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"Why don't we stop subsidizing corn so much?" Lobbyists. "Why don't we teach effective nutrition and cooking in school?" We do. It's called home economics. "

"Why don't we stop subsidizing corn so much?" Lobbyists. "Why don't we teach effective nutrition and cooking in school?" We do. It's called home economics. "Why don't we teach effective exercise, sports, and fitness in schools?" We do. It's called gym. "If we can ban alcohol and tobacco sales to children, why not things like added sugar, hydrogenated oils, corn syrup, etc?" Go tell a 6 year old they can't have cake on their birthday. "If we can ban alcohol and tobacco advertising to children, why not products with added sugar, hydrogenated oils, corn syrup, etc?" Lobbyists "Why don't we limit advertising on fast and junk "food"?" Lobbyists "Why don't we provide healthy lunches to school children instead of using them to subsidize agricultural conglomerates for low quality food?" We kinda do: http://www.fns.usda.gov/nslp/national-school-lunch-program http://www.fns.usda.gov/nslp/national-school-lunch-program "Why don't we stop subsidizing fossil fuels so much so people would walk and ride bikes more?" How many times do I have to say this: LOBBYISTS. "Why don't we align our medical system with prevention instead of expensive and risky cures?" That's a good question, actually. EDIT: I like falcolas' answer: Money. Long term care is more profitable than prevention.

johnward 13y ago
As far as nutrition goes what the government thinks is a nutritious lunch is far from it. It's way to pro carb/starch/sugar and anti fat. A typical lunch when I was in High School would be a decent sized slice of pizza, piece of bread, a scoop of corn, a sugary milk. All of those are carb sources.
- normloman 13y ago
  The guidelines have changed. The school lunch program is putting more emphasis on fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. That said, it's still not perfect, and not every school participates, hence "we kinda do."
  - johnward 13y ago
    I know they are getting better. My school in WV participated. When inspectors came in they shut down the school store that sold chips, rice crispy treats, pop. Also a lady in the basement sold giant grease soaked pepperoni roles except when the inspectors came. All of the other soft drink machines were turned off on those days too. My wife's High School in Ohio had an ice cream sundae bar...
falcolas 13y ago
> "Why don't we align our medical system with prevention instead of expensive and risky cures?" That's a good question, actually. Money. Long term care is more profitable than prevention.
JulianMorrison 13y ago
You seem very willing to wish away the structural power of money by blaming the middleman. This is rather like blaming maggots for death.
- normloman 13y ago
  Na, I'm with you on the money thing. Lobbyists are just a symptom of the winner-take-all economic system we've got here. That said, it's probably more realistic to control the symptoms right now than try to reform our entire economy. You could probably answer every question with "People in power use their fortunes to preserve power" and you'd nail it 90% of the time.
  - JulianMorrison 13y ago
    I'd say instead that it was a symptom of the money-controls-resources economic system. Basically, thought experiment: imagine a population where everyone starts with a fixed N dollars. Random-walk each dollar a few iterations and you end up with a bell curve of money distribution. Now start again and instead of random-walking them, apply a probabilistic walk, where having more dollars makes you a proportionately more likely recipient. You end up with a skewed distribution with a few rich controlling most of the resources. Now imagine being a congress-critter in that skewed world. Who are you going to have to cut deals with? And you can make the rich-get-richer rule steeper now, because the dollar-owners are cutting deals to make dollar-taking easier. And now your wealth distribution looks like the real world. The answer is simply that money itself, the alienable control of resources, is the cause. In a society organized by money, corruption and misrule will result. Any "symptom control" amounts to pumping the distribution flatter - it's a sisyphean task, structurally opposed to the power that money creates, and hence metastable at best.
