by al_borland | 2025-11-22 06:52:31+00:00
Religion doesn’t play any role in what I said. I feel like you made up a whole persona for me based on very little information and missed the mark.

Lifestyle choices are changed at a population level by changing the incentives for those producing food. Back in the 70s and 80s small changes were made which shifted how the population ate, and it led us here. I worked with a guy who ended up getting weight loss surgery. His wife was Japanese, and when he went to Japan he’d always lose a bunch of weight, because the food quality and culture is much different than the US… as one example. He ate better in Japan, because it was easy to eat better. In the US it take study, effort, and constant vigilance to eat well.

> Especially since obesity is immutable: poor lifestyle choices cause it, but switching back to good lifestyle choices does not reverse it.

This is simply not true. Surely you’ve seen a person lose weight before.

It is true that once you gain a certain amount of weight you end up with more fat cells, and those don’t go away (without liposuction), but the fat they hold can be lost. Lots of people do it. I’m not saying it’s easy to maintain longterm, but it is possible and millions have done it. To say obesity is immutable is not accurate.

> it will take a generation to see a result (like it happened with smoking - almost no one quit it

It didn’t take a generation to screw everything up. People grew up with one food landscape and had a different one as adults, and things got worse for them.

I know countless people who quit smoking. The idea that they’ve all just died off is not reflected in the world I’ve experienced. I know more former smokers than smokers at this point.

My point isn’t that we shouldn’t have any medications for people who need it, it’s that we shouldn’t just give up and say we need to medicate an entire population, because it’s the only option. We should be making those small tweaks to move the population back toward a lifestyle that doesn’t require all this medication just to live. I don’t understand how this is a controversial opinion.

Also, exercise is helpful, not for weight, but for general health. Discouraging exercise and replacing it with a drug does not help with the things that exercise helps with. When you’re old, it is the exercise that will help keep you from falling, and when you do fall your bones will be stronger (with resistance training), so they don’t break as easily. This also saves lives and prolongs them. It also prolongs a person’s health span—the number of good years they have to actually live a life worth living.

I don’t think the fix is for every individual to spend years educating themselves on nurturing and going out into the minefields everyday. Food producers should make food that doesn’t make us sick. Stores and restaurants should have good convenient options that don’t make us sick. That should be the standard… rather than a whole menu full of junk with one questionable salad as a “healthy” option.

If you’re on GLP-1 drugs, I’m not saying you’re a bad person. My dad was put on one after his bypass surgery. What I am saying is we, as a population, shouldn’t give up and deem it normal to live on junk food and soda, because the GLP-1s will balance it out. It’s treating the symptom, not the actual problem. I like to fix the root cause where we can, and then we have the drugs for the edges cases.