I would like to pitch the idea that the obesity epidemic is a symptom of failed city infrastructure. Imagine if riding a bike was a no-friction activity; you walk out your door, you have a bike there and the bike lanes are treated as first-class infra instead of cars. Imagine how much more you would bike in this situation, and how much healthier you and everyone around you would be
You’re trying to find a problem for your solution.
The obesity epidemic actually due to the increased availability of ultra processed foods.
As well as a massive car-centric society. I can’t even walk to Jack in the Box at 10pm to get a shit burger, but I can drive thru with a car. That’s part of the problem.
This is only tangentially related, but I just wanted to share a random anecdote.
I ordered a mobile pickup order at my local Taco Bell with their app. Since it’s nearby, I walked there and I had selected in store pickup. I walked inside and waited for a few moments. The manager comes out and this interaction happens.
Manager: “Inside was supposed to be closed. Idk who unlocked the door but you have to go through the drive through”
Me: “Oh uhh I already paid for an in store pickup through the app.”
Manager: “You have to go through the drive through.”
Me: “Uhhh…can I walk through the drive through? I walked here.”
The manager looks at me in total disbelief that someone would do that. “You don’t have a car???”
Me: “I mean I just walked here.”
Manager: “Ok hold on I’ll get your order.”
Lol. She looked at me like she had never heard of anyone walking some place to get some food lol. Granted I live literally a 5 minute walk from there which is probably not really the norm.
European countries have access to those same ultra processed foods and yet their consumption and the obesity rates are dramatically lower. I think there are factors beyond simple availability that we should look at fixing.
Once upon a time people worked 9-5 with a commute somewhere under twenty minutes - so somewhere in the realm of nine hours of employment before home tasks like cooking and cleaning started happening. I believe most millennials and under work at least ten and a half hour (and the number of people trying to juggle multiple jobs has gone way up).
The ultra processed and fast foods are generally the default option when you are so fully drained by a sedentary employment and craving chemical joy to deaden the depression of existence. Millennials have eschewed alcohol and tobacco like no other generation and sugar is the only chemical fulfillment they can find so it becomes a spiral of comfort food into physical pain into inability to seek other enjoyment into comfort food.
I’d hesitate to ascribe the obesity epidemic to a single cause due to the exceptions that prove the rule.
Active living may not be the only way to address the obesity epidemic (it’s endemic now, isn’t it?) but it would help. People will be happier and healthier if they can get exercise as part of their day to day activities.
I fully agree with this. Someone else rightly pointed out that access to UPF doesn’t equate consumption. Why are people consuming UPFs? I would argue because of economic hardship (being overworked), lack of prioritizing healthy activities and social encounters, ignorance, misinformation, and habit and/or addiction.
I think eating good foods should be every humans number one priority. “You are what you eat” may be cliche but it’s true. Above all else, I think, people should be making time in their day to eat properly. Not enough people know how to cook using fresh ingredients. I constantly see claims that processed foods are so much cheaper than fresh foods. In my experience, it’s the opposite. I mean, I just made a whole stock pot full of vegetable soup for less than fifteen bucks and it’ll feed me for a week.
To your point, I think it’s true that adding exercise to your daily routine contributes to a more positive mindset. I don’t know if this is universal but when I’m depressed I eat more poorly. When I’m in a good mood, I eat more healthy. This would seem to be backed by biology and our innate need to consume sugars and fats for long term storage.
Is it? There’s primitive cultures that eat every kind of weird diet you can imagine, and they’re all thin and fit. It’s still kind of a mystery why exactly we can’t handle eating even a fraction like the historical Inuit, and just the processing itself shouldn’t change much.
Because ultra processed foods don’t fill us up but taste incredibly good. Technically the problem is overeating, but it’s a lot easier to overeat ultra processed foods.
One of us is confused.
I’m saying that ultra processed foods - food that have had their nutrients stripped and replaced with sugars and fats and chemicals - are more readily available. We have an ancient instinct to store fats and sugars due to food shortages. Ultra processed foods are pleasurable to eat and our biology specifically deals with them by storing them as fat.
I have never heard anyone say it’s a mystery that we can’t eat like our ancestors. On the contrary, there are a hundred fad diets specifically designed to do just this. If you look into “blue zones”, you’ll find people living long healthy lifestyles free of ultra processed foods and eating and exercising more similarly to our ancient ancestors.
Or walking. I’ve been to a few US cities, and the common denominator for all of them is that walking anywhere isn’t really an option. Sure, you can’t always walk A to B in most cities, but at least European cities have public transit to cut down on the distance, necessitating only two short walks to and from a transit station.
Observation: Saudi Arabia is heading down a Houstonian path. There was one pedestrian bridge near me, and outside of that one, getting anywhere involved strategic jaywalking to cross freeways. At least they seem to have a decent bus network, though.
