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I am an American and I'm speaking about America, where we have an all-time high 40%+ obesity rate and a 14% food insecurity rate at the same time. Both are over

I am an American and I'm speaking about America, where we have an all-time high 40%+ obesity rate and a 14% food insecurity rate at the same time. Both are overrepresented for people with low incomes. For reference, obesity and food insecurity in Germany (which has one of the highest obesity rates in the EU) appear to be ~23% and 4%, respectively. For reasons we don't fully understand (but probably have something to do with the ubiquity of highly processed, low nutrition, low fiber, high calorie density foods -- plus the lack of time to cook and the breaking-up of family & community fabrics among lower income communities), we've created a society that makes more of us fat, more than our first world peers, even while dangling many Americans (especially children and the poor) over the precipice of starvation. This is a broken food system. We have similar issues with health care: we spend more on healthcare than any other country in the world, by a mile. The US spends about 1.5x to 3x per capita on healthcare (adjusted for PPP) compared to most of the other OECD countries. However, our health outcomes are... not great. We hover around 50th place in the world on most metrics, close to Panama. Additionally, our healthcare system is byzantine and deeply, deeply painful to interact with. If people in countries with high-performing health and food systems are getting infected with America's particular brand of brain worms, all I have to say is: you really don't understand how good y'all have it in this particular respect, and consider that mistrust of government regulation may worsen the situation, not improve it.

tpm 2y ago
> America's particular brand of brain worms You (Americans) are not that special :). Antivax brainrot was started by that Wakefield study in the UK, distrust of government/establishment is and was widespread in many countries, sometimes for good reasons. Moreover many of the brainrot-infected people actually have it good and don't need any regime change. What I think has actually happenned is that spreading disinformation has become cheap thanks to soc. networks and that was then weaponised by the most unscrupulous people. This is not connected to any physical reality except access to capital by the baddies. What is now happenning is the disinformation beast - the name for that which I like is disordered discourse - has to be perpetually fed or it will eat even those who it brought to power. So now it is destroying institutions. It will get worse everywhere, I'm afraid.

tpm 2y ago

> America's particular brand of brain worms You (Americans) are not that special :). Antivax brainrot was started by that Wakefield study in the UK, distrust of government/establishment is and was widespread in many countries, sometimes for good reasons. Moreover many of the brainrot-infected people actually have it good and don't need any regime change. What I think has actually happenned is that spreading disinformation has become cheap thanks to soc. networks and that was then weaponised by the most unscrupulous people. This is not connected to any physical reality except access to capital by the baddies. What is now happenning is the disinformation beast - the name for that which I like is disordered discourse - has to be perpetually fed or it will eat even those who it brought to power. So now it is destroying institutions. It will get worse everywhere, I'm afraid.