Comment by munificent
3 days ago
> I feel like a better angle would be educating people that 1500 kcal worth of Starbucks sugar for breakfast is not healthy.
An even better angle is educating Starbucks to stop selling unhealthy garbage.
The idea that all blame rests on individuals and corporations are blame-free is crazy. They have way more agency over what we consume than individuals do.
This is an extremely hazardous opinion.
It is true that corporations spend vast resources attempting to lure consumers into their webs but you do have agency! You can resist!
Vote with your wallet and strip these bad actors of the power you handed to them when you gave up.
> The idea that all blame rests on individuals and corporations are blame-free is crazy.
You know they have Starbucks in other countries without an obesity crisis?
No one is forcing you or I to order a particular drink at Starbucks; they literally put the number of calories directly next to the menu item. The blame is 100% on the individuals making their own health decisions.
> The blame is 100% on the individuals making their own health decisions.
If you put a pile of junk food on the floor, your pet will eat it until they make themselves sick.
We are smarter than many animals and have more discipline. But we are still animals and do not have unlimited executive function. The people who architect the environment of incentives that surround us bear some amount of responsibility for the behavior those incentives create.
Denying that is denying that we are living beings subject to all of the same limitations as any other mortal animal. We are not spherical rational actors in a vacuum.
You can't control the incentives, you can only control your reactions to those incentives.
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Just eyeballing a map, the countries that pop out as both having Starbucks and not having an obesity problem are China and India. Other than that, it looks like most of the countries that have Starbucks have obesity rates over, like, 20%, which seems pretty bad.
This isn’t to say Starbucks is causing obesity, of course. Most likely they are showing up together as the economy develops.
I do think it is worth noting that obesity is a pretty widespread problem, not uniquely American or anything like that.
Yeah but progressive ideals are a much harder sell if people have to take responsibility for their actions. "Others should pay for my mobility scooter because others keeps feeding me junk food" and all that.
Then again, free will is an illusion, so...
That Starbucks probably saved my life after I made an unwise decision to bike 40 miles on an empty stomach. Bonking is real, and I’m glad they are allowed to sell the sugary beverages to prevent me from bonking.
Oh and I also fainted the first time I donated blood, because I did not know I should not donate blood while fasting. Again, sugary drinks helped.
I bonked in the middle of a 100km ride on a rail trail through farmer's fields. I thought I'd had enough food, since the same amount was sufficient for the initial trip out a few days earlier, but it wasn't. It was the return journey of my first big bike trip, and it was absolute hell after I bonked. I'd ride for twenty minutes, then lie on the ground for ten. When I was laying on the ground I'd be searching the vegetation for anything that looked vaguely edible.
Crazy how a glucose drop can sneak up and humble you so quickly!
There's a lot of area on the spectrum between where we are today and "sugary beverages are all banned".
For example, Starbucks could limit the sizes it sells and advertises—you'd still be able to have as much sugar as you would like by buying multiple drinks, but it would raise the activation energy needed to do that. Making the healthier choice the path of least resistance works wonders.
You really can't discern between a healthy portion of sugar and an unhealthy portion of sugar? I can assure you it should be way less than what they are serving. Especially since society will bare these costs in a variety of unexpected ways, Starbucks needs to be compelled into doing so. They broke the societal compact, they have to be punished.
I can discern it very well. And indeed I think for the people like me who can discern it, stores should be able to sell these sugary beverages. The same amount of sugar is unhealthy when I’m sedentary, but absolutely necessary in other cases.
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By that logic, should Starbucks also sell life-saving insulin and epi pens?
You know multinational brands sell sweeter products in the US than in other countries?
It's not that all the rest of the world has sugar tax or something. It's customer profile.
[0]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32576300/ [1]: https://www.itiger.com/news/1184332557
> They have way more agency over what we consume than individuals do.
I walk by Starbucks every day without consuming 1500 kcal worth of Starbucks. You think that's due to their agency??
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I'm guessing that you meant this in a semi-humorous and hyperbolic way rather than a mean way, but it would probably be good to review the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. A comment like this wouldn't need too much to come across as friendly rather than aggressive.
GLP-1s disprove this to an extent. Personal responsibility is based on a fallacy, it’s just brain chemistry.
So give everyone GLP-1s to cast the shadow of personality responsibility (reduction in adverse reward center operations, broadly speaking) through better brain chemistry. Existence is hard, we can twiddle the wetware to make it less hard.
The only thing that GLP-1 agonists prove is that CICO does indeed work - if you force yourself into a caloric deficit through the inhibition of hunger hormones using drugs that you will lose weight. It has nothing to do with people choosing to eat highly processed unhealthy foods over healthier options. When you're on Ozempic or peptides like Retatrutide/Tirzepatide you don't think "I will not eat a bag of chips today because it's unhealthy and calorie dense", you simply don't think about eating because your feeling of hunger is inhibited.
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> Personal responsibility is based on a fallacy,
That fallacy is "free will", which as we know doesn't exist at least in the way we think it does. Society's reckoning with the idea of free will as something fictional is on par with our upcoming intelligence reckoning, evolutionary reckoning and heliocentric reckoning.
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Eh? I mean, this sounds potentially interesting but I don’t understand it!
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Read my comment more carefully.
If a company put a giant a giant bollard in the middle of the interstate and someone hit it, are you saying that the company bears zero responsibility for that?
Are millions of people voluntarily paying money to hit the bollard daily or thereabouts when not hitting the bollard is free and takes less time out of their day?
Yeah it would be better if everyone just didn't eat crap but crap is what people want.
Having briefly experienced weight loss drugs - and the bliss of that constant “EAT!” voice in your head just going quiet - I’m pretty convinced most humans have a genuine genetic predisposition to overeating.
And when you zoom out to the population level, the “we’re all autonomous individuals” argument gets a lot shakier. Like yeah, at the individual level you have agency, you make choices, fine. But at scale? We are absolutely at the mercy of whoever has figured out how to tickle our monkey brains in just the right way to get us buying their fattening food.
Humans and dogs: how many dog owners have to store their dog’s food in a bin the dog can’t get into? How many can’t leave more than one meal’s worth of food out at a time?
Until the past century or so, “eat up the available food while available” was generally a plus for survival for most populations - a person who could keep some of that excess around on them was more likely to survive a famine than their leaner peers.
Even my grandmothers (born in early 1920s Texas) remembered not always getting as much to eat as they wanted as children, and it wasn’t because their mothers were afraid of them getting fat - there just wasn’t any extra food. One of them likely did have a caloric deficit a few times here and there around age 10-12, and it showed: she was rather small.
One of my grandfathers lied his way into the Army at 16 just to be one less mouth for his mother to have to feed.
We’re really not that far separated from “eat all the food” being a health benefit.