Challenge: How to Stop Obesity?

Great Debates
41

I am of the opinion that anything other than medications will not work. The reality is people are lazy. people don’t take medications that can save their life (blood pressure) or that can provide great quality of life advances (antidepressants, antipsychotics). expecting everyone to rebuild their entire lifestyle and adopt one that is at its core a threat to survival (the reality is denying yourself calorie dense food and expending more calories than you need to is a recipe for starvation and extinction as far as the evolutionary brain is concerned).

Diet & exercise work, but people arne’t going to do them. So drugs are the only answer.

i’d be in favor of more tax breaks and subsidies for exercise or diet programs. right now there virtually are none. Diet programs/meds aren’t covered by most insurance and exercise programs are not really subsidized.

42

Frankly the food pyramid is a crock of crap. If you look at the diets of peoples across the globe you will see a vast variety in the amount and type of food consumed. Grain/meat/vegetable portions are often WAY off what the U.S. would have you believe what is healthy. These people are usually not obese. For example, Inuit and mongolians eat a large amount of fish and meat and little to no vegetables. Conversely, Hindu and bhuddist eat loads or rice and veggies and no meat. Both groups have no problems with obesity or major heart disease. I attribut this wholey to the fact they maintain active lives. Excersise is the key, not food.

43

So why not empasize the importance of a healthy diet and plenty of exercise in public schools? Encourage kids to pursue athletics or some sort of other physical activity.

Marc

44

Orbytal, I’m glad you have found a way to keep your body in shape, but unfortunately, exercise isn’t the simple cookie cutter answer. If it was, don’t you think people would have realized it by now? There are many, many more factors contributing to the obesity problem. I’m not devaluing exercise, it’s obviously quite necessary and it would help alot if people exercised more. But it won’t solve everything.

Myself in example, I work out for one to two hours every day. I do triathalons for fun, and I really enjoy exercise. But I still have a weight problem. I wish just exercising was the answer, but for all people, it’s not.

45

Uh, or maybe we should emphasize spelling a bit more.
To begin maybe we could start taking physical education classes a bit more seriously. I know many of you had some pretty negative experiences with PE so just let me finish before you throw rotten fruit and veggies at me. <ahem> You there up front, put that tomato down. Thank you.

During the first years of school PE should focus on fun games and activities. The kids will be exposed to a wide variety of activities and will learn the fundamentals and rules of some of our more common sports.

Later on they should have the opportunity to explore an even wider variety of activities. The amount of activities we could think of is only limited by our imaginations and the school’s budget. Rock climbing (some schools have this), hiking, or whatever activity the kids might be interested in.

Marc

46

The issue isn’t that people are lazy. The issue is that our society is set up to reward the behaviors that lead to obesity. That’s the real problem, and isn’t going to be easy to fix.

As far as tax credits for gym memberships go, there’s a difference between having a gym membership and actually going to the gym.

47

In terms of exercise, I’ve been having this particular thought for a while…

Exercise, to be blunt, sucks. This is, of course, IMHO, and I know a lot of people don’t share this perspective, but exercise is boring, painful, and seems like a complete waste of time. Now, intellectually, I understand that it has a greater purpose. But when I have to spend an hour a day working out, I spend it thinking of all the other things I could be accomplishing, and that this hurts, and that I’d much rather be having fun.

I, like many other people out there, never learned to enjoy physical activity. Not surprising when you consider that in the US, school physical fitness programs are designed to benefit those who need them the least; the jocks excel in gym class, and the kids who don’t do sports are just miserable. By the time my gym requirement was finished, I was determined to never participate in an organized sport ever again.

I think what’s needed to encourage people to exercise is a way to eliminate some of the drawbacks to exercise. Out of the three downsides mentioned before, boring, painful, and a waste of time, exercise is always going to cause pain and take time, so making exercise less boring would seem to be the obvious course.

One of the things that’s making people less likely to exercise is the vast array of entertainment choices out there. And one of those choices is, I believe, the key to making exercise more fun. I speak, of course, of video games.

It’s already begun. Go into any good arcade these days, and you’ll see people riding bikes, skateboarding, and dancing like crazed maniacs, and enjoying themselves immensely. Games are able to use positive reinforcement to make exercise an immediately rewarding experience; instead of waiting months to feel the benefits of an exercise regime, you get points right away for working hard. The boredom factor is eliminated by the establishment of interesing short-term goals, and the imposition of a storyline, and the involvement of being in a virtual environment.

