I don’t think they said there was an “obesity problem” in the Star Trek future. And, anyway, for one thing, it seems like if someone were unhealthy in that way, they would “fix” them via a pill or injection or psychological conditioning or something, not a crude operation like liposuction. For another thing, we see, for example, Troi requesting an nth serving of chocolate ice cream (and absolutely no low-fat substitutes or anything like that) and the AI refusing to give it her.
It seems like you would have to overcome a lot of subtle and not-so-subtle pressure to make the actively countercultural choice to be fat, to be ugly, to be “unproductive” (which does not have to do with money), and so on. You would probably be largely ignored, in the hope you would eventually get tired of your antics, but, if you were deemed a threat, who knows?
Exactly, that’s what I’m saying. With the technology as presented and the post-scarcity society implied, there’s no reason not to eat all you want and never get fat. The replicator refusing Troi made no sense. If you have transporter technology that can remotely and safely scan living creatures down to the quantum level (which is what the old “Tech manuals” said they did), you can regulate exactly what parts of the food you eat actually make it into a person’s system. Once they hit optimal calories for the day, everything past that simply gets beamed out.
That would be the ideal system. The “liposuction” idea would be cruder, yes. Letting the fat actually accrue and then beaming that out doesn’t seem as efficient, but it would be worlds away from what we call liposuction now. Like most surgery, it should be more akin to photoshop. Beam someone into the pattern buffer, edit out the fat/cancer/injury, whatever, beam them back out healthy, thin, and whole.
A thought occurred to me in the shower this morning. Since the Federation knows that the dust from Alfa 177 can cause the transporter to split (“The Enemy Within”) and duplicate entities, good and bad, why don’t they take someone like Garth of Izar there and run him through a transport cycle? It’s not like it could make him any worse, and it just might give them a version that is sane again.
Strangely enough, I have ethical problems with such a chair. Yet I have none about mucking about with a damaged transporter. I am large - I contain multitudes.
People eat unhealthily for reasons. In a future without “food deserts” or other economic reasons, those reasons would be psychological, and Trek is big on curing psychological problems through counseling, not just treating the end result and calling it good.
Then again she is an officer aboard a ship underway, so it may just be that even in the post-scardity TNG days, Starfleet regs say no, you may not just indulge yourself with no limits, and it’s programmed in.