I’ve spoken about the ethics of future medicine before (in the form of hypothetical pills), this time I’ve invented a pill that is a logical extension of all diet regimes.
What it does is ‘turns off’ the human digestive system. Food will be passed through the body without any of the calories, fat, protein or anything else being absorbed. In other words, take one of these pills and for an hour you can eat any foodstuff (it won’t work on rotten or poisonous food though, you mad bastards) you want without any repercussions. Gorge yourself on chocolate cake, stuff your face with French fancies, chomp on cheese without fear of waist expansion.
An hour after the pill is taken you’ll need to reach lavatorial facilities and the unhealthy food will be promptly expunged in undigested form, whereupon your digestive system will within half an hour return to normal. It only works once every 24 hours so you can’t accidentally starve yourself to death.
The mechanical processes in the human gut still occur, the food when excreted will be in no shape to be eaten again, without getting too graphic. Likewise it has no effect on oral hygiene, if you eat chocolate and potato crisps for the entire hour and forget to brush your teeth don’t blame me when your teeth rot out of your head.
Would you be interested in such a pill, or do you think it should be banned? If you’re interested, how much would you pay for a month’s supply?
I have managed to practice restraint and retrain my system, with the help of lots and lots of fiber supplements, cinnamon and gymnema, so that eating only a small amount of food is no longer the physically painful experience it once was.
But I love food. I miss it. And I really hate the temptation and family and community pressure to eat more of it than I need to at social functions. If I could take this pill and binge to my heart’s delight and not suffer the ill effects of obesity and obesity related illness and it had no side effects? Absolutely, sign me up.
I probably wouldn’t take it every day, but once a week or so, absolutely.
Before I vote, can you explain why you think it might be considered immoral? The only thing I could come up with is the wastage of food and thus unnecessary resources, greenhouse gasses etc. But perhaps you are thinking of some other more direct immorality … ?
You’ve got in in one; it would encourage perfectly good food literally going straight down the toilet. There are a few other arguments I can think of why it would be a bad thing from an ethical perspective, outlined in the poll options as well as other reasons I’m sure I haven’t thought of in the OP (maybe creating a rift in society between people who see nothing wrong with eating and living with the consequences of it and pill-users who shirk what nature intended).
I’m not sure why it would be immoral. It’s not like the food I would eat would be available to people who don’t have enough to eat.
Tons of food gets wasted everyday anyway, what difference it make if it’s thrown in a dumpster or flushed down the toilet?
I’d love to have a pill that would help me lose weight, but I doubt I would gorge myself, I hate that feeling. It would be nice though to have one meal a day where I could just eat what I wanted without thinking about calories.
Well, it pretty directly encourages gluttony, which many people consider sinful/immoral.
I’m glad my religion doesn’t share that point of view.
Otherwise, I can see it being immoral in the same sense that overeating is immoral or wasting food is immoral - that is, there are starving people who could use that food to maintain their lives, or health, and here I am want to shove it into my maw just to poop it out “wasted”. And…yeah, I can see that. I can also see that it’s immoral for me to have this laptop and pay for internet access when I could use that money to support vaccination efforts in Nigeria.
For those who’d want the pill, don’t forget to tell me what an appropriate market price would be. I’ll be flogging them in packs of 30. Would you be willing to pay megabucks for such a medical miracle, or only willing to part with a small amount?
It only works for one hour out of 24? So I’m supposed to gorge myself for that hour once a day, but I don’t metabolize the food, so I’ll still be hungry and have to eat anyway? I don’t see it as immoral at all, just not that useful to me. I’d take some when I visit New Orleans, or any major period of gluttony, but those don’t happen that often.
I don’t have megabucks to spend. I think you’d be better off shilling them in smaller amounts if you want to make more. I’d pay $20 for a 2 pack, 'cause it would get me through a weekend. I could probably swing $50 for a 7 pack that I might buy once a month on a regular basis and twice a month during the holidays. I wouldn’t spend $200 - $300 for a 30 pack, though, even though it’s the same per pill price I’d be willing to spend for fewer pills.