Hook up an exercise machine, say an elliptical machine, to a game console, and you could program a game that would encourage repeated use, increasing physical fitness gradually as the player moves along the storyline. You could design multiple games, and keep people interested in their virtual exercise routines indefinitely. Heck, you could design networked games that had teams of players playing sports that are totally impossible in real life, online together.

I dread exercising, but if it involved slaying orcs, or piloting spaceships, or creating mayhem every time I worked out, I’d be all over it.

I know people are going to say that you can have similar experiences by going out and playing sports, with real people in a real environment. But doing so requires that you find people to play with at your level of expertise, find a place to play, set up a time to meet with them, make sure they all arrive, and then commute there and back again. As opposed to just popping in a disk. Also, in actual sports there’s considerable risk of injury, and in today’s underinsured society, nobody wants to risk that. And lastly, a lot of us have been raised to be very private people, and the last thing we want to do is embarrass ourselves in public with a return to the ineptitude we displayed in gym class.

In short, it’s an entirely different experience than actual-world sports. It’s private, convenient, and you can do things that are impossible in reality. With the addictive nature of video games added in, it could mean that in time, we could be witnessing the birth of an army of buff gaming geeks.

Not a universal solution, perhaps, but one that could help a segment of the population that needs the help badly.

Anybody know a hardware manufacturer that wants to try making a huge chunk of money while making the world a better, fitter place? Have I got a sales pitch for you…

48

I agree. The problem is that our society has become too “nice”. We need to be willing to tell fat slobs to stop stuffing their ugly faces.

49

As far as tax credits for gym memberships go, there’s a difference between having a gym membership and actually going to the gym.

I thought about that, too, ultrafilter, so let’s scratch that.

Tax credits/breaks for losing weight?

Tell someone they can get a check or pay less in taxes for dumping 100 pounds and that might be the motivation some people need (there will always be people who won’t lost the weight regardless of the rewards). It would have to be a significant amount of money, and you’d have to have an affidavit from your doctor proving you’ve lost the weight. Any money Uncle Sam would pay out towards something like this would be paltry compared to what the government pays because of heart attacks, strokes, diabetes, etc.

I agree. The problem is that our society has become too “nice”. We need to be willing to tell fat slobs to stop stuffing their ugly faces.

That was a joke, right?

50

What is it? I’d like to learn more about it.

I’m going to think positive and assume that I have been whooshed.

51

I agree. I hated P.E. class. My parents aren’t that into sports, and as a kid, I’d get to P.E., be given a basketball or something, and have no clue what to do with it, and no one ever taught me.

I spent a few weeks in Japan this summer as an exchange student at a high school. At first I was pretty bummed that I would have to go to P.E., but it ended up being my favorite class. At first we were doing volleyball, and the coach actually was teaching various moves and strategies, and when we played games, everyone was very kind, even when people made stupid mistakes. They also offered Karate and Kendo (fighting with bamboo swords), which seemed a lot more fun then the sports US schools usually offer. My Japanese school was also five stories high with no elevator, so that did something to give people excercise.

52

Why do people see exercise as going to the gym for a couple of hours per week, pumping iron (or whatever they do in gymnasia)?

People are, overall, a lot less active than they once were. They drive 500 metres to the shop and will wait five minutes for a lift rather than walk up one flight of stairs.

53

Iceland is slowly moving in the same direction as the US. We are probably a couple of decades behind you but ppl over here are very aware of where we a heading.

We are probably going to tax sugar heavily. It has been shown to work fine against tobacco, to a certain degree. Its a pretty easy tax to implement. We also tax alchohol heavily.

The government also supports various projects such as subsidizing fitness classes and supporting private enterprises such as www.lazytown.com.

54

For those of us who don’t read Icelandic, what is Lazytown?

55

Weird when I use the excact same link from google it works for me. It is supposed to be in English.

LazyTown was originally a television show that has sprouted into all sorts of direction. Its shown every other day on the state television and encourages kids to take part in it by dancing around doing aerobics and stuff. Kids are sent home with “LazyTown diet contracts” that are signed by the parents and the kids and excludes sweets 6 days of the week. Schools take active part in Lazytown.

