3 ms·
Very few foods are unequivocally bad. The FDA shouldn't tell people in general to avoid calorie-dense diets...they have to figure out how to tell just overweigh
by saosebastiao 11y ago
Very few foods are unequivocally bad. The FDA shouldn't tell people in general to avoid calorie-dense diets...they have to figure out how to tell just overweight people to avoid calorie-dense diets, because if they accidentally tell an athlete, or a nursing mother, or someone with ALS, they could end up doing them a lot of harm. And they can't tell people in general that lots of Tomatoes or Spinach are good, because some people would end up with Barrett's Esophagus, Acid Reflux, or Kidney Stones.
The problem the FDA has with regulating unhealthy food is similar to one the EPA has with regulating CO2, because the goal isn't complete avoidance, it is maintaining a safe equilibrium. But with the EPA, they have all the tools at their disposal to monitor the environment (and we are so far gone at this point that there is little risk to treating all CO2 like a bad thing). The FDA still has to rely heavily on doctors and other health professionals to make recommendations on top of their recommendations, because they don't have the tools to monitor health.
Maybe devices are what we actually need. A device that could monitor someone's actual health and diet and provide daily recommendations would be an amazing thing for the FDA to work towards.
- nitrogen 11y agoThe FDA shouldn't tell people in general... Sounds like a good argument for personalized medicine, either in the form of a device as you suggest, or better processes used by physicians, or both.
- orky56 11y agoIf we were able to socialize healthcare to a greater degree, we could regulate it on a regional basis as we do with districts for education. The same way we provide standard curricula to teachers and administration & then evaluate/incentivize them based on the performance of their students, there must be a similar method we could use for health and wellness. We have superintendents responsible for arbitrary school districts, post offices for zip codes, etc. If we had a public health official or body in charge of a region, they would be responsible for the health of their constituency. They could administer the right combination of food & drugs to ensure that wellness was being achieved. At the end of the day, we know CO2 is something that affects everyone so it needs to be regulated. We are at the point where public health & preventive epidemics such as childhood obesity do affect everyone and society at some level, even just due to the interconnected nature of the cost of insurance, drugs, and various externalities.
- wisty 11y agoThere's problems with top-down incentives, if they aren't well thought-out - http://highered.blogspot.hk/2009/01/well-intentioned-commissar.html http://highered.blogspot.hk/2009/01/well-intentioned-commiss... Optimisation can be a literal genie, even when it's humans doing the optimising.