I’m not sure how taking a pill to gorge is any more wasteful than those who choose to purge after gorging. An even better one are those who do that chewing and spitting out thing so they don’t have to actually purge.
I’m pretty sure I might take a pill like that just to see what happened. Likely, the result would be similar enough to looking like a purge or a nasty stomach virus that I would never do it again.
Remember the woman who stuffed her face with a bag of those Olestra potato chips, who made the news with her disastrous results, but was certainly not the only one who had the same side effect? I would bet the final consensus on these pills might be similar to that of Olestra, with people ultimately saying, “no thanks.”
First of all, the food isn’t entirely wasted: The primary purpose of, say, chocolate cake is to provide the enjoyment of eating it, and with this pill, the chocolate cake still serves this purpose. It might be wasteful to use this pill with, say, unseasoned rice, but I can’t see too many people using it that way anyway (and if they do, it’s because they’re still getting something they value out of the rice).
Second, waste of food in the developed world is basically completely unrelated to people going hungry in the undeveloped world. In terms purely of capability of food production, the US alone could meet the entire world’s food needs and then some, and we can meet our own food needs many times over. Hunger in the third world is not a result of lack of food, but lack of distribution of that food. Saving your empty Calories from going down the toilet isn’t going to help that problem.
That said, I’m one of those lucky ones who can eat as much as I like and still remain within an acceptable (to me) margin of my ideal weight, so I would not use this pill myself. But I have no objections to anyone else using it.
The pill already exists really, its called bulimia and all that changes is what end it comes out of again.
Im not convinced it would help most overeaters much in that it does nothing to fix feelings of hunger and the like so overeating would probably still occur. So its less about morality and more about real utility in my view.
There already are pills like that (although they don’t shut the system off completely) . En ex of mine had them prescribed, but she stopped just because of this:
The way the OP is posited, anybody using it daily would be keeping his gut empty; the absorption processes would work for 23h, then everything would stop and any food (whether ingested during the “magic hour” or before) would go out in a flush of diarrea.
I for one wouldn’t be looking forward to giving myself the liquid runs, that’s for sure.
Sign me up. I see the pill selling for $24.95 with an advertised proclamation that one dollar from each sale goes to help third world starvation. Used once every week or so it would make dieting the remainder of the time easier.
No, bulimia doesn’t stop calories from being absorbed. Bulimics tend to be normal weight or overweight, unlike anorexics, and they have a host of other nutrient and electrolyte difficulties. They have a huge rate of dental decay from stomach acid on the teeth, and a ruptured esophagus from the force of educed vomiting is not unheard of. There are lots of side effects from bulimic binge and purge patterns, unlike this hypothetical pill, and some of them are life threatening.
Oops–I didn’t read about it only lasting 1.5 hours. That’s stupid. the way this pill would work would be to essentially block absorption in the gut–there’s no reason for it to do anything else. There’s no reason for it to force a purge–your body will do that naturally.
The only thing that gives me pause on that version is those people who say that hunger is really about feeling like you need more calories, and, thus, this sort of thing would not stave off hunger.
But, seriously, I’ve thought of a future where genetic engineering to cause the intestines to absorb less, and the only real problem is if there is suddenly a food shortage. This doesn’t even carry that problem. The only potential problem I see is making sure you are well nourished–maybe making it a shot that includes required nutrients would be a good idea.
And, if it needs to be said: your version seems pointless, since, as soon as the waste is expelled, I’m going to feel really hungry because everything is empty. That’s not a natural state. You can’t lose weight on an hourly basis.
Well, if it turned off the digestive system for too long eventually someone would cross the line and starve. On the evacuation point; maybe really unhealthy food would be ok in the large intestine without being expunged, but you still have to get rid of what came before or the small intestine’s gonna do it’s job.
