to continue as a species. The fact that society doesn’t support healthy parenting is not an individual failure, but a failure of society. Similarly, it is not a “personal lifestyle choice” to live in economic insecurity due to layoffs. It’s the fault of corporate greed coming back to bite corporations and instead of the executives responsible paying for it, it’s the employees that had no decision making power. We are not individuals with some godly ability to warp reality to fit our health. We are all subject to a society that isn’t incentivized to prioritize the wholistic health of the people living in it.
    - bequanna 4y ago
      The parent comment is complaining about the difficulty raising children. If you have children without accounting for how that is going to change your life, I guess I don’t have much sympathy for you. And layoffs are a reality of the economic cycle, not merely because some “greedy corporation” decided to fire ppl on a whim. If there is less work than workers or business outlook changes, what would you do? Keep on employees to dig ditches and fill them in out of the goodness of your heart?
      - SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
        You are blaming individual families on one hand for not budgeting for children and giving CEOs the benefit of the doubt for not budgeting for economic headwinds. This is the precise propaganda I was talking about. At least I have a consistent logic: if the issue is that we have an unhealthy population we should prioritize the health of the population. Give people the time to exercise and cook. Give people the healthcare they need. Give people who fall down a way to get back up without crushing humiliation, debasement, and poverty trauma.
      - caeril 4y ago
        It's also a poor excuse. I have a full-time job, am raising multiple children, and I fit gym and meal prep into my schedule just fine. When people say they don't "have time", examine their television, video game, or social media habits. You'll find that 99% of the time they are liars. We all have plenty of time, it's just a matter of priority. For many, imposing an unnecessary burden on the healthcare system is a small price to pay for having watched plenty of TikTok and knowing the minutiae of Game of Thrones. On their (premature) deathbeds, they'll all wish they'd finished Season 6 of The Expanse and clicked on more heart icons.
  - cduzz 4y ago
    "Where you live and work is completely up to you" That's a patently false statement for a huge number of people now and the vast majority of people throughout history. There's a kaleidoscope of possibility around people's behavior, station, and life between "Fully Self Actualizing Superman" and "Lazy schmuck who gets what they deserve."
    - francisofascii 4y ago
      Sure, it is false for many. But many of us on HN moved away from family to chase the excitement of Bay Area, NYC, etc. to work on cutting edge tech. And we could potentially have no problem getting hired at a boring, less stressful, 9-5 job tech job back where our families live. Many of us here have options.
      - cduzz 4y ago
        So -- if you want to say "Where a person lives and works is discretionary for a very small number of people for a small period of their lives" that's a more correct statement. The blanket statement "Where you live and work is completely up to you" is a deeply naive and insulting opinion of the same flavor as "let them eat cake"
FormerBandmate 4y ago
As it turns out, obesity is one of the main risk factors for people dying of Covid. This is inconvenient, so no one ever talks about it. That being said, the vaccines worked. The Covid culture war was dumb as fuck
- mathieuh 4y ago
  I don't know where you are in the world but in the UK we were constantly reminded that obesity, immunodeficiency, and old age were the biggest risk factors for worse Covid outcomes. In fact when the prime minister (quite a fat man) at the time caught covid and became quite ill he started talking about how people should lose weight to increase their odds of a quick recovery
joenot443 4y ago
We normalized and encouraged obesity to the point where even the acknowledgement of one's state of obesity can be labeled as inappropriate speech. There's a growing sentiment that the term 'obese' is a slur [1] and should be removed from our lexicon. Imagine if the same thing happened in the 60s as we started to understand the risks of smoking - all the smokers got together and decided that the science was hateful and they were being discriminated against. To rephrase a line from the article, using that silly hypothetical: "In the end, says Flegal, defining smoking by number of cigarettes/day promotes anti-nicotine attitudes and tobacco stigma." One can't navigate conversations about obesity without topics like "attitudes" and "stigma" being part of the conversation, but I don't think the hard biology of the results of excess fat tissue really cares. I'm aware this is a bit of a goofy tangent, but hopefully it highlights the silliness of the current obesity discourse. [1] https://conscienhealth.org/2022/04/obesity-how-does-a-diagnosis-become-a-slur/ https://conscienhealth.org/2022/04/obesity-how-does-a-diagno...
- mansoon 4y ago
  Nobody needs to smoke. Everybody needs to eat. Abstinence is easier than moderation.
  - joenot443 4y ago
    That's a very fair point. It's definitely not a 1:1 comparison between smoking and obesity.
  - eru 4y ago
