Why is ok to deprive alcoholics of beer/liquor, but not obese people of food?

So before you make the obvious (but erroneous) argument that "food is essential but alcohol is optional", consider that a majority of the food obese people eat are equally (if not more) "optional" and toxic to the body than alcohol. In fact, sugar is perhaps the worst thing you can put in your body. That's among the slew of other preservatives, additives, and other manmade substances obese people (and quite frankly, we all) eat (from time to time). Not to mention the absolute over-intake of calories we tend to injest.

So paralleling from certain "detox" and "cleansing" regimens that alcoholics go through in rehab programs..

The possible action(s)-
`1. take away food from clincally obese people. or people we just think are too fat. allow them only unlimited quanitites of water, lemons, and 2 vitamins / day. (similar to what I allow my gf 2 days / week). could be family members, co-workers, doctors, or anyone that the fat person is associated with.
2. make unhealthy foods prohibitively expensive for people with obese BMIs.

The possible outcome(s) (assuming success)-
1. overall a better looking society. maybe we can be healthy and fit, like certain Eastern European countries. one that eshews whalewomen in favor of slender, tall, perfectly fucktastic specimens.
2. pharma companies would see market capitalizations cut in half. short XLV and IBB.

==

The possible pushback-
1. capitalism thrives on complacency, complicity, and (most of all) idle workers. Idle, as in, the ability to sit for long hours without the urge to get up and go hiking, kickboxing, etc (i.e. non ADHD). If you've read books on human evolution, neurotriggers, and/or the rise of agriculture, you'd know that a hungry organism is a restless organism. Food is (too) plentiful, cheap, and abundant precisely to placate the masses into subversion and (the aforementioned) idleness. Your employer (and it's shareholders) don't care if you're obese, diabetic, and will die a painful death at age 50. They want ROI. Feed them 800 calories for $1.5 USD.

So alas, capitalism and the societal structure is the reason why we will never (perhaps ever) stop giving fat people food. It will cause undue anxiety, restlessness, and (eventually) the chaotic breakdown of the system due to rebellion/uprising of the wage slave. And therein lies the twisted beauty of capitalism.

 
Funniest
MonacoMonkey:
allow them only unlimited quanitites of water, lemons, and 2 vitamins / day. (similar to what I allow my gf 2 days / week).

![https://media3.giphy.com/media/NLbivNFUwhoTm/giphy.gif][https://media3…]

"If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them." - Bruce Lee
 
"If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them." - Bruce Lee
 

Obesity is hormonal/metabolic/genetic in many cases. Alcoholism isn't - the risk of becoming an alcoholic may be increased by genetics but getting shit faced on a Tuesday at 11am on whiskey is a choice.

Also obesity harms solely the user. You being fat doesn't hurt me. Alcoholics can get into fights, drive whilst drunk and make not make rational decisions.

Quite an interesting topic but way too complex to debate like this.

 

"hormonal/metabolic/genetic"; not really. There is nothing unique to the American genome. The average American just eat larger portions of food with more sugars while getting less exercise. The amount of obese people that can't help being obese is far less than one percent.

Obesity harms everyone, because it burdens our healthcare system and increases premiums overall as you can't discriminate based on weight / fitness (only offer incentives for working out through gym subsidies).

I think solving the obesity epidemic is complex, but there are some pretty low hanging fruit to dismiss like your ill-conceived idea that people can't help being fat, that it doesn't harm anyone, etc.

 

I'll reply to you but @WCBC60" this is also a reply to you. I 100% agree that obesity costs society - just like all medical problems. I have to pay for that as much as the next guy but the cost of obesity (from the medical side) is over estimated. Since people here like statistics, let me give you some; the CDC stated in 2008 the cost of obesity in the US was $147 billion (Source: https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/adult/causes.html) whilst the cost of excessive drinking in 2010 was $249 billion (https://www.cdc.gov/features/costsofdrinking/index.html). Both are high, but as you can see excessive drinking is MUCH higher.

And I also agree that pounding down Oreos and soda may be a choice but if I took an individual who was depressed for whatever reason (bullying, tragedy in life or whatever) and I asked him 'how do you want to cope with this depression?' I would rather he sit at home going to town on fast food than going to a bar each night and getting completely shitfaced alone. Both are bad ways of coping and both can be replaced with better alternatives.

As for the hormonal and genetic element, you are wrong. It plays a very large role. As someone with a medical genetics background I am happy to provide plenty of evidence for this.

This study highlights genes that lead to the increased risk for alcoholism and abuse - not causal https://www.nature.com/articles/nrgastro.2013.86

This study shows a strong causal link between genetic factors and obesity and obesity disorders https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12291-015-0541-x

I'm honestly happy to debate this further and if you feel like reading the papers, I'm happy to decipher some of the science if need be (not being condescending, honestly trying to be helpful)

I agree that in America portion sizes are bigger and many people are overweight but the genetic component (as posted by others here) plays a massive role whilst it plays a small role in alcoholism meaning that one is far less in control of their propensity to get fat than they are on their propensity to become an alcoholic.

