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Instead of a system that makes these drug available for purchase, I'd rather live in a system that promotes healthy food and active behavior. Unfortunately, I h

• epolanski 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • haliskerbas 2y ago
    As with everything I'm sure there is a spectrum. There are surely folks who have food addictions, there are surely folks who are not taking accountability for their habits, and there are possibly folks for whom this could be the best or safest option.
    • epolanski 2y ago
      [flagged]
      • wizzwizz4 2y ago
        It doesn't follow that your body, when running at a calorific deficit, will continue to run the life support systems at optimal levels. In principle, it's possible (unless you're actually fasting, which is a whole different kettle of fish) for a reduction in energy-in to lead to putting on more weight, if your basal metabolic rate drops more than the food did. It's complicated. What's true for some people isn't necessarily true for all people. Sure, I'm willing to bet a lot of people – probably most people – are able to choose how fat they are by adjusting their diet and exercise regime, without adverse effects on their health, but that's not a law of biology. I know as many people who struggle to put on weight as struggle to lose it.
      • lacrosse_tannin 2y ago
        Who cares? If someone needs to eat less to get healthy, they can do that and: be miserably hungry or not. It's like telling people they can't have aspirin during a hangover.
      • Draiken 2y ago
        What a naive way of looking at things. Sure, everyone that's fat is lazy! There cannot be any other explanations, right? You seemingly forget not everyone is as privileged as you are. Clearly by your take, you can afford to eat healthy and have the leisure time to exercise. A lot more people can't.
        • epolanski 2y ago
          [flagged]
  • yieldcrv 2y ago
    How is that specifically late stage capitalism
    • epolanski 2y ago
      Filling aisles of unhealthy and very tasty stuff then finding the cheat to keep doing this.
  • cl0ckt0wer 2y ago
    I've struggled with weight loss my entire life. It's gotten to the point where I'm on multiple blood pressure medications, and the dosages are creeping up. And yet I still find myself thinking about eating constantly. Then I took Zepbound. It was revelatory. It was like a curse was lifted, and my hunger was silenced. I'm down 45 lbs in 4 months. Perhaps if I didn't have responsibilities or trauma or stress or a thousand other things I could put all my energy into self control. Unfortunately, I only get so many years on this planet, so I'm going to keep taking the drug and spend my mental energy on other persuits.
    • organsnyder 2y ago
      > Perhaps if I didn't have responsibilities or trauma or stress or a thousand other things I could put all my energy into self control. This is so relatable. Right before Covid, I was working really hard at counting calories and was looking at going below 200 lbs for the first time in my adult life. Then Covid hit, my life was upended, and I prioritized other things; I'm up about 40 lbs from then. I can only devote so much energy to this kind of intensive lifestyle change, and other things have been taking precedence (including, recently, working out—that's been a huge lifestyle improvement [other than Wednesday being leg day and my legs still yelling at me], but hasn't led to weight loss).
    • epolanski 2y ago
      Nice story, but I stick to my opinion. Drugs and excuses are merely replacing natural selection. I've struggled with weight too, and both alcoholic and abusive parents, traumas and stress, and I stuck on discipline and won it. You should absolutely do what makes you live better, but you aren't solving the root causes, just making excuses. That's the biggest issue I have, these drugs are just gonna make the world unhealthier and unhappier.
  • Draiken 2y ago
    Late stage capitalism is what got us in this place. Add sugar to everything, advertise anything and everything to kids so they are hooked up early, make healthy food expensive so the poor have no choice but to eat unhealthy and so on. Profit! Now they'll profit once again at the other end "fixing" the issues they caused in the first place. Genius. There's no limit on human ingenuity when it comes to exploiting others.
  • organsnyder 2y ago
    > Like..you can't bother to take a walk, eat healthier, so you shell thousands on drugs.. For many of us in the United States (and elsewhere, I'm sure), our built environment makes driving the only feasible mode of transportation. Sure, we can walk for recreation, but at some phases of life carving out that time is extremely difficult. Regarding food: there are brilliant people devoting their careers to coopting our natural processes to buy their products—and many of those products are unhealthy foods. Fruits and veggies don't have that kind of marketing.
