Too bad it tastes horrible. 
How would I solve it? Accept that human nature is what it is, that we evolved not to starve and asking people to voluntarily deprive themselves of high macronutrient foods in a land of plenty is doomed to fail.
Invest heavily in medical R&D determining how the body determines bodyfat levels. Find medical interventions that can safely and permanently lower the set point so people who voluntarily choose (nobody should be forced or nagged to lose weight if they don’t want to) to lose weight and keep it off can do so in a way that consistently works in the real world using real people. This would probably involve things like injectible leptin, leptin sensitizers, ghrelin blockers, time release T3 thyroid hormone, CCK boosters, etc. to replace the endocrine signals your body changes because it wants you to gain the weight back. Losing weight isn’t that hard, there are thousands of studies where they get people to lose weight (sometimes very large amounts of weight). There are far, far, far fewer studies showing how to help people keep it off for 5+ years. The human body isn’t designed to lose weight and keep it off. If it was, then how is someone supposed to survive the second famine?
As far as helping people live a healthier lifestyle (which is not the same thing as obesity) I really don’t know. Make it easier to juggle a full time job and being active. Being covered in sweat on your lunch hour or after you bike to work is no fun. It really only takes 2-3 hours of exercise a week to boost health. You don’t need to be a triathlete to be healthy.
Require junk food to be kept in a special aisle. To gain access to the aisle, you have to look at yourself in the mirror. To leave the aisle, you have to look at yourself in the mirror. Make them fun-house mirrors so that everyone looks fat. And require the store clerk to hold up another mirror right before he rings you up. And require him to say, “Are you sure you want to buy that?”
Seriously, one way would be to treat sugar like the bad thing it is. There should be a recommended daily amount for sugar just as there is for sodium and fat. And packaging should tell you upfront the grams of sugar per serving. This is the first thing I always look at when I take something off the shelf, not the fat.
The trouble with home economics classes is what the hell to teach. Remember the 1950’s? A diet plate was a hamburger without a bun and a scoop of cottage cheese and a cigarette for dessert, and you know what? Everyone was thin, at least compared to now.
In 1984 the FDA says you need as much as 11 servings of breads, grains, rice or pasta. Next thing you know everyone’s carbo-loading like a marathon runner the day before an event, giant bowls of spaghetti, it’s not the potato that’s fattening, it’s the sour cream you put on it, have some more oatmeal and a bagel without butter and it looks like a Jabba the Hutt look-a-like contest out there.
Maybe dietary recommendations from the education-industrial complex aren’t what we need.
Let’s start by noting that what we have been doing is actually working … obesity in kids is leveling off and decreasing in some subgroups.
What would you drop to include the home ec classes every year? Math? History? Gym?
Yes to only healthier choices in schools and some changes to that end have been done already.
Yes to the Big Gulp Tax. Low hanging fruit first … can focus on amount of added sugar per realistic serving size. Actually dracoi taxes on tobacco DO have a large impact on smoking.
Yes to better regulations about advertising junk to kids. Of note several kids’ networks are doing it on their own.
New food labels are a step in the right direction and at least highlight added sugar and require using serving size standards that reflect what people actually eat. There is no RDA for sugar … no added sugar would be just fine. Could be a maximum note: 25 gm for women and 37.5 for men is the most people should be having.
Obesity rates exploded in the late '70s/early '80s. So the cause started there.
The most interesting hypothesis I’ve seen is economic insecurity. People are reaching for comfort food and eating larger portions to relieve their stress (especially as cigarettes became taboo). Plus the lack of sleep, which leads to even more binge eating late at night. This also helps explain why obesity affects the poor much more than the rich.
A more popular scapegoat is corn subsidies, especially the widespread distribution of HFCS in the '70s and putting it in all sorts of food.
This is a small thing, but the candy/chip rack next to the cashier in every grocery store makes every kid annoy their parents until they break down and get something to make the little buggers shut up. So that’s something else for Big Brother to ban.
Let evolution sort it out. Or, genetic engineering.
I don’t think it has much to do with the health of the food in question. Technology has given us food that is essentially free, but our hunger instinct evolved under conditions where food was scarce. Massive amounts of fruit, nuts, or other “healthy” food will get you just as fat as Mountain Dew.
My low appetite would have gotten me killed in the wild; I wouldn’t have gorged on that antelope, so I’d starve over the next scarce period instead of burning off fat reserves. But it serves me well in modern society.
