[thebean11]

> Only a minority of people can withstand an onslaught...

Is that true? Most people aren't addicted to anything let alone social media..I really don't buy the claim that people have literally no control over their actions. What's your solution? Ban sugar, alcohol and social media? Padding on the sidewalks?

[oblio]

> What's your solution? Ban sugar, alcohol and social media? Padding on the sidewalks?

There isn't "one solution". And bans generally are not a solution.

But we need to fight with the same weapons they're fighting, for example, let's take sugar and unhealthy foods.

They're presenting their food as fun and glamorous, let's blow that up, like we did for tobacco.

No more mass advertising for it, anywhere. Horrible labels showing disfigured obese people that are suffering because of their addiction to junk food.

The food is cheap because they use crap ingrediens? Let's tax food based on universal standards agreed upon not by the industry, but by healthcare specialists. The more you're off the mark from healthy food, the more you get taxed (excises, same as for alcohol and tobacco).

Heck, I'd earmark those excises as funding for subsidies meant for producers of healthy, bio foods.

These junk food companies are making their stuff cool, so let's prevent that and they're making it cheap by passing their externalities to us (diminished long term health) so let's make their food more expensive and let's make the healthy stuff cheaper.

Ah, more than that, quotas of healthy food in every place serving or offering food. Get rid of food deserts. Poor people with low mobility should have access to healthy food at decent prices.

Yes, this is all very complicates. Yes, it's very political.

But doing nothing achieves nothing. Worse than that, doing nothing actively degrades the situation since these actors are actively harming people in very subtle ways.

[thebean11]

20 years ago the sugar lobby told everyone that sugar was good and fat was bad.

I'm all for banning specific ingredients and processes that are known poisonous (like BPAs for example are banned in many countries, deservedly) but unilaterally deciding what's healthy and having quotas for healthy foods is extreme. It will be the sugar vs fat thing all over and only the rich will benefit.

Just to make sure I understand what you’re proposing, taco trucks and ice cream shops would be illegal in your ideal world yeah?

[oblio]

> 20 years ago the sugar lobby told everyone that sugar was good and fat was bad.

And we're 20 years from that and now we know better. Which lobby is it this time, the healthy living one, that's lying to us? ...

> Just to make sure I understand what you’re proposing, taco trucks and ice cream shops would be illegal in your ideal world yeah?

Did I stutter? Did I propose bans anywhere?

And why is having quotas for healthy foods extreme? Sell 20% healthy foods out of your entire stock. How hard is that?

We have quotas for all sort of things <<all>> the time. The roof hasn't fallen.

Separate note: I guess this is the risk of arguing with libertarians :-) I'd venture you're one.

[Aerroon]

>And why is having quotas for healthy foods extreme?

Because there is no such thing as a universally healthy food. "Healthy food" is a buzzword used to make people feel good about the food choices they make that (usually) don't taste that great.

The primary concern with healthy eating is to eat enough and in a decent balance of a laundry list of things: protein, fats, (carbs), vitamins, minerals and probably some more. You can't eat all of them at once either, because some of the vitamins and minerals can end up blocking each other from absorption. Missing any of these for long enough in large enough quantities (or large enough imbalances) is going to cause health issues.

Some people like calling foods that have few calories and little nutritional value as "healthy", but the value those foods provide comes from limiting the average person from eating something else. Eating a cucumber doesn't give you much, but you're less likely to have those fries after you've had the cucumber. But you certainly wouldn't be fine with only eating cucumbers long-term.

[thebean11]

I’m not a libertarian at all, I think taxes should be pretty high and there should be universal healthcare. Pretty silly I need to say that, though, and bringing it up is a non sequitur. I’m curious, do you think most non libertarians would agree with what you’re proposing?

But yeah, if you think forcing an ice cream shops to sell sides of broccoli (that nobody will order) to comply with some silly 20% law, we probably won’t get anywhere discussing. It takes a pretty active imagination to picture something like that having a positive outcome.

[mountain_peak]

Oddly enough just yesterday, I was thinking of why alcohol and foods with low nutritive value haven't suffered the same fate as tobacco.

If you advocate for universal healthcare (like my country has), then it's ultimately in society's best interest to keep everyone as healthy as possible to avoid burdening the healthcare system, which does mean that government needs to step in and place limitations on advertising, sales to minors, laws, etc.

Just as a few examples, we (my country) currently has: no advertising to children under 13, seat belt laws, helmet laws, smoking packaging laws, alcohol advertising laws, and so on. It's odd that communities are spending millions on active living infrastructure, and simultaneously allowing companies to run ramshod marketing unhealthy and addictive products. And by 'odd', I mean that these organizations have enough backing to influence politicians to the detriment of society.

As I recall, tobacco companies only took action when laws changed or when they started losing lawsuits - given how destructive alcohol is for society it wouldn't be a stretch to make it less socially-acceptable to consume 'empty' calories. Some industries are mandated to spend part of their advertising budget on 'preventative' campaigns, but in almost 100% of the cases, these 'anti-whatever' messages are cleverly disguised to sell even more of their product (e.g., anti-gambling, soft drink recycling). There may be no perfect solution, but doing nothing isn't an answer either.

[micromacrofoot]

> Most people aren't addicted to anything let alone social media

Even if it's just 5-10% (difficult to prove one way or the other, but some have estimated it's within this range) that's a massive amount of people on a global scale. That's enough to influence elections, for example. Scrutiny seems reasonable.

[thebean11]

Sure let's say it's 10%, is the conclusion you draw from that that free will doesn't exist? Do 100% of people need to give up the freedom of choice to lower that figure?

Not sure what you're getting at about elections, are you saying that's a reason to intervene? I don't really want the government making policy for the purpose of influencing election outcomes.

[oblio]

So dramatic.

100% of people will need to give up some luxuries so that everyone can benefit, and especially <<vulnerable groups>> can benefit.

Taxes work the same way. Laws in general work the same way (otherwise we'd assume everyone is smart, fair and calculated heck, perfect, all the time).

[thebean11]

Can you be more specific then about what we're discussing, if it's not "ban things that the 10% is addicted to"?

[AnIdiotOnTheNet]

They aren't talking about bans, but other controls. Cigarettes are not banned outright, but cigarette companies are banned from advertising in a lot of mediums and cigarette cartons have a warning label about the harmful effects of smoking them. For a long time there were PSAs about how bad they were for you too, to counteract the damage already done by the tobacco industry's marketing. And we tax them pretty harshly. People still smoke, it is still legal to smoke. We could do similar things for food and social media without outright banning it.

[thebean11]

Yeah that's fair. Like I alluded to in a sibling comment thread, though, I think doing the same thing for food is pretty dangerous given our still pretty limited understanding of what foods are actually bad for you. Eggs are still oscillating between healthy and unhealthy every few years (although I think we're settling on healthy? Who knows!). Cigarettes aren't needed to sustain life so there's not as much risk to meddling like that.

The only thing I can really get behind is stricter controls on individual ingredients that are very clearly unhealthy and obviously don't need to be part of your diet (BPAs, trans fats, etc). Once you start messing with society's macros though it's fraught territory and very easy to do harm IMO.