  • intothemild 2y ago
    You really shouldn't generalise. I've been running distance most my life. I stopped when my wife had our first kid to concentrate on working hard and give her as much time off from the kid as I could, then after 6 years I had enough and started running. Two years ago, I hadn't been losing any weight, and I was put on these drugs to help me. I lost more weight. I run, walk, and move more than you imagine. It didn't work, but these drugs worked. Not everything is black and white or fits into your preconceived notions.
• from-nibly 2y ago
  You don't have to worry about which government subsidy is going to help big ag at the expense of your health. It's all of them.
• paulcole 2y ago
  This is like saying, "All things being equal, I'd prefer Santa Claus bring presents on Christmas Eve than have to go shopping for my kids." It's like well duh of course you'd prefer the impossibly unrealistic miracle.
  • wizzwizz4 2y ago
    Other countries do it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change4Life https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change4Life
    • sbelskie 2y ago
      Is there any evidence it’s effective? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_United_Kingdom#/media/File%3AObesity_in_the_UK.svg https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_United_Kingdo...
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      • wizzwizz4 2y ago
        The claim was about promotion, not effective promotion. (As a sibling comment points out, effective promotion is not unrealistic either. It won't happen on its own, but nothing does.)
        • card_zero 2y ago
          So other countries would officially prefer the impossibly unrealistic miracle.
      • sweeter 2y ago
        the UK has basically become the US by most metrics. This includes the increasing privatization of health services, transport, etc... and the excessive commodification of basic necessities like housing. I find that saying that health initiatives don't work by vaguely gesturing at a country, is not a structurally sound argument. Its like the sentiment here is: "is the fact that we include Pizza as a vegetable in American schools part of the problem? Nooooo, that can't be it. it must be a moral issue!" and thats just one example. The obesity problem in the US is tied directly to our relationship with highly processed (and CHEAP) food. Along with the stranglehold those companies have over state and federal institutions that allow them to directly sell these foods in schools and institutions, and heavily skirt FDA regulations via lobbying. The US is uniquely bad when we have a ton of chemicals and ingredients in our foods that are banned in most other countries. It is largely a systemic problem and a problem that can easily be solved. Poorer people tend to eat cheap food, cheap processed food isn't well regulated and is directly tied obesity and a whole host of health problems.
• TeeMassive 2y ago
  I'm glad for RFK Jr. for this reason. Nobody talked about this in the mainstream conversations in the past.
  • labster 2y ago
    People and officials have been talking about healthy eating for generations. Hard to get more mainstream than every doctor talking about diet and exercise.
    • TeeMassive 2y ago
      Politicians have been protecting big ag for decades. Now independent farmers are getting criminally prosecuted for selling their raw foods directly to consumers.
  • llamaimperative 2y ago
    If you like RFK Jr "for this reason," you oughta looove Michelle Obama! https://letsmove.obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/ https://letsmove.obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/ Out from underneath the rock, people have been talking about this nonstop for decades.
    • TeeMassive 2y ago
      I don't see the Obamas defending the farmers getting criminally prosecuted for selling their raw food directly to consumers. RFK Jr is.
      • llamaimperative 2y ago
        Yeah that’s because it’s dangerous
        • TeeMassive 2y ago
          If that was the case then the Amish would not be healthier on average than the rest of the population
• gcr 2y ago
  If you have an open mind, I'd like to assign you some homework if you like. Take a look around r/zepbound and count the following: 1. Posts from folks who diet+exercise, or who have tried diet/exercise and nothing's worked so they then turned to Zepbound ("excited to hit the gym," "my diet is finally starting to work with Zepbound" and similar) 2. Posts from folks who haven't tried diet/exercise and turned to Zepbound first. (e.g. "I'm excited to eat dessert and laze around on my couch all day!" or "Zep is so much easier than before, no more keto for me" and similar) Which group do you think would have more posts? Selection bias probably prevents us from being able to count "Zepbound didn't work for me, but diet and exercise did" posts, which is why i suggest this. Here's my hypothesis: I think self-control is generally uncorrelated to losing weight. Perhaps it's necessary to have self-control to lose weight "the simple way," but certainly not sufficient. I know lots of friends who've struggled and found it's not so simple.
  • llamaimperative 2y ago
    GP isn't talking about self-control, they're talking about the fact we've created a system that requires obscene amounts of self-control if you wish to maintain physical health. People in the 50s weren't slimmer because they had ironclad determination to stay such.
