Quote:
Originally Posted by ranchlandsselling
Because alcohol is made available in almost every grocery store in the states. As is tobacco.
An analysis of prime time TV found that alcohol commercials appeared at the rate of 0.2 per hour while drinking portrayals during programs occured 25 times more frequently, at five times per hour.
Just because HFCS is so prevalently out there it doesn't negate the responsibility to pay attention to what you eat. I don't ever hear people trying to quit smoking blaming the prevalence of cigarettes on the fact they're made so available (less now than prior). If I were to give smokers any sort of credit is they usually accept their involvement in the issue. "It's a disgusting habit and I should have never started and I want to quit but I've got to little willpower". Not "the smoking industry lied to us".
I think a lot of the prejudice towards overweight people is because a lot of them act like it's not their fault. Yeah yeah, I'm sure there's plenty that have actual issues (physical, non-curable) that result in them being obese. But the self esteem issues, depression issues, etc, welcome to the world of EVERYONE. Yeah, it's hard to get over some of these issues, or to get started exercising when you're 400 lbs. I don't thing anyone is saying otherwise. But stupid people are always going to hate/laugh/mock so the faster one learns to live with it the better.
Clearly Devils Advocate had something he needed to deal with. Holy F, he did a kick ass job, dealt with some of them, unfortunately may continue to deal with them, but has knocked the overweight issue out of the friggin ball park. If anything he's proof that plenty of obese need to stop blaming a plethora of things and move on with their lives and start taking responsibility.
I've got countless things I need to do with myself. Some that are bordering on being so much more important than much else in my life and I put them off. I blame myself because I'm a procrastinator and lazy. Not some ghost HFCS industry that's in cahoots with the government (yes, that's an extreme exageration).
BTW, loved the Eat Less Move More video. That was awesome!
|
About alcohol... Well, yeah, except for the fact that, you know, you need to eat food to survive. I mean, the comparison is not fair: of course alcohol is readily available everywhere, as cigarettes are (and of course there's a lobby behind them too), but 1/ you don't need to buy them for your whole family every week, 2/ they're more expensive than food, and 3/ they're a whole category of stuff that can notoriously be bad for you. But food is a whole other problem: people need to buy it, often on a budget, and they have to figure out which is better for them. (And the last part gets trickier than it seems once you add HFCS in food behind their backs). Put all three parts together, and it becomes hard for some people; I'm not saying that it's unsolvable, but you need to think about it for a bit, and some people just don't do it (lack of time, money, personal issues, or brainpower).
I think we just have two different approaches to the problem. You say that people should just stop being lazy and get out of their way to be careful about what they eat, and so it's their fault if they are struggling with it or not trying cause it's hard. I say that people have always been lazy and that it's unrealistic to think that you can change that; but you can change the path of least resistance for people by acting against what shapes society in a bad way, and it's much more effective.
So yeah, in a way it's the people's fault if they're lazy; problem is, they're not doing anything different that everyone has done in the last thousands of years. The difference to me, the one that made the obesity rate go up in the last three decades, is that the rules of the game changed: more cars (less forced exercise), food prices falling hard (making fast food a viable option for a lot of people), food subsidies skewed by industry lobbying (making the wrong kind of foods very affordable), flavor engineering (engineering the taste of anything to get you hooked), incredible increase in marketing spending (saturating media with any information that's good for consumption, not people), mega-corporations gone international (huge spending power and brands as part of popular culture everyone knows and love), etc, etc.
So you can always say that people are lazy and they should know better, but I don't think there's ever been a time where all people went out of their way to do something because they know it's better for them in the long run. Rather, people have always been inherently less motivated by long-term hypothetical rewards, the difference is that society changed to make being fat incredibly easy, which is why the obesity rate is so high. You can try to expect a surge of willpower among people (or moan about it not happening), but my money is on shaping society so that the best choices are made the easiest...