Comment by lenerdenator

2 months ago

I was wondering when the other shoe would drop.

These drugs are turning into a band-aid on the fact that it's more profitable to sell addictive, high-calorie foods in the US than foods that promote long-term health.

We'll decay people's heart muscles before we put a tax on unhealthy food to help fund Medicare and Medicaid.

10 comments

lenerdenator

Reply
omegaworks  2 months ago

> a tax on unhealthy food to help fund Medicare and Medicaid.

Fully 13% of the population lives in an area with restricted access to grocery stores[1]. Couple that with car-centric anti-pedestrian development[2] and you have a definitively societal problem. Addressing that with taxes on the individual will not address these causes, only shift the burden further onto the poor.

1. https://www.aecf.org/blog/communities-with-limited-food-acce...

2. https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2023/11/09/i...

autoexec  2 months ago

> These drugs are turning into a band-aid on the fact that it's more profitable to sell addictive, high-calorie foods in the US than foods that promote long-term health.

The food is most of it, but it also doesn't help that our environments and society don't allow for as much mobility and exercise as our bodies evolved to expect. You can't force people to sit in a chair for 8-10+ hours a day staring at screens and then be surprised when a bunch of them are unhealthy. It's more profitable if you ignore people's health and keep them in place and working on task without interruption though so here we are.

thefz  2 months ago

> These drugs are turning into a band-aid on the fact that it's more profitable to sell addictive, high-calorie foods in the US than foods that promote long-term health.

What I don't understand about these drugs is:

Ok, you are taking the medicine to lose weight, but are you eating the same shit as before in the process?

The answer is always "pfft no, I am going to eat healthier"

So why don't you just eat healthier now?

  • cthalupa  2 months ago

    > So why don't you just eat healthier now?

    I used to be you - in most of my 20s, I found it very easy to just eat well, east less, etc. It didn't take any willpower on my part to be fit. It was trivial. I didn't understand why fat people didn't just do the same things I was doing. I thought they had to want to be fat!

    Then I got busy with other things, I had less and less free time, fast food, etc. got more and more convenient. Then the pandemic happened and I started just ordering uber eats twice a day. And suddenly I realized "holy shit, I'm fucking fat."

    And then I tried to go back to my earlier habits, and it was hard. Things that took zero willpower on my part suddenly meant spending a significant portion of my day fighting different urges.

    Was it within my power to do so? Sure, in theory. Everyone, given no other task to do but focus their willpower on just not eating too much, could likely eat healthier and lose weight. But that's not reality, it's difficult, and it ends up slipping down the priority list behind a dozen or two other things.

    But on tirzepatide, my relationship with food nearly immediately reverted back to how it was when I was younger.

    The fact of the matter is, America has a huge amount of obese people that know they shouldn't be and know in theory that fixing their diet and exercising would resolve their issues. And yet they still are fat. Very very very few of them want to be that way. And the reason is it is hard to just eat healthier when you have that level of food craving