    • nextos 2y ago
      Exactly, good systems do not rely on willpower. They rather make obvious habits effortless. Deviating from the mean is hard. Bad food and sedentarism are the norm.
      • jsrcout 2y ago
        Agree. "Defaults matter".
      • Scoundreller 2y ago
        > They rather make obvious habits effortless. I wouldn’t call taking the stairs in a pre-elevator world “effortless”, rather it was just the only option. I also think better food handling/storage/treatment/blah means we absorb & retain more of the calories that we consume.
• paulmist 2y ago
  What is a realistic path to this? Being from Europe I visited US last year and was horrified at the quality of your food. You see a lot of documentaries/youtube videos/etc... discussing the problem, but how do you even go about this?
  • supportengineer 2y ago
    There's plenty of high quality food, you just have to know where to look. For example, come to the Bay Area and check out Whole Foods and any number of high-end restaurants.
    • hyggetrold 2y ago
      +1 to this - what Europeans consider "the basics" for most Americans is filed under "luxury" or "bougie."
      • cultofmetatron 2y ago
        was in greece for three months. the quality of the BASIC fruits and vegetables at the regular local market down the street from where I was staying was on par with wholefoods. It was surreal how cheap it was to eat HEALTHY.
        • fooker 2y ago
          Have you been to Mexican grocery stores in the US?
          • throwup238 2y ago
            Almost any ethnic grocery store will do since they cater to immigrant communities that are likely to be lower income. Here in SoCal some are cheaper than others but they're all way cheaper than Ralphs/Vons/Trader Joes/Costco/etc (I don't shop at WalMart so I'm not sure how they compare) There are also native stores that are increasingly entering into low cost produce like Grocery Outlet and then there are the usual like Food4Less but they tend to eventually move upmarket.
• deleted 2y ago
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• whall6 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • llamaimperative 2y ago
    You're not being a dick, just utterly unhelpful and non-contributory.
    • whall6 2y ago
      Maybe. Or maybe pointing out the obvious
      • llamaimperative 2y ago
        Pointing out the obvious: the conversation isn't about GP and their own time allocation. It's about the empirically observable fact that we've built a civilization that turns people into lethargic, sedentary, chronically afflicted mush.
  • SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
    That's not even close to true. I can easily pop into HN for 5 minutes while taking a mental break at work, that's not an option (and would be utterly ineffective) for the gym.
    • whall6 2y ago
      If you truly only have 5 minutes of free time in your entire week, then why is it ineffective to do 5 minutes of pushups? That’s a lot of pushups.
      • SketchySeaBeast 2y ago
        > If you truly only have 5 minutes of free time in your entire week, I was responding to your claim that if you can browse HN you can go to the gym, and it's obvious with any sort of thought that they are not similar activities. > then why is it ineffective to do 5 minutes of pushups? What is your goal? Fitness or weight loss? Either way, that won't be effective. Sure, it can be part of a larger fitness regimen, but just 5 minutes of push-ups ain't cutting it.
• vundercind 2y ago
  It’s been studied pretty well. Possible effective solutions to the US obesity epidemic are pretty much limited to: 1) Radically alter aspects of food culture, work culture, social policy, and business regulation. 2) Magic pill (/injection) There appears to be no imminent progress on the many parts of #1 that need serious work, so if we want a big turn-around in the next half-century, #2 has suddenly and surprisingly become a real possibility.
  • jodrellblank 2y ago
    From the article "Estimates suggest GLP-1s can reduce body weight by at least 15% when taken regularly". That's a 5'10" man starting at 250lbs (obese, BMI > 35) and finishing at 220lbs (obese, BMI >30). Or a 5'10" man starting at 220lbs (obese) and finishing at 187lbs (overweight, BMI > 26). It ain't nothing, but that's not a magic pill which will fix the obesity epidemic. And these people have skipped changing their lifestyle, exercise, diet, and attitudes around food.
    • vessenes 2y ago
      I lost 100 lbs over 18 months. And, I found it much easier to change my lifestyle on a GLP-1 drug. Naturally thin people / people who don't have some environmental sensitivity are super judgy about GLP-1 drugs, and closet judgy about fat people. It's just not so simple as "lazy/poor diet/no exercise." I went from nutritionist appointments that were like "are you lying about your food intake? because if not, you have some serious problem with something in your environment" to "yep, it was easy to cut out a couple things that bothered me," and weight came off astonishingly rapidly.