    Well, nicotine is actually a pretty good ADHD treatment option. That's part of the reason why we see more (adult) ADHD these days: people used to smoke a lot. (Chain smoking plus guzzling black coffee used to be the stereotype for eg journalists or editors.) So nobody strictly _needs_ to smoke, but it helps some. (Before you go and light one up: smoking is one of the worst ways to get nicotine. Use a patch or lozenge or vape instead.)
    - maeil 4y ago
jvanderbot 4y ago
I don't want pill to fix poor life choices, I want daily monitoring of the top 20 most likely things to kill me or destroy my health, like PSA, blood pressure, skin mapping, blood sugar / insulin sensitivity, etc. I will optimize my life around those. There's just no data ... one day you'll feel a little off, a month later a routine checkup will detect advanced stage cancer, and you've got no time left.
- fastaguy88 4y ago
  There is someone who does this already: https://med.stanford.edu/snyderlab/news/May-24-20211.html https://med.stanford.edu/snyderlab/news/May-24-20211.html I heard him give a talk - at that time the main thing he learned was that although being extremely fit, he was at risk for type II diabetes, so he modified his diet. My takeaway was that, even with all this monitoring, the best strategy is diet and exercise (or doing what your doctor has been saying for the past 50+ years).
  - jvanderbot 4y ago
    I'm at elevated risk for skin cancer, which is almost trivial to handle with monitoring. It's a perfect case for a phone app / camera app. Not just "is this cancerous" but "how has this changed over time"
noobermin 4y ago
Even healthy people get cancer, get into accidents, die from crashes. A lot of health is lifestyle but there are always exceptions.
- bequanna 4y ago
  Sure, but why not at least try to put the odds in your favor? We know much about how exercise and diet plays into long term health in the same way that wearing a seatbelt keeps you safer.
- filoleg 4y ago
  I mean, yeah, I agree with you, but think of it this way: I don't have a citation on hand, but I remember reading a while ago that when it comes to general health outcomes, it was about 70% genetics and 30% personal choices (don't quote me on that, can make that number even 60/40 or 75/25, the point will still stand). Which makes sense, a lot of people here probably know someone who did everything "right" in terms of their health choices and still got hit with something nasty (e.g., active lifestyle, eating healthy, etc., and still got cancer or covid or something else), as well as someone who did a lot of things wrong and still had a decent outcome (e.g., my grandfather who has been smoking a pack a day since middle school, been doing hard manual labor, and is still kicking in his 80s). And sure, it seems daunting that your health choices can affect only that 30% (rather than 70%). In blackjack, however, the house edge against an average player is about 2%, and about 0.5% for perfect strategy pro players. People spend countless numbers of hours practicing memorizing (and executing) perfect strategies just to give themselves that extra 1.5%. While with just basics of taking care of your health, you can take charge of the 30%. That's quite a massive effect that taking care of your health can have on your outcomes (and your life), even though your genetic health predisposition still has the edge.
DoreenMichele 4y ago
We need more mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods, we need to resolve the housing crisis, we need to make it feasible for most people to live comfortably without a car if they so wish. Car-centric lifestyles and other trends that were not the norm fifty or a hundred years ago have made it nigh impossible for probably most Americans to live the way you describe. Those lifestyle bits strongly shaped by the public infrastructure, how work gets structured etc are even harder to talk about productively than diet or home healthcare. People feel helpless to change any of it, so saying something like "If America had cycling infrastructure like the Netherlands..." just more or less falls on deaf ears. The way America used to eat healthy was "wife and mom" (aka homemaker) was the primary role for a lot of women. With two-income couples and other trends, that just isn't a pattern we can rely upon anymore. There is a proliferation of products, like meal delivery services, to address this widespread crisis but we need to more explicitly recognize and grapple with some of the root causes and we don't seem to doing a great job of that.
credit_guy 4y ago
> their poor life choices [...] But we normalized obesity. Feeling hungry all the time is not a life choice.
- ultrarunner 4y ago
  Responding to it is. I'm hungry all the time, and I eat all the time, and I weigh the same as I did in high school. I also run 70 miles a week. This is not a recommendation to anyone (although I sincerely enjoy it). There are a million ways to respond to a million variables. Some of those responses are hard.
neuralRiot 4y ago
It’s because we’re conditioned to believe we are already doing the right things an taking the right decisions so anything “substractive” is seen as a step backwards we expect a solution that will fix our problems with minimum effort. Cutting subsidies to factory farming and encouraging plant-based diets would save billions in healthcare reduce pollution and water usage, yet people kick and scream for “mah bacon!”. We will get what we deserve no more nor less.