56

Zoe I found this book to be extremely informative:
“The art and science of Rational Eating” by Albert Ellis, Ph.D. et al. Barricade books, New Jersey, 1992. Available at Amazon.

It describes very well the different feedbackmecahnisms, both hormonal and psychological, involved in obesity and dieting.
Some facts I learnt from the book, for instance:
-after a diet the body burns more efficiently. However, what most people do not know is that this effect only last 3 weeks (I thought it was months)
-fat cells produce additional hunger feelings. Liposuction, the surgival reduction of fatcells, therefore often leads to losing even more weight.
-science cannot prove such a thing as a “fat personality”. The socalled caracteristics of obese people, like lack of selfcontrol and less selfworth, can be proven to be the result of unsucceful dieting, not the other way around.

What is the name of the drug your doctor prescribed you?

57

I’m worried about any sort of sin-tax on food. It’s not just the overweight that buy food. Many people are poor and food is one of their biggest expenses. Pricing it higher will hurt them. People who are overweight don’t only eat chips and candy–they eat pasta, meats, breads, etc. Raising the price of those foods would hurt everyone.

One solution would be to have a sliding scale of increased insurance premiums based on how overweight an individual was. This way the increased medical costs would be borne by the individuals which had increased medical expenses. But insurance (group insurance) does not work this way. The rate for each individual is based on the expenses of the group as a whole.

One big problem is that you must eat, and that we like to eat. You can’t remove food from your diet as you might do with other unhealthy things like cigarettes or alcohol. The fact that we like to eat makes it very hard for us to limit ourselves. It is hard to deny yourself something when the negative consequences are not immediate.

I think a lot of people know they are overweight, but they don’t really understand why. There’s a lot of blame on genetics when it’s really that they are just eating a lot of calories.

So anyway, what would I like to see as a solution? I think that whenever you buy something from a restaurant where nutritional information is available (like McDonalds, Subway, etc), the number of calories are printed on the receipt along with what percentage that is of your daily caloric requirement. So if you get the Big Mac Extra Value Meal, you see that the 1200 calories it contains are 60% of the recommended daily amount. I feel this would go a long way to educating people about how much they are eating and why they are gaining weight.

And make it illegal to call anything low fat. That alone has probably gotten a lot of people fatter by creating the illusion, “Oh, pasta/bread/frozen yogurt is low fat so I can eat as much as I want.” Low fat doesn’t magically make it low calorie.

58

Filmore the idea of adding the calories to the receipt is brilliant. Patent now.

59

Originally posted by eli_the_fanatic
I think the only solution is to continue with the relentless shaming of the heavyset.

It sure is refreshing to hear that there exists more sensible approaches for me to lose 40 pounds of ugly fat than by cutting off my head…I just hope that the few fellows who stated that the obesity problem is a result of diminished chastising, public shaming and humiliation. I figure that would be a sure way of creating more Columbine high schools instead of a thinner and healthier populace. It sure is a puzzel in how that the poorest segments of our society are also the most overfed and obese - or improperly fed would be a better term. Its just a whole lot cheaper to eat unhealthy I guess…And there is a definite addictive quality in processed flour, caffeine and sugars. If you have ever attended an OA 12 step meeting the degree of its long term effect on mood becomes clear. Although I doubt Keith Richards ever made a mad dash to the corner at midnight for a Moon Pie and a bottle of Pepsi. I would think the only avenue the government could take on this weighty issue would be to insure that the purveyors of food stuffs, healthy or otherwise, would adhere to strict and accurate nutritional accounting. There is a lot of snake oil attitude with the fast food and snack food industry. I just saw a commercial the other day with a fellow proclaming that his svelte, hale and hearty new self was completely due to a diet of grease dripping Kentucky Fried Chicken, (and I love fried chicken, don’t get me wrong).

60

What I would personally like to see is any medical care required due to being over weight be charged to the person (or insurance policies change to exclude high risk “fat” people).

I wish I could say it a nicer way but when you’re seriously over weight, 3 doctors all tell you to loose weight and you don’t, no one else should have to pay for your mistakes. Remove subsidies for medical care of the over weight and let nature take care of those who don’t care for themselves.

This might affect enough people to bother to take care of themselves. Even people who call themselves “big boned” might think twice about going to McDonalds if they knew they had to maintain a certain BMI (or weight range) to keep their medical insurance. It might seem spiteful but in the end but hey, you made your bed and now you get to sleep in it.