I’ve lived on the east coast, west coast and in Europe. Out here in the west coast (Vancouver) the cities are nice enough but anytime I leave my home I have to walk down a hill (and my partner struggles with that due to arthritis), walk along half a mile of four lane arterial roadway, squeeze through two blocks along the same roadway on an extremely narrow unprotected at grade sidewalk while semis barrel by leaning over my head… then I get to a shopping center and transit nexus and can go elsewhere.
While living in Southern Spain I’d walk two blocks on quiet pedestrian streets to a waterfront promenade which was littered with restaurants and provided a wide (like 20 meter) surface to stroll along to reach the city center - at one point before the city center you’d need to cross a two lane high traffic road but that road had protected crosswalks every 150 meters.
The contrast between these two places (and don’t even get me started on how pleasant Barcelona is to pedestrians) is stark.
Not just obesity, but also the loneliness epidemic, since mental health is boosted as much by the weak relationships of the people that one sees regularly, day-to-day, whose name one might not even know, as it is by close, intimate relationships. (And even the latter are suffering the loss of social contact.)
When you pop a balloon, the helium floats to space and is lost into the solar wind forever. Unlike every other element we could run out, and nobody cares. (Helium is important for a lot of serious things, too)
There’s more pressing issues, of course, but if you want one that’s very unknown compared to it’s long-term significance, there you go.
I have goodish news. We aren’t going to run out of helium any time soon.
Based on current rates of helium consumption the US alone has something like 250+ years of stored helium. We pumped a porous mountain full of all the helium we could back in the 60s and it’s been kept stable since.
We still have no alternative to helium in a few of its most important use cases, but there is price where the helium we haven’t bothered collecting will become cost effective to go get. Those untapped reserves are estimated 3-10 times what we have ever used.
I’m also fairly certain that we will have figured out a way to produce helium in the next hundred years. We know how it came to exist naturally it’s really just the matter of someone being crazy enough to try and replicate those underground conditions and spend the money on the project.
I have faith that helium is a solvable problem for the human race.
Because of how entirely permanent this is, it pays to look far - like millions of years. That’s what it took to accumulate.
We know how it came to exist naturally it’s really just the matter of someone being crazy enough to try and replicate those underground conditions and spend the money on the project.
How that works is just normal radioactive decay. The conditions aren’t actually important.
It’s probable we’ll be able to make a bit with fusion, but the amounts will be small. IIRC we also collect some from decaying radioactive things in manmade settings, but again, it’s hard to beat an chunk entire planet underneath a salt dome. Next options are harvesting it from space (but it’s really spread out) or a gas giant (but there’s stupid amounts of gravity).
The USA’s two-party system is a fucking farce and we’re not going to see major, widespread change under either party. But if I bring this up I get called a “Russian bot” and accused of telling people not to vote… even though I vote.
Speaking of real, the USA is not a law of nature. It’s only been around for a short time, historically, and it took a bloody civil war to keep it going this long. The warning that we have to vote for the correct color every time, or the country falls apart, is wrong. Voting for the correct color and the country still falls apart is possible if that color can’t make the fundamental changes needed.
The issue is that the same people that would lose votes from doing so would have to change the system. Which obviously means they have no incentive to do so.
The problem is that the US first needs to be in a stable place in order to break free of the 2 party system. I don’t think we’re going to see that in our lifetimes.
I’ll also add that one of the two parties actively wants to see me and anyone like me dead, so there’s a lot of pressure for many of us on simply surviving
I’ll also add that one of the two parties actively wants to see me and anyone like me dead, so there’s a lot of pressure for many of us on simply surviving
Oh, for sure, hence why I’m not anti-voting. I still want to save my ass in the short term, even while thinking about the long term.
Trans people will be murdered over bathroom laws. You want a masculine bearded guy in the women’s room? That’s exactly what anti-trans bathroom laws require. Those guys are gonna get shot.
Which is stupid, since unisex bathrooms already exist. It shouldn’t be hard to install those in every single new building everywhere.
Or, hear me out, we repeal the laws and trans people just continue using the bathroom of their choosing like we’ve been doing without issue for decades.
Remember in the 2000’s before gay marriage was legal a lot of people would suggest elimination of the word marriage and just call everything civil unions to appease religious objections?
That’s what eliminating gendered bathrooms sounds like. Gay and straight people enjoy being married. Trans and cis people enjoy their gendered privacy that makes them feel safer. I believe you’re intentions are good but removing a universal cultural norm isn’t the solution. It’s side stepping the issue of transphobia, exactly like whites only bathrooms sidesteped racism.
Class struggle and the institutionalized corruption that the owner class is deploying against working people.
Bootlickers’ pathological behaviours that support the owner class narratives as they larp what they hear on teevee