      • jodrellblank 2y ago
        And this anecdote a person on HN[1] "reached a peak of 340, and in exactly a year, while maintaining the same CICO, but changing from the SAD to strict non-Keto Paleo, became 214". (I want to ask this in a non-combative way, but 3 days later I still can't. How did you know the couple of foods(?) which were bothering you, which were the problem, and your nutritionist did not know about them, and you weren't lying to the nutritionist? I can't make sense of that without also accusing you of hiding them from the nutritionist, or the nutritionist being terrible at their job). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27936397 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27936397
• mmsc 2y ago
  When the majority of the population is so far gone from being in a healthy weight, promoting healthy food for the masses is not going to help that majority. Yes, walkable cities and so on would be great, and promotion of healthy food and habits is great (remember Michelle Obama asking "why are you people so fat wtf?") for future generations, but Ozempic et al. provides a solution where otherwise, a lot of people are simply "lost".
• chairmansteve 2y ago
  The government isn't going to help you. This evening, go for a one minute walk. Tomorrow evening do the same. Next evening do the same. Repeat. The journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step.
  • knowitnone 2y ago
    one minute? I'm sure that's not going help anyone to walk for one minute. 30 minutes at a minimum. 60 is good, 120 is great!
    • chairmansteve 2y ago
      They've got to start somewhere. Build the habit, get over the resistance. 1 minute will turn into 2 minutes, then 5 minutes. And 1 minute is infinitely better than 0 minutes.
    • blamarvt 2y ago
      I choose to interpret the post as saying "start small, and be consistent". If you were to tell someone to go for an at least 30 minute walk every day many people would balk at you. Start with a minute walk. Make time in your day for it. Extend to a 2 minute walk. 5 minute. 15 minute. Etc.
    • bronzekaiser 2y ago
      most people dont have 2 hours a day to walk around in circles
      • chairmansteve 2y ago
        If they can get a little fitter, they can do 15 minute medium intensity exercises. The point is, make a start.
      • TeaBrain 2y ago
        I think most people actually would, if they would cut down on other time sinks in the evening.
• throwaway019254 2y ago
  To paraphrase: Instead of relying on medication that helps with issues caused by our society, let's completely change the society so it's no longer the issue? That's very idealistic, in my opinion.
• itronitron 2y ago
  It would be interesting to run an experiment where everyone in first world countries was able to (and had to) walk to the grocery store to buy their groceries. It seems like that would promote useful exercise while self regulating consumption.
  • knowitnone 2y ago
    I walk to the grocery store all the time. This was part of my weight loss strategy and I chose to walk to a farther grocery store. And yes, I did attain my weight loss goals.
• fasteddie31003 2y ago
  The two are not mutually exclusive.
• ajkjk 2y ago
  As compelling as the theory that "unhealthy behavior" is root cause of the obesity epidemics, at this point it seems to me that the weight of evidence suggests an actual physical disruption. It's not supposed to be _this hard_ for (some) people to maintain their weight; something is actually not working right. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/25/book-review-the-hungry-brain/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/04/25/book-review-the-hungry... might be interesting in the same direction.
• pkulak 2y ago
  I run three miles a day, never drive anywhere (bike or bus), eat reasonably healthy, and I'm still 20 pounds overweight. And what really scares me is that running is the only exercise I enjoy and if my weight fluctuates up just 5 pounds or so, I start getting hip/knee/foot etc pain. If I gain 10 pounds through some lapse in morality, I won't be able to run anymore and I'm cooked. If that happens, I'm banging down my doctor's door for a pill.
  • intothemild 2y ago
    So I'm a distance runner, who is on these drugs.. and yeah, It sucks, I LOVE running.. but running heavy SUCKS. Most people run to lose weight, I lose weight to run.
    • karmajunkie 2y ago
      honest to god i wish i knew what it was like to be like you —i have always hated every step of a run, and im halfway convinced the notion of a runners high is a convenient fiction cooked up by nike.
      • Schiendelman 2y ago
        There are a few things that happen here, but the most common one is not having someone helping you with form, and running much too fast. If you talk to a physical therapist and run with a distance runner and have them help you keep your heart rate in zone 2, you will probably feel much better.
