[jstummbillig]

You fix the immediate problems where you can. You buy time. You find better solutions down the line. When a person is dead, you can't find a better solution.

It's "masking" the issue as much as chemotherapy is "masking" the issue. People are dying. We have tried appeals to salads and quick walks.

Unless you got anything up your sleeve, I recommend we stick to the ol' "keep more people alive with the best stuff we currently got" plan, until information pops up, that makes this look like the morally worse option.

But in that regard preventing death is fairly hard to beat as a baseline.

[squigz]

> We have tried appeals to salads and quick walks.

This bit made me laugh, as if public health initiatives have been taken remotely seriously by the past few decades. It seems quite a jump to go from "maybe try a a salad?" to putting millions of people on medication.

Did that happen with tobacco? Alcohol?

[jstummbillig]

> It seems quite a jump to go from "maybe try a a salad?" to putting millions of people on medication.

It's a hyperbole, meaning to say: The problem is so frustratingly silly and solution is so obvious and simple — just eat a little less, move a little more — that I understand how hard it is to accept that it might just be the completely wrong approach.

What makes it fairly obvious to me is that despite clear and long standing conflicting beauty ideals, the massive societal advantages beauty affords, and an industry build around weight loss (not even drugs, stuff like Weight Watchers), people still struggle.

If you have good insight into why informing about tobacco worked to the degree it did (although lung cancer is still the leading cause of cancer death) other than claiming vague un-seriousness, I am all ears. Otherwise I have a hard time understanding this as an information problem.

[squigz]

> If you have good insight into why informing about tobacco worked to the degree it did

My point here was that we seemed to approach tobacco/alcohol a bit more methodically - taxes (i.e., increasing costs for cigarettes), regulations (i.e., where alcohol can be sold), education (i.e., scary cigarette packaging) - whereas we seem to be saying, "Well, we did very little and got no results, so let's go nuclear!" when it comes to obesity

It seems to me that, if obesity is so harmful to society, places like McDonalds and other (provably) unhealthy food shouldn't be as cheap or as easy to get as it is.

> The problem is so frustratingly silly and solution is so obvious and simple — just eat a little less, move a little more — that I understand how hard it is to accept that it might just be the completely wrong approach.

It certainly is frustrating, and I feel that more than I probably should. Probably something to reflect on.

[pseudalopex]

Millions of people have used medication to quit tobacco and alcohol.