What people seem to misunderstand about weight gain is that there is far more out of the person's control than people think. Often the 'why don't you just eat less' excuse is used just like 'why don't you stop being sad' is for depressed people. We take things like obesity as purely external-based conditions we often forget the plethora of internal factors affecting it.

 

"Obesity is hormonal/metabolic/genetic in many cases."

What is "many cases" by your definition? Last rates I've seen are (granted, estimates, how can you truly quantify IMO) sub 10%. They're fat because they make horrid lifestyle decisions, and hiding behind the genetics excuse is typical mentality and further confirmation of why they are how they are.

As The Real Max pointed out, zoom out of the U.S.: 2016 USA 36.2%, average of Western European countries: 19.9%. It's honestly embarrassing. I'm always astonished when I land in Houston after out of country work trips, it's frightening.

 

Detox and rehab centers don't work.

Fat people are more genetically pre-disposed to keeping fat. Most people lack discipline in one area of their lives. Also studies have shown that the caloric intake of a fat person does not equate to wait loss/gain. Simply said you could give a fat person -1500kcals below maintenance levels and they wouldn't lose significant weight.

It's the kids, honestly. I've never seen so many obese children than I have in 30 years. You just can't take away recess and activities at such a young age.

 

Your view of thermodynamics and how it equates to fat loss/gain is a common misconception.

You see how we arrived at kcals for food was by measuring how much energy it takes to incinerate said food. Let's take a banana in this instance, scientist A took a banana and INCINERATED it. Now if you think the human body with it's complex system of fat storage/energy storage and use is the same thing as incinerating food well THAT is patently false.

Let me give you two more common examples of how humans are not incinerators, let's take someone who has type 2 diabetus, what can you say to describe this person? It would be safe to assume that his body has tremendous amounts of adipose tissues. Now why is this, it is surely a symptom of something, and that is insulin resistance. Through being fat and slowly obese he has ruined his body natural ability to use food as energy and his insulin must be increased eventually artificaiily in order to live. Now let's take a type 1 diabetus person, opposite problem, he does not create his own insulin, and as a result this person does not gain fat easily or at all. It is a medical symptom of type-1 diabetus.

Now these are examples to illustrate that thermodnamics does not apply to humans digestion system, or to conceide a point it not the ONLY factor.

 

My main point, and I didn't make it clear enough, was that obeisity is a symptom. And yes, it is circular in logic. But if a skinny person become fat then he changes his gamete so that it becomes genetic. Just like nature/nuture...it's both.

It is a sedentary issue, people are just not active enough anymore and our quality of foods has risen to the point where we have cured starvation by being so economically prosperous that tasty foods are so cheap because of demand that we consume 100gs in sugar than what our genes are used to.

 

Have you ever seen a picture of a fat person in the Irish Potato famine? or the Soviet famine? or during WWII in the concentration camps?

Last I checked they were skinny as a twig. Sometimes anecdotal evidence isn't the best. But here it reiterates an obvious fact -- if you starve someone for days/weeks, they WILL lose weight.

To believe otherwise means your either obese, ignorant, or retarded (or all 3).

 

"similar to what I allow my gf 2 days / week"

jfc. If this isn't a troll post, then how did you even get a job as an analyst? I agree obesity is a problem in the developed world. But this is like bombing an entire neighborhood to get rid of a couple bed bugs.

Practically every suggestion you made involves some type of illegal price discrimination, dodgy eugenics, a near-omnipotent government and rampant sexism.

It's like Kim Jon il and Nazi Rudolph Hess had an angry, mentally challenged baby

 

All it takes is strong will.

Look at all those professional actors who are by no means athletes (Jared Leto, Christian Bale, Matthew McConaughey). They manage to gain and lose huge amounts of body mass in extremely short spans of time. And they've done it on several occasions.

Shaming people on their bad decisions has also proven to be quite effective to keep people in line. Nothing acts as a better motivator than "I don't want to f*** you fatty.".

Listen to the Adam Carolla 'Fat Women' 30-minutes long rant on YT. **

 

Funniest part is to see obese people on a diet. They barely take anything for lunch, and once back in the office you find them with 3 sodas, and they ate 10 chocolate bars. The best thing is that they think they are on a diet and claim they are, I was once told by someone 'look what I am eating, only a salad and I am not loosing weight, this prove that it's genetics', 20 mins later I'll let you guess what this person was doing.

And OP, we should do the same with smokers then. We could increase prices to $40 as in Australia and the number of smokers would drop massively, especially in Europe where smoking is common (up to 1/3 of the population in some countries).

 

I agree with the headline. I used to be real fat, like size 48 fat. No surprise, I started losing weight when I stopped eating shit. Looking back, I was too lazy and weak-minded to break out my lifelong habits. It's a mental game and most of them can't win at it.

I also heard all of the genetic, or thyroid or blah blah blah excuses that others made for me. But guess what? None of it was real and when I made changes, my body responded.

To all fat people, purge that weakness from within and become a better person for yourself and your current/future family. If nothing else, do it for the bitches.

 

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