Comment by supertrope
6 hours ago
It's much more effective to address the obesity problem on the front end.
We have fast food and junk food advertising targeting kids. Kids are driven to school instead of walking or biking. School lunches are optimized to be cheap not nutritious. Pediatricians have to tap dance around weight. When the Obama Administration tried to push for healthier lunches there was pushback from the right over government bad, from industry over higher costs, and from school districts over costs. Healthier food for kids could not win a durable political coalition!
> It's much more effective to address the obesity problem on the front end.
Is it? GLPs cost literally pennies to manufacture in bulk. The government could easily justify a trillion to just buy the rights and give it away for free and still come out ahead on healthcare cost savings.
Everything your suggesting sounds like a lot of work by comparison.
GLPs require some good dietician advice to be given and followed to be effective, otherwise you are just trading off obesity for an eating disorder. You really have to do both, provide the high protein + high fiber food alternatives and the GLP to make cheating less likely.
Have you taken them? Because I see this “you still need virtue^Wdiscipline” refrain a lot, but it doesn’t match my experience or that of many others I know who use GLP-1s.
For me, I lost 50 lbs not exercising and not actively managing my diet. I felt better and all my biomarkers got better (blood pressure, cholesterol, etc.). Later, I started to exercise and cleaned up my diet because I wanted to. Healthy food just tastes better now, and moving my body is satisfying rather than tiring. They are the closest thing to magic I’ve ever experienced.
Why not both? Because we’ve been “addressing on the front end” for a while without results. Making places walkable and getting (especially already obese) kids onto healthy food are things we should be doing, but need more support and take longer than a drug, which admittedly has side effects but seems healthier than waiting.
And Obama’s healthier lunches received pushback because they had some stupid requirements, like reducing salt intake, and poor implementation: maybe not Obama’s fault, but should’ve been addressed, IME students were forced to take a fruit or vegetable they would just throw away, and sometimes the “fruit” were these gross bananas that were simultaneously green and brown/mushy. They also received pushback from kids themselves and their parents.
> We have fast food and junk food advertising targeting kids.
The government is also heavily subsidizing corn, which made corn syrup the cheapest sweetener.