      • __turbobrew__ 2y ago
        Second the other commenter. Measure your heart rate and stay within a lower zone. Most likely this means you will be walk-running at the beginning or even just walking up a steep hill. Running is an activity of many small incremental gains. Every week you can go a little tiny bit further but if you amortize that over a year it makes a big difference. Many go into running too fast and hard which leads them into not liking it because they feel absolutely miserable the entire time or they injure themselves due to bad form. I had a good physical therapist which took me from nothing and for the first few months I wasn’t even running but doing foot and ankle strengthening because that part of my kinetic chain was so weak.
• dmead 2y ago
  You'd prefer that. Great. Meanwhile we live in this reality.
• hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
  But you already live in a system that promotes that, quite heavily. Healthy food and active behavior make you more physically attractive, which is in turn linked to better life outcomes along almost every metric you can care to think of. There is, in fact, already an enormous, fully endogenous incentive to do those things. The fact many people are not keeping in shape (myself included) suggests the allure of food really is just that appealing.
  • biztos 2y ago
    I’m a standard-issue stress eater. I also like to work out. When I’m really feeling the stress, even though I will tell myself at that time to just hang on and hit the gym later, the food is that much more of an instant fix that it wins out more often than not. I’m sure that’s not just the actual food itself, but also the easy availability of it, and probably subliminal cultural factors such as advertising. But partly, yeah, it’s that my ancestors evolved to love eating when they had food, and their gift to me is that same desire in a world of endless plenty.
  • t-writescode 2y ago
    > But you already live in a system that promotes that Correction. We live in a system that *rewards* that. The infrastructure and system itself expects us to drive everywhere (because it's either faster or literally at all possible), eat overprocessed food (because it's tastier (literally designed to be hyper-palpable) and faster), and to work for absurd hours. If you somehow have spoons after all that, then you're expected to workout, etc, to gain the additional benefits; but the systems in play do not facilitate that, at all.
    • hiAndrewQuinn 2y ago
      I see no difference between "promotes" and "rewards" here. If it's a difference of intent, I'll point to everyone in this thread consciously "promoting" a lifestyle of fewer working hours, cleaner food, and less driving as a much more salient viewpoint than the opposite. And if the difference is because of "the system", well, you're going to have to differentiate between the system of living in human society and ... some subset of that system, I guess. Some subset Luckily there's a precise term from economics we can use here to split the difference: Opportunity cost. I can certainly concede that in some people's lives the opportunity cost to working out is higher. In some lives you make a lot more money per hour worked than you do working out, and so it's not a surprise more people on the margin in those situations choose the former over the latter. If you dislike even having that option on the table, the good news is you can move to someplace where you make less money, and then that opportunity cost will go down, because working out is pretty much the same wherever you go. One more sophisticated take of course is to claim people don't really know what's good for them, and they discount the true value of working out far too heavily. (s/working out/eating less/g, or whatever other health promoting difficult activity you wish to sub in here.) But, if we're going to claim that -- which is actually pretty reasonable -- then why would we consider a miracle drug that seems to directly counteract that irrational discounting a bad thing? That should be a godsend.
• deanrtaylor 2y ago
  The problem is that you can't undo millennia of evolution that has pushed us towards the situation where people are obsessed with food and struggle to limit themselves. We also shouldn't forget that not more than a century ago famine and rationing was still commonplace. Certainly my parents were still raised in an environment that hadn't gotten used to food being plentiful and were always forced to eat everything they had at all times and rewarded with food, this has been engrained in myself since I was young as well. I'm lucky that I managed to move away and isolate myself and lose a lot of weight but the important thing to note is that once I got down to a lower weight, everything was easier, getting up in the morning, walking, jogging, working out, talking to people, going outside. Now I've probably gained back 30% of what I lost and if I could take Ozempic to lose 5kg the rest would come a lot quicker because I'd be able to run further and have more energy generally. All that is to say, these two are not mutually exclusive and if people receive this drug everything we already do to promote a healthy lifestyle will become much more realistic for many people, as far as I understand Ozempic removes the desire of hunger, it's not like people can continue their bad habits and take the drug and lose weight. Furthermore once they assume these habits, the generational cycle of raising children and over indulging will likely come to an end and we will probably not need the drugs as much. TL;DR, people want to be healthy, they just don't have the tools or motivation to do it. Losing weight will likely be a gateway to many health improvements and benefits for future generations