why not both is a question asked of politicians for perhaps a century, and we never seem to get both. changing the schedule is a stroke of a pen, changing US/Canadian diets and exercise patterns is a huge battle.

dont get me wrong im all for fixing our health and food, but its a generational battle compared to a pretty easy fix. babies should still get vaccines, just less and perhaps a bit later on most.

I don't think its an easy fix at this point. Lobby groups have far too much power in the food industry or sway on government. The food industry got their way, they addicted generations which results in an uphill battle and obese people don't do well with anything uphill.

Sugar is a hell of a drug, getting kids hooked is the key. i think even if we can get a nominal amount of kids food, school lunches, etc it may have a good long term effect. the rest sadly is on parents.

It is, but I think at large people are not food educated. You have parents now that grew up in the period where food companies were driving addiction.

At just a very high level I bet you most adults could not tell you how many calories are in a gram of carbs, fat, profiten, etc.

I legitimately think education around food is so poor that at this point you have to slap warning labels and disgusting images all over heavily processed food packaging and foods that contain well beyond healthy consumption amounts of XYZ. People can't read so they need pictures.

And that's where its incredible that so many other places around the world have already done this but North America, this advanced place has not because money wins out.

This post was edited by SBD on Jan 16 2025 11:43am

Sugar is still significantly better than HFCS. Back in the 90's, everything had sugar, and nobody was fat.

Well that's totally false, obesity was still beyond 30% in the 90s. Obesity skyrocketed after the 80s.

https://usafacts.org/articles/obesity-rate-nearly-triples-united-states-over-last-50-years/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9611578/

This post was edited by SBD on Jan 16 2025 11:48am

food education is so poor that people still believe in calories.

bit of both being correct. the 1980s to today didn't present a major increase in sugar intake. americans have eaten about 70-80lbs of sugar per year consistently for 100+ years.

but in the 1700s when sugar intake was about 4lbs/year obesity was almost non-existent. now we're over 35% of adults.

the truth is sugar tends to present itself in food which is altogether unhealthy. so sugar itself may not be the cause of obesity, but a contributing factor and ever present in foods which do a have a true causal effect.

the 1980s and beyond, especially 2000 and beyond, saw a decline in physical activity. taking the bad food we always ate post WW2 into an epidemic health status.

This post was edited by thesnipa on Jan 16 2025 11:59am

Yeah sorry I just mean as in its not at all true that no one was fat in the 90s, that's not what the data says, sugar or other, the food issue as a whole was already rearing its ugly head well before the 90s and certainly started to explode during that period.

yup agreed, people were already in suboptimal health when they are the terrible food. but food got even worse and exercise dropped off. now its really getting bad.