[Nagyman]

A bit harsh to make a blanket statement about intelligence; people just need information which isn't being readily provided or is being drowned out with too much information. The collective actions seem counterintuitive to people paying attention, but paying attention requires time - which doesn't come easily if a swath of the population is busy with two part-time jobs and recovering with reality TV in the meantime.

[trbvm2]

"people just need information which isn't being readily provided" The breakdown of the nutritional value of every food stuff is literally right in front of the consumer's face. I'm not sure information availability is a core issue there. It takes less time to check a food label than it does to respond to a text message or check Facebook.

If I had to guess I would say prioritization and budgeting are core issues here. It really is a very similar problem to financial budgeting. In this view we are balancing a calorie budget against time, money, emotional state, and health so the categories are different but the question is still the same as in finance. This could also be a likely culprit since we do not tend to teach this topic well and Average Joe seems to be about as bad at personal finance as he is with personal wellness.

Perhaps more training on prioritization, goal setting, and delayed gratification is part of the solution?

[kedean]

"It takes less time to check a food label than it does to respond to a text message or check Facebook"

That's a pretty ridiculous counter. Multiply that by the dozens to hundreds of items a person buys in a single grocery trip, and you might have a valid comparison. It's true that this would be mostly a one time cost, as you would start to learn what is good and what is not, but the fact still stands that it is not as quick as checking a text message.

[Qwertious]

That's great, people can observe the contents. And now they just need to interpret it, which requires research. What's this "HFCS", and is it good or bad for you?

It's like asking a nonprogrammer to read the source code. Sure, it's right there in front of them, but that doesn't make it useful. The obvious solution - let's require everyone to become a programmer! /s

[jensen123]

If you read a few books on nutrition, you will learn that refined sugar is unhealthy. This is not hard for anybody with half a brain to figure out.

As for working two part-time jobs etc., many of the people doing this buy status symbols like SUVs, iPhones, big houses etc. If they didn't buy so much unnecessary stuff, they wouldn't need to work so much.

[Dylan16807]

> iPhones

Yep, buying a nice phone for half the price of phone service is why poor people are poor. How stupid of them. If they had just saved an extra $10 a month, they wouldn't need that second job.

[puddintane]

> If you read a few books on nutrition, you will learn that refined sugar is unhealthy. This is not hard for anybody with half a brain to figure out.

Totally true, I myself went thru an over use of refined sugar and non-healthy fast food choices. It was a truly terrible experience that thankfully I caught at a young age before it progressed to thousands to possibly hundreds of thousands in medical care.

Essentially I ended up having tears in my throat and ulcers at the same time causing and obscene amount of blood to, well for sake of the conversation, come back out of the body reverse style. It was due to the amount of sugar intake and "fast food" that caused me to experience this horrible scenario. I feel as though a lot of people who experience this just go, "oh I'll take some pills and I can get right back into it" which in it self will cause the problem to worsen but the general populous has for some reason come to believe that the magic pill solves all and we can rely on future technology to keep us "safe from tipping the edge"..."until it all collapses into a mess".

I honestly believe it's the fact that our culture is now bred to have things handed to them so easily. As an application/web designer I often have to create "dumbed" down interfaces that to me seem illogical and a waste of precious coding time.

While yes it sucks they don't put it in bright high contrast words on the labels, but at the same time they are putting it on the label and if we just took the time we could curb this silly notion of the big corporation is evil - even creating a core class required for students to take at various stages of school would make a phenomenal difference (in theory).

Essentially while a company may be evil, they are only evil because it's making a profit. We the people of the world need to make the change for big industry to make change because at the root of it they only do it because we keep paying!

[goldbrick]

I need that stuff to get laid though.

[jensen123]

Good point. I admit that I'm not very good at getting laid myself. However, if you eat healthily, you will look much better than if you eat unhealthily. We know that men are attracted to good looking women. However, women seem to be attracted to high-status men, and put less value good looks.

I wish there were some studies that compared how much success healthy and good looking but relatively poor men would have with women, compared to unhealthy and bad looking but relatively rich ones.

I hope I did not get too off topic here, but I think maybe it's possible that this is part of the explanation. That people want status symbols in order to get laid, and thus have less time for health. So maybe I was wrong about the Average Joe having a low intelligence...

[5ilv3r]

Find a lady that likes debt free men and try to make her happy.

[tremon]

Nutrition is no longer taught in school, so you cannot demand that people know this.

Also, the acknowledgement that sugar is unhealthy beyond children's teeth is relatively new. I don't think you'll find it in nutrition books from over 15 years ago.