sspiff 13y ago
In Belgium, the biggest health-insurance provider (and probably others) subsidizes sports club membership fees, gym subscriptions, .... Their goal is to reduce the cost of treatment by encouraging prevention. I'm not sure how many people make use of it.
- cylinder 13y ago
  Most private insurers provide this option in the US as well.
varelse 13y ago
"Why don't we teach effective exercise, sports, and fitness in schools?" We do. It's called gym. Um no, and that's part of the problem. In my experience, gym class was a Hunger Games like spectacle for the athletically (but not otherwise) gifted to enjoy their brief decade in the sun at the expense of those who will peak much later in life (but of course, they're more likely to be sedentary in part because of such a negative early impression of physical activity). Evidence? Do I need to mention anything else beyond Shirts vs. Skins Battle Ball? What kind of %$*!ing psychotic thought this sounded like a good idea at the time? "Why don't we align our medical system with prevention instead of expensive and risky cures?" That's a good question, actually. No money in it for big pharma, a segment increasingly under attack from the FDA for many of its practices and for which many critical drugs are facing patent expiration. So now they're trying to play good guy by increasingly focusing on orphan diseases ($10K to $500K/year per patient) where if someone blocks a promising therapy, its entire population of victims is doomed. And since these are the long-tail, it also creates an effective barrier to entry for smaller competitors.
- normloman 13y ago
  I'm sorry your gym experience was so terrible. Mine wasn't great either. That said, the poor state of gym now is no reason to eliminate it all together. We need to reform it.
  - varelse 13y ago
    Absolutely, an ex-girlfriend knocked some sense into me in my early 20s and I've been in great shape ever since. There's probably a fantastic company in doing exactly what you propose and I'd love to be a part of it. But a lot of tenured gym teachers I've met as an adult are the same people who were tormentor jocks in their childhood. So I've never moved further on it. How do you propose reforming it with people like that blocking the way? Because I think America needs an intervention, Europe isn't far behind, and Asia is doing its level best to catch up right now. There were a bunch of absolutely awesome ads in the subways of Hong Kong last year that showed a woman's flabby mid-section with a timebomb strapped to it. Contrast this with last week's Facebook kerfuffle between Maria Kang and Curvy Girl which demonstrated (to me) that anything but the most vanilla criticism of this situation in the US is apparently hate speech. Gag me.
Someone 13y ago
Lobbyists can't be the whole answer; tobacco hasn't had lack of lobbyists or lack of quality of lobbyists, but it got severely restricted. In the end I think the answer is "because we, society, allow it.". It is very hard to lobby for things we really do not want.
- normloman 13y ago
  Ultimately, this is the real answer. We can overcome anything if the political will exists.
jclos 13y ago
"Why don't we teach effective exercise, sports, and fitness in schools?" We do. It's called gym. Maybe you had better gym classes than me, but mine were tedious and boring and turned me (along with most other "nerds" in my class) off from sport until I reached high school and discovered weight lifting. I always liked Kelly Starrett's motto of "all human beings should be able to perform basic maintenance on themselves" and I wish that point was more emphasized during physical education.
numo16 13y ago
> "Why don't we teach effective nutrition and cooking in school?" We do. It's called home economics. I don't know of many schools in my state that still have the budget to provide a home economics class/pay a teacher to teach it. The most my school went into nutrition was in the 1 semester of health class that everyone took.

