Comments

1

OK, who gave the edibles to Lindsey Graham?

2

If there was a chemical in our food that killed as many young people as obesity related illnesses do, it would be dubbed the largest health crisis in history, and people would move mountains to sort it out quickly and at a great expense that people would bear willingly.

But instead it is just sugar and most of the nation overeating on a daily, constant basis. So we shrug our shoulders and say there is nothing that can be done. Instead, we watch and assist our loved ones as they literally eat themselves into an early grave.

3

Life expectancy continues to downtrend in the States while it improves in other developed nations. I read that midlife mortality rates were most pronounced in the industrial Midwest, which is being attributed to lost manufacturing jobs and the opioid epidemic. These are deaths of despair, rooted in poor education and lack of livable wages.

4

"Police have arrested a man for stripping off his clothes, including his underwear and 'fully exposing himself' in the Russell US Senate Office Building."
Police later said that they are now releasing Mr. McConnell to his home and he is free to resume his duties on his own recognizance.

6

@2: Making health club memberships tax deductible would help.

10

@6: It really wouldn't, your weight is almost a 100% reflection on how much you eat, and exercise does little to change your weight. Unless of course you exercise extremely vigorously for hours everyday, but such a small percentage of people are willing to do that, it becomes meaningless to even mention. An olympic athlete in training can outrun their diet, but you can't.

Foods that are high in added sugars and certain prepared foods need to be heavily taxed and somewhat restricted from SNAP purchases. Not only will this lower use rates, it will also help fund the massive health expenditures that obese people cause. Aside from tax breaks/penalties based on body fat percentage, this is all that really can be done from a federal level, as education and better food labeling have been shown to be pretty ineffective.

Other than that, people just need to stop fetishizing sugary foods and constant overeating. It takes a social shift, but will be difficult in a society where food has gone from nourishment to entertainment due to sheer abundance.

12

Getting a plumber up to the ISS to fix the toilets is going to cost a ton, especially on a holiday weekend. Double time-and-a-half, at least, plus travel time.

13

@ 10 & 11,

Empowering a Death Panel that tells Americans what to eat or tells corporations what poisons they can’t dump in our food supply is Communism, better dead than red,
checkmate,
and case closed infinity, comrades.

15

@2

From the CIA World Factbook, 2016/2017 data:

Average Lifespan:
US: 78.8
Germany: 80.8
India: 68.8
UK: 80.8
China: 76.7
Nigeria: 53.8

Obesity rate:
US: 36.2
Germany: 22.3
India: 3.9
UK: 27.8
China: 6.2
Nigeria: 8.9

Note that Germany and the UK have the same average lifespan, but the UK has a substantially higher obesity rate.

What if we instead considered poverty to be the biggest health crisis in history, since it is inarguably killing far more people than obesity?

16

The news is such a despairing ordeal every day that on this Thanksgiving Eve, I’d just like to mention that I’m thankful for:

Family and friends;
Cats and dogs and all of our furbabies;
Massive amounts of man-on-man seXXX, especially after a workout. The bearded, big-muscled men of the Pacific Northwest are the best;
Living in a free society;
Dolly Parton;
The incredible courage of people all over the world in confronting cruel, tyrannical, kleptocratic regimes, such as those in China, Chile, Israel, Turkey, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the United States, to name a few.

We all share the same struggle.

17

@10: It's a combo: exercise and health eating, right? A trainer can help someone loose 60 pounds over the course year with just one vigorous session per week. And then we see those same folks no longer hiring trainers but able to maintain their lower weight by working out at the gym on a regular basis and health eating. And then jackpot: they are able to get off high blood pressure meds!

18

@15: Let me know when you find the solution to ending poverty in every nation. Meanwhile, I am going to stay on topic and not laughably pretend that lifespan only has one or two factors. Poverty is caused by a plethora of both internal and external forces. Body weight can be completely managed internally and simply with individual effort.

@17: If we are strictly talking weight loss, burning calories through exercise of course will help on a literal level, but the problem is that most humans drastically overestimate the calories they burn through exercise, and underestimate the calories they consume. People who successfully lose weight do it through diet, not exercise or "trainers." You can easily lose weight without doing any exercise at all, if you just monitor your diet honestly. You can (and likely will) gain weight by focusing on exercise without worrying about diet.

Obviously exercise has a myriad of other health benefits and consistent, vigorous exercise is an extremely important part of staying healthy. Being sedentary is just as unhealthy as being obese, if not more so. But the fact is, the size of your body is determined in the kitchen, the strength of your body is determined in the gym.

19

@18 Oh, right, let's pretend that part of the world doesn't exist, and blither on about dieting and our muscle tone and other first-world problems instead. Because that's totes not "off topic" somehow.

If body weight can be managed by individual effort alone, then it must follow logically that the people of India have far superior willpower to the people of Germany. Or maybe there's some factor outside of personal virtue regulating body weight?

Curious that you don't seem to have the slightest interest in even considering solutions to a health crisis that affects orders of magnitudes more people than obesity. For some reason. Gosh I wonder what that might be.

20

Maybe some dairy, animal protein, and gluten occasionally aren't bad for you but actually necessary for a healthy lifestyle.

Of course, eschewing opiates would help someone live longer..

