[Devils-Avocado]

The primary flaw of the dating/sex market in the USA and many Western societies is obesity.

I live in a society where obesity levels for women and most men are essentially 0% - due to lower prevalence of processed food and societal pressure to remain slim - and everyone is 'f*ckable', to put it bluntly.

By contrast in a typical Western society the bottom 30% of society is typically very sexually unappealing due to obesity. This also has strong negative impacts on equality, since obesity is usually correlated with education and income, so poor (overweight) women are much less likely to wed wealthy (slim) men.

https://ifstudies.org/blog/less-marriage-more-inequality/

The solution seems to be to place a large tax on sugar, 1cent per gram - in the same way that we tax other products that have negative health outcomes like alcohol, tobacco, gasoline. Use the proceeds to fund national healthcare or displace existing sales taxes.

[titanomachy]

A tax could help. I think that approach showed some effectiveness in reducing Mexicans' consumption of soft drinks. I think good nutrition and nutrition education in schools would be a more durable and effective approach, though. A lot of families just don't have the knowledge and habits to prepare and consume healthy meals. The sugary foods are popular because they are cheap, tasty, and effortless; making food that's healthy but still tastes good requires more work.

[AstralStorm]

Not really it doesn't, but you have to adopt practices of fast food companies in a seemingly perverse way. You end up with slightly less healthy product than by not doing so, but save a lot of work. The practices involved are batching and preservation by freezing, chilling and sometimes vacuum or atmosphere packing. More rarely use of certain preservative agents. (E.g. antioxidants.) Capital investment to do these is rather low, it's mostly the knowledge that's missing. Almost nobody teaches this kind of cooking, it's university level education for some reason.

The problem is, those practices are still better scalable for bigger groups. So if we could escape the individualism of cooking more cheaply somehow... Yes we did. It's just the mainstream has decided that you have to pay a tax on a healthier, better food.

Why is a proper salad or a soup twice as expensive per calorie than a burger? It's not the amount of work and definitely not the price of the materials.

[titanomachy]

> Why is a soup or salad twice as expensive per calorie than a burger?

Soups and salads have pretty low calorie density compared to a burger. You can get a plate of rice and beans pretty cheaply at most Mexican places, which will go further to meeting your energy requirements if not the micronutrients.

[R0b0t1]

I'm not sure I follow, especially the focus on overweight women not marrying up. The article has a more egalitarian slant to it than that.

These things can be true, but what is their relation to a disrupted dating market?

[Devils-Avocado]

If you are at the bottom of the dating hierarchy (for whatever reason) as a male in the USA, you are typically limited to overweight women. The gulf between real and fake sex thus becomes much larger, and fake sex more appealing, than in a society without obesity.