johnward 13y ago

As far as nutrition goes what the government thinks is a nutritious lunch is far from it. It's way to pro carb/starch/sugar and anti fat. A typical lunch when I was in High School would be a decent sized slice of pizza, piece of bread, a scoop of corn, a sugary milk. All of those are carb sources.

normloman 13y ago
The guidelines have changed. The school lunch program is putting more emphasis on fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. That said, it's still not perfect, and not every school participates, hence "we kinda do."
- johnward 13y ago
  I know they are getting better. My school in WV participated. When inspectors came in they shut down the school store that sold chips, rice crispy treats, pop. Also a lady in the basement sold giant grease soaked pepperoni roles except when the inspectors came. All of the other soft drink machines were turned off on those days too. My wife's High School in Ohio had an ice cream sundae bar...

falcolas 13y ago

> "Why don't we align our medical system with prevention instead of expensive and risky cures?" That's a good question, actually. Money. Long term care is more profitable than prevention.

JulianMorrison 13y ago

You seem very willing to wish away the structural power of money by blaming the middleman. This is rather like blaming maggots for death.

normloman 13y ago
Na, I'm with you on the money thing. Lobbyists are just a symptom of the winner-take-all economic system we've got here. That said, it's probably more realistic to control the symptoms right now than try to reform our entire economy. You could probably answer every question with "People in power use their fortunes to preserve power" and you'd nail it 90% of the time.
- JulianMorrison 13y ago
  I'd say instead that it was a symptom of the money-controls-resources economic system. Basically, thought experiment: imagine a population where everyone starts with a fixed N dollars. Random-walk each dollar a few iterations and you end up with a bell curve of money distribution. Now start again and instead of random-walking them, apply a probabilistic walk, where having more dollars makes you a proportionately more likely recipient. You end up with a skewed distribution with a few rich controlling most of the resources. Now imagine being a congress-critter in that skewed world. Who are you going to have to cut deals with? And you can make the rich-get-richer rule steeper now, because the dollar-owners are cutting deals to make dollar-taking easier. And now your wealth distribution looks like the real world. The answer is simply that money itself, the alienable control of resources, is the cause. In a society organized by money, corruption and misrule will result. Any "symptom control" amounts to pumping the distribution flatter - it's a sisyphean task, structurally opposed to the power that money creates, and hence metastable at best.

sspiff 13y ago

In Belgium, the biggest health-insurance provider (and probably others) subsidizes sports club membership fees, gym subscriptions, .... Their goal is to reduce the cost of treatment by encouraging prevention. I'm not sure how many people make use of it.

cylinder 13y ago
Most private insurers provide this option in the US as well.

varelse 13y ago

"Why don't we teach effective exercise, sports, and fitness in schools?" We do. It's called gym. Um no, and that's part of the problem. In my experience, gym class was a Hunger Games like spectacle for the athletically (but not otherwise) gifted to enjoy their brief decade in the sun at the expense of those who will peak much later in life (but of course, they're more likely to be sedentary in part because of such a negative early impression of physical activity). Evidence? Do I need to mention anything else beyond Shirts vs. Skins Battle Ball? What kind of %$*!ing psychotic thought this sounded like a good idea at the time? "Why don't we align our medical system with prevention instead of expensive and risky cures?" That's a good question, actually. No money in it for big pharma, a segment increasingly under attack from the FDA for many of its practices and for which many critical drugs are facing patent expiration. So now they're trying to play good guy by increasingly focusing on orphan diseases ($10K to $500K/year per patient) where if someone blocks a promising therapy, its entire population of victims is doomed. And since these are the long-tail, it also creates an effective barrier to entry for smaller competitors.

normloman 13y ago
I'm sorry your gym experience was so terrible. Mine wasn't great either. That said, the poor state of gym now is no reason to eliminate it all together. We need to reform it.
- varelse 13y ago
  Absolutely, an ex-girlfriend knocked some sense into me in my early 20s and I've been in great shape ever since. There's probably a fantastic company in doing exactly what you propose and I'd love to be a part of it. But a lot of tenured gym teachers I've met as an adult are the same people who were tormentor jocks in their childhood. So I've never moved further on it. How do you propose reforming it with people like that blocking the way? Because I think America needs an intervention, Europe isn't far behind, and Asia is doing its level best to catch up right now. There were a bunch of absolutely awesome ads in the subways of Hong Kong last year that showed a woman's flabby mid-section with a timebomb strapped to it. Contrast this with last week's Facebook kerfuffle between Maria Kang and Curvy Girl which demonstrated (to me) that anything but the most vanilla criticism of this situation in the US is apparently hate speech. Gag me.

Someone 13y ago

Lobbyists can't be the whole answer; tobacco hasn't had lack of lobbyists or lack of quality of lobbyists, but it got severely restricted. In the end I think the answer is "because we, society, allow it.". It is very hard to lobby for things we really do not want.

normloman 13y ago
Ultimately, this is the real answer. We can overcome anything if the political will exists.

jclos 13y ago

"Why don't we teach effective exercise, sports, and fitness in schools?" We do. It's called gym. Maybe you had better gym classes than me, but mine were tedious and boring and turned me (along with most other "nerds" in my class) off from sport until I reached high school and discovered weight lifting. I always liked Kelly Starrett's motto of "all human beings should be able to perform basic maintenance on themselves" and I wish that point was more emphasized during physical education.

numo16 13y ago

> "Why don't we teach effective nutrition and cooking in school?" We do. It's called home economics. I don't know of many schools in my state that still have the budget to provide a home economics class/pay a teacher to teach it. The most my school went into nutrition was in the 1 semester of health class that everyone took.