nus07 4y ago

I used to do that until I moved to US. Now the stress of working long hours, constant anxiety of layoffs, working on next cutting edge tech, raising a kid without any family or community help, constant fear of losing healthcare insurance leaves me exhausted. I don’t have time to cook, exercise or sleep well. I guess that is the American dream.

bequanna 4y ago
I see what you’re trying to do, but everything you list is the result of personal lifestyle choices. It is unfortunate that you’re having a difficult time but where you live and work is completely up to you.
- afarviral 4y ago
  It may not be a conscious choice but an unconscious belief about themselves, such as that they are not productive enough, or that their feelings are not valid.
- SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
  This individualism logic is borderline propaganda. It is not a “personal lifestyle choice” to have children. Children are a biological necessity if we want to continue as a species. The fact that society doesn’t support healthy parenting is not an individual failure, but a failure of society. Similarly, it is not a “personal lifestyle choice” to live in economic insecurity due to layoffs. It’s the fault of corporate greed coming back to bite corporations and instead of the executives responsible paying for it, it’s the employees that had no decision making power. We are not individuals with some godly ability to warp reality to fit our health. We are all subject to a society that isn’t incentivized to prioritize the wholistic health of the people living in it.
  - bequanna 4y ago
    The parent comment is complaining about the difficulty raising children. If you have children without accounting for how that is going to change your life, I guess I don’t have much sympathy for you. And layoffs are a reality of the economic cycle, not merely because some “greedy corporation” decided to fire ppl on a whim. If there is less work than workers or business outlook changes, what would you do? Keep on employees to dig ditches and fill them in out of the goodness of your heart?
    - SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
      You are blaming individual families on one hand for not budgeting for children and giving CEOs the benefit of the doubt for not budgeting for economic headwinds. This is the precise propaganda I was talking about. At least I have a consistent logic: if the issue is that we have an unhealthy population we should prioritize the health of the population. Give people the time to exercise and cook. Give people the healthcare they need. Give people who fall down a way to get back up without crushing humiliation, debasement, and poverty trauma.
    - caeril 4y ago
      It's also a poor excuse. I have a full-time job, am raising multiple children, and I fit gym and meal prep into my schedule just fine. When people say they don't "have time", examine their television, video game, or social media habits. You'll find that 99% of the time they are liars. We all have plenty of time, it's just a matter of priority. For many, imposing an unnecessary burden on the healthcare system is a small price to pay for having watched plenty of TikTok and knowing the minutiae of Game of Thrones. On their (premature) deathbeds, they'll all wish they'd finished Season 6 of The Expanse and clicked on more heart icons.
- cduzz 4y ago
  "Where you live and work is completely up to you" That's a patently false statement for a huge number of people now and the vast majority of people throughout history. There's a kaleidoscope of possibility around people's behavior, station, and life between "Fully Self Actualizing Superman" and "Lazy schmuck who gets what they deserve."
  - francisofascii 4y ago
    Sure, it is false for many. But many of us on HN moved away from family to chase the excitement of Bay Area, NYC, etc. to work on cutting edge tech. And we could potentially have no problem getting hired at a boring, less stressful, 9-5 job tech job back where our families live. Many of us here have options.
    - cduzz 4y ago
      So -- if you want to say "Where a person lives and works is discretionary for a very small number of people for a small period of their lives" that's a more correct statement. The blanket statement "Where you live and work is completely up to you" is a deeply naive and insulting opinion of the same flavor as "let them eat cake"

FormerBandmate 4y ago

As it turns out, obesity is one of the main risk factors for people dying of Covid. This is inconvenient, so no one ever talks about it. That being said, the vaccines worked. The Covid culture war was dumb as fuck

mathieuh 4y ago
I don't know where you are in the world but in the UK we were constantly reminded that obesity, immunodeficiency, and old age were the biggest risk factors for worse Covid outcomes. In fact when the prime minister (quite a fat man) at the time caught covid and became quite ill he started talking about how people should lose weight to increase their odds of a quick recovery

joenot443 4y ago

We normalized and encouraged obesity to the point where even the acknowledgement of one's state of obesity can be labeled as inappropriate speech. There's a growing sentiment that the term 'obese' is a slur [1] and should be removed from our lexicon. Imagine if the same thing happened in the 60s as we started to understand the risks of smoking - all the smokers got together and decided that the science was hateful and they were being discriminated against. To rephrase a line from the article, using that silly hypothetical: "In the end, says Flegal, defining smoking by number of cigarettes/day promotes anti-nicotine attitudes and tobacco stigma." One can't navigate conversations about obesity without topics like "attitudes" and "stigma" being part of the conversation, but I don't think the hard biology of the results of excess fat tissue really cares. I'm aware this is a bit of a goofy tangent, but hopefully it highlights the silliness of the current obesity discourse. [1] https://conscienhealth.org/2022/04/obesity-how-does-a-diagnosis-become-a-slur/ https://conscienhealth.org/2022/04/obesity-how-does-a-diagno...