Fatness isn’t a huge impediment to reproductive fitness, but there should be at least some negative influence. Evolution only requires a mild push, so I could see some improvement over a few dozen generations. That’s a bit of a long time, though. Maybe we’ll be able to solve it through genetic engineering.
I don’t see how there’s any analogy to smoking. The correct amount to smoke is easy to determine and not dependent on the individual. Food is not like that; the problem is with self-regulation. It’s biological in nature.
Huh, the home economics classes around here really are about 50% how to make healthy food. And learning how to make a PBJ? Yeah, that’s part of it. I know it sounds ridiculous, but some kids don’t even know that, and you’ve got to start somewhere.
I suggest identifying the chubby shits by affixing felt pigs to their clothing and throwing the fat little fuckers in a special fat camp where they can concentrate on their diets. If my special BMI police… Size Sheriffs…I think I’d call them… find any of the porky bsstards hiding in the upstairs gaming/feeding attics, they are going straight to the front of the cattle cars and off to the camps.
Or maybe I’d just realize that not everything individuals find horrifying about documentaries needs to be societally “managed”.
Speaking of eating your feelings, I’m thinking of the stereotype of a woman after a break up eating an entire tub of ice cream, or a giant cake. I could be wrong, but I don’t think that trope existed in older films from the '50s or '60s. I’m not sure where it started though. Anyone know?
Home economics: Make the student document all calories and fat consumed each day. (Seriously, once they see in print how much they are consuming compared to how much is normal; if that doesn’t motivate them, I don’t know what will.)
Bring back PE. (All the way til graduation.)
No more fad diets. Any proposed diets by a would be entrepreneur would have to be pier reviewed and accepted by the AMA.
Massive media campaigns aimed towards children. Make junk food uncool in the same way they’ve made smoking uncool.
We have this issue because calories are far more prevalent than they use to be, and labor is much less a part of daily life for most people in the developed world. As long as those two facts remain, it will never be solved.
If obesity took on the stigma that smoking now carries, it would help some. But it wouldn’t be a complete solution.
It’s not like there’s no shame attached to obesity, at least for women. As Americans have gotten bigger, models have gotten smaller; the disparity between the anorexic models and the general population is staggering. Just like with smoking, obesity has the stigma of being caused by lack of discipline. And being fat doesn’t even have the “cool kids” factor.
I honestly don’t think this country is so fat because people don’t care. Diet has become a huge industry; recently I even read an article on the resurgence of the tape-worm-diet, something people used to laugh at. The problem is people are obsessed with cutting fat out of their diet, and that fat is replaced by over-processed, sugary food.
I would start a program of public education explaining how imortant it is to fullfill all areas of our lives. I would educate folks on how suseptable we are to negative and positive reactions to the various brain chemicals and hormones we produce. I would give them better access to programs that would increase thier chances of fullfilling areas of their lives that are lacking. Primarily through social and creative arts and crafts programs as well as sports and intellectual endeavors.
Look at the worldwide epidemiology of the epidemic (now near pandemic and in many countries, endemic). The clear correlation is not with economic insecurity, in fact in many regions obesity dramatically increased as their economies grew rapidly. Universally it was the adoption of Big Food Inc displacing more “traditional” diets.
The switch to more sedentary lifestyles also correlates.
That candy/chip rack is not the small thing you make it out to be. It is to some degree a sentinel event.
Is that because of lifestyle changes stopping the rise in obesity or because people just aren’t genetically capable of getting much fatter at that age? The vast majority of people will never be 500 pounds as an example no matter how shitty their lifestyle, if obesity levels are leveling off it is due to lifestyle or the fact that the kids in general can’t get much fatter?
Also this article says the rates are still going up because the methods of measurement are different.
I’d implement every single idea that had the remotest chance of being useful, and keep evaluating them. Stop subsidizing corn farming, start subsidizing vegetable and fruit growers, make physical ed an important part of school curricula, no junk food in schools, healthy school lunches, a blitz of advertising about exercise and good food, ban junk food advertising especially in venues where there are children etc etc.
Smoking was reduced dramatically in the US because multiple approaches were used and the barrage kept up and kept increasing. It gradually got less and less cool to smoke, and harder and harder to find public places to do it. When I grew up, all the adults I knew smoked. Now almost none of them do. That didn’t happen by itself.
Making the right eating and exercising choices easy and the wrong ones hard, instead of the other way around, would go a long way.
Just like tobacco, the resistance from those who make money off creating ill-health will be ferocious.
And if it isn’t accepted, you get pushed off the pier and right into the ocean!
LOL. Stupid homophones!
Wouldn’t this amount to censorship?