Since opiates are actually downers it might be helpful to see a major study that looks at whether there's a relationship between rising rates of opiate addiction and suicides.

21

@20 I have no idea how you'd establish causality in such a study.

The correlation is already there in the data, of course. And gets stronger if you factor in gun ownership. But again, it's merely correlation.

22

@19: "Why is someone talking about obesity when discussing American life spans instead of how people in India are poor? This means everyone is racist."

Look dude, I am sorry you are fat and insecure, but if people talking about weight loss and the obesity epidemic hurts your fragile little butt so much, just step away instead of throwing a silly tantrum.

23

@22 How the hell is obesity on-topic for a discussion of national life expectancy, while poverty is verboten no-go unspeech?

I take it from your silence that you do indeed agree that the people of India show far greater willpower in their eating habits than the people of the US?

And for the record, I don't think you've said anything racist, though it's interesting that's the first thing that sprang to mind for you. For all I know, you might simply be a staunch supporter of preserving and increasing wealth inequality, refusing to think about poverty because the basic means of alleviating it is both obvious and entirely antithetical to your belief system.

25

@22: I'm sure the straw robotslave that lives in your head is suitably chastened, and regrets saying that thing you just made up. And points for calling them names! That'll teach 'em to sass you.

26

@18

It figures that the American response to lower life expectancy than many other western developed nations is to tell fatties to eat less (even though it's suicide rates and treatment affordability that are also major contributors in crashing American life expectancy).

Rather than, you know, do what every single other developed nation on earth has done and have an affordable more socialized healthcare system and regulate the food industry so you can deal with the crisis. But. you know. Something. Something. Buh SOCIALIZM!!!

That sort of stubborn stupidity makes sense since blaming victims is how we have been addressing every other major crisis for the last thirty years. From income equality and poverty rates and mass shootings to the Climate Crisis. And each of those just keeps getting worse.

You can always count on the blind stupidity of Americans to do exactly the opposite of the most effective proven solutions.

I can only hope morons like you die soon so we can get a little closer to solutions that work.

27

@25 My preferred prounouns are "he" and "him."

I say this mainly to piss off the kind of people who can be provoked by the idea that people ought to be allowed to prefer their pronouns to begin with. I forget how easy this can be, and resolve to do it more in the future.

28

PS. Here is a link to the actual JAMA study if anybody want to you know, actually read it so they can have some sort of informed opinion. God forbid.

https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/2756187

29

@ 24, Educated by whom? The websites sponsored by the Factory Food Industrial Complex all say you can never eat enough salt, sugar, and sugar substitutes—they’re God’s dandruff, gawdammit.

If you’re against Big Sugar, you’re against America.

And I said “case closed INFINITY,” commie.

30

@25 If ti weren't for logical fallacies I don't think Teddy could actually form thoughts at all. It's a software subroutine in his brain.

And you just know that straw man is big fatty eating cupcakes and swilling mayonnaise shakes while sewing a flag with big sickle and hammer on it.

31

@23: When humans have conversations, they may not always solely talk about the things you want. I know this is going to shock you, but if someone is discussing life expectancy in America, poverty in India is not going to be often brought up.

So what a human would do in this situation instead of being mad that other people are talking, is to start their own conversation instead of crying that a different one is happening.

I mean now look, the whole nursery is ranting about socialism again for no reason and making multiple repetitive and angry posts. Look what you have done.

32

@31 Ah, so when I talk about things you don't want to think about, like comparing our national life expectancy to, you know, another national life expectancy, well that's "off topic," but when you talk about things nobody brought up in the post, then everyone should just suck it up because the world doesn't owe you the conversation you prefer?

Do you just not own a mirror, Teddy, or is it really true what they say about blood-suckers?

33

@31

Obesity rates in the US have been consistently high for decades. And obesity rates have even begun dropping recently. Except in a few states (which are not coincidentally deep Red states which have abysmal public heath spending). Life expectancy has been starting drop consistent with the rise in healthcare costs and suicide. Also mostly in deep Red states. Gee.

You went off on a tangent about obesity and fatties and how individual choices, etc. I even linked to the report for you. Which takes about health related issues including obesity but it's also talking about failure to treat these problems due to inadequate healthcare.

So, sure, obesity is related to American health, the way to address this specific crisis is already laid out for us all over the globe — and that is to implement the systems almost every single other developed nation has implemented. And it's not telling individuals to "be better."

Because we've been screaming at fatties for 40 years and look where we are?

For fuck sake. What is wrong with you. I'm beginning to think you have serious cognitive impairment. YOU'RE the one changing the subject and not able to talk cogently and realistically about the topic of dealing with a health crisis.

We give you data you give back straw men and pouty idiotic derails.

34

@27: Noted! He/Him for you from now on. :)

35

I was going to get involved in the conversation about life expectancy here but I think I'm too late to crash my own train into the rest of the wrecks.

36

@6 If you care about the cost of a gym membership there is little chance you are itemizing your deductions. The discounts the Y and others offer to low income families are sure to make more of a difference.

37

I just ate a whole package of Nutter Butters...

38

I just have to say that that story about Monkey is crazy and his owner showed grace and compassion commenting that nobody needed to die. Go Monkey!


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