mansoon 4y ago
Nobody needs to smoke. Everybody needs to eat. Abstinence is easier than moderation.
- joenot443 4y ago
  That's a very fair point. It's definitely not a 1:1 comparison between smoking and obesity.
- eru 4y ago
  Well, nicotine is actually a pretty good ADHD treatment option. That's part of the reason why we see more (adult) ADHD these days: people used to smoke a lot. (Chain smoking plus guzzling black coffee used to be the stereotype for eg journalists or editors.) So nobody strictly _needs_ to smoke, but it helps some. (Before you go and light one up: smoking is one of the worst ways to get nicotine. Use a patch or lozenge or vape instead.)
  - maeil 4y ago

jvanderbot 4y ago

I don't want pill to fix poor life choices, I want daily monitoring of the top 20 most likely things to kill me or destroy my health, like PSA, blood pressure, skin mapping, blood sugar / insulin sensitivity, etc. I will optimize my life around those. There's just no data ... one day you'll feel a little off, a month later a routine checkup will detect advanced stage cancer, and you've got no time left.

fastaguy88 4y ago
There is someone who does this already: https://med.stanford.edu/snyderlab/news/May-24-20211.html https://med.stanford.edu/snyderlab/news/May-24-20211.html I heard him give a talk - at that time the main thing he learned was that although being extremely fit, he was at risk for type II diabetes, so he modified his diet. My takeaway was that, even with all this monitoring, the best strategy is diet and exercise (or doing what your doctor has been saying for the past 50+ years).
- jvanderbot 4y ago
  I'm at elevated risk for skin cancer, which is almost trivial to handle with monitoring. It's a perfect case for a phone app / camera app. Not just "is this cancerous" but "how has this changed over time"

noobermin 4y ago

Even healthy people get cancer, get into accidents, die from crashes. A lot of health is lifestyle but there are always exceptions.

bequanna 4y ago
Sure, but why not at least try to put the odds in your favor? We know much about how exercise and diet plays into long term health in the same way that wearing a seatbelt keeps you safer.
filoleg 4y ago
I mean, yeah, I agree with you, but think of it this way: I don't have a citation on hand, but I remember reading a while ago that when it comes to general health outcomes, it was about 70% genetics and 30% personal choices (don't quote me on that, can make that number even 60/40 or 75/25, the point will still stand). Which makes sense, a lot of people here probably know someone who did everything "right" in terms of their health choices and still got hit with something nasty (e.g., active lifestyle, eating healthy, etc., and still got cancer or covid or something else), as well as someone who did a lot of things wrong and still had a decent outcome (e.g., my grandfather who has been smoking a pack a day since middle school, been doing hard manual labor, and is still kicking in his 80s). And sure, it seems daunting that your health choices can affect only that 30% (rather than 70%). In blackjack, however, the house edge against an average player is about 2%, and about 0.5% for perfect strategy pro players. People spend countless numbers of hours practicing memorizing (and executing) perfect strategies just to give themselves that extra 1.5%. While with just basics of taking care of your health, you can take charge of the 30%. That's quite a massive effect that taking care of your health can have on your outcomes (and your life), even though your genetic health predisposition still has the edge.

DoreenMichele 4y ago

We need more mixed-use, walkable neighborhoods, we need to resolve the housing crisis, we need to make it feasible for most people to live comfortably without a car if they so wish. Car-centric lifestyles and other trends that were not the norm fifty or a hundred years ago have made it nigh impossible for probably most Americans to live the way you describe. Those lifestyle bits strongly shaped by the public infrastructure, how work gets structured etc are even harder to talk about productively than diet or home healthcare. People feel helpless to change any of it, so saying something like "If America had cycling infrastructure like the Netherlands..." just more or less falls on deaf ears. The way America used to eat healthy was "wife and mom" (aka homemaker) was the primary role for a lot of women. With two-income couples and other trends, that just isn't a pattern we can rely upon anymore. There is a proliferation of products, like meal delivery services, to address this widespread crisis but we need to more explicitly recognize and grapple with some of the root causes and we don't seem to doing a great job of that.

credit_guy 4y ago

> their poor life choices [...] But we normalized obesity. Feeling hungry all the time is not a life choice.

ultrarunner 4y ago
Responding to it is. I'm hungry all the time, and I eat all the time, and I weigh the same as I did in high school. I also run 70 miles a week. This is not a recommendation to anyone (although I sincerely enjoy it). There are a million ways to respond to a million variables. Some of those responses are hard.

neuralRiot 4y ago

It’s because we’re conditioned to believe we are already doing the right things an taking the right decisions so anything “substractive” is seen as a step backwards we expect a solution that will fix our problems with minimum effort. Cutting subsidies to factory farming and encouraging plant-based diets would save billions in healthcare reduce pollution and water usage, yet people kick and scream for “mah bacon!”. We will get what we deserve no more nor less.