[NoPie]

Diet and exercise will work much better to prevent obesity than any medicine on market. It is just that long-term adherence to these things is very much determined by culture and will be much harder for Americans compared to Japanese, for example.

There are new discoveries in diabetes medicines recently but again, you will do much better by not getting diabetes in the first place.

The same goes for smoking which can cause, for example, lung cancer. Roughly speaking, once you get diagnosed with lung cancer you only have 40% chance living more than 1 year. Costly novel medicines often prolong the life by few months only.

We really need better health economy education for everyone.

[lambdaba]

I mean, it's not complicated, when we allowed the tobacco industry to manipulate people for profits while hiding the disastrous health consequence of their products, people got ill in larger numbers

It's the same for the processed food industry. It's time will come, soon, too, as healthcare systems everywhere are failing because of it.

[paulpauper]

all the nutrition info is on the labels yet people knowingly overeat. different type of problem.

[lambdaba]

I don't think people think much beyond calories wrt to overeating. I know my mentality was once "calories can come from anywhere, can always take a multivitamin to cover deficiencies", which I now find, to put it gently, silly.

[astrange]

Not "diet and exercise", just diet. Exercise doesn't contribute more than ~10% to weight loss (it helps for many other things but not that) - and if you're having trouble with the diet then it makes it more difficult because you get hungry, which sometimes cancels the entire thing out.

[NoPie]

Well, the idea is probably not to gain weight in the first place. Once you gain weight it is very hard to lose it. Many people manage naturally to keep perfect BMI by eating healthy diet and having enough exercise or by just moving around. Exercise will have more health benefits than just keeping your body weight low.

[lambdaba]

IME exercise (combined with appropriate diet, mind you), actually reduces food intake for me. Or at least, makes it so I eat less net calories after removing the expenditure. But otherwise agreed, diet is the foundation.