Healthy food is absolutely not a luxury item. I’ll accept the argument that the time to prepare healthy food is a luxury, but in almost every corner of the US you will find basic ingredients (eg rice, beans, carrots, celery, corn, potatoes, pasta) are way less expensive than the pre-prepared slop in boxes in the middle aisles of the store. People are addicted to that sugary shit and actively choose it
Addiction is the inability to stop doing something.
With the acknowledgement that addiction is a disease, what’s happening is a part of the brain cannot stop choosing to do something, for a variety of legitimate chemical and habitual reasons
How is choosing to buy a sugared drink instead of water the same as playing a game of chess against a grandmaster? What exactly about it makes your analogy fit?
Information: does an individual know chess rules? Openings? En passant? Do they want to spend the time and effort to learn? Are they getting their info from reliable sources or are they learning bongcloud and knooks?
Difference in skill level: the food and diet industries have thousands of specialists on their side with experience in psychology, advertisement, economics, lobbying, etc. Grandmasters can set up traps that new like a good idea to their opponent while thinking 10 steps ahead.
Complexity: chess and diet are not a single choice, but a series of choices, some of which make later moves more difficult.
Effort: it takes a long time to learn enough to even put up a decent resistance to a grandmaster, let alone win. It’s more than I’d care to put in. I don’t want to think about chess all the time. That’s called a chessing disorder.
So your point is that it’s difficult to resist the urge to buy sugared drinks due to distinct factors such as lack of information about it being unhealthy (which I seriously doubt nowadays) and people being psychologically manipulated through advertisements and making their product economically competitive. I agree some of these factors make it easier to be unhealthy, but I disagree that it’s enough to say people don’t have and make a choice. The choice to be healthy is just a harder one to make than it should.
You’re straw manning me. I’m not saying people don’t have a choice. But they’re still going to lose. It doesn’t matter that I have a choice of which piece to move when the point is not to move pieces, but to checkmate. Saying there are choices misses the point.
almost every corner of the US you will find basic ingredients (eg rice, beans, carrots, celery, corn, potatoes, pasta) are way less expensive than the pre-prepared slop in boxes
Huh, guess I might technically live in a food dessert
low-income census tracts that are more than one mile from a supermarket in urban or suburban areas and more than 10 miles from a supermarket in rural areas.
However, a number of studies suggest that poor health in “food deserts” is primarily caused by differences in demand for healthy food, rather than differences in availability.
First of all, that’s one “devil’s advocate however” in an article full of information to the contrary.
Second of all, I’d be interested in seeing who funded those studies. Lobbying groups for different unhealthy foods as well as grocery stores looking for excuses to not cater to poor people often fund junk studies that say exactly what they want them to. Just like Big Tobacco did and political groups still do.
Third, addiction still ≠ choice and sugar is more addictive than most narcotics.
Just on your last point, sugar is not more addictive than narcotics. That’s complete bunk. Provide a primary source for that claim if you want to refute me, but all those headlines about that topic were sensational and were basically based on sugar lighting up the same part of the brain as narcotics, namely the pleasure areas. So we like them both, but that has no bearing on addictiveness.
I was also reading an article about nutritional quality of food itself has been declining over the last 50 years. So to get the same nutritional amount, you need to eat more food period.
There’s also bigger systemic issues about food access that is driving people to “choose” it. Lack of time, cost, availability, transportation all factor in that are beyond a simple idea if a person having a pure choice between two equal (or even somewhat equal) options.
Many people in the US also live in food deserts where easy access to healthy food IS a luxuary due to simply not being able to buy it where they live or work.
I was only commenting on the concept of free will. Doesn’t matter where you apply it, we’re all just following our programming.
Obviously, the program is incredibly complex, otherwise the illusion of free will wouldn’t be so easy to believe.
However, there are many examples where the programming becomes apparent.
The best example of this is a radio lab episode about a woman with transient global amnesia. Her memory reset every 90 seconds, and she kept repeating the same conversation over and over for hours. Like a program stuck in a loop.
She couldn’t choose to say something else. Given the same input, she would repeat the same response every time. She didn’t have the ability to realize she had already said it, so she just kept looping.
“I can spend a ton of executive function thinking about and preparing food in a way contrary to what the food industry and their advertisers, food engineers, psychologist, etc., try to get a person to do while having only a slight chance at losing weight if I’ve already gained it. I’ll probably do so by getting involved in the super scammy diet industry.”
Vs
“I don’t want to spend that much of my life thinking about, preparing, tracking food (maybe because I have an eating disorder/medical issue/mental health issues, maybe because it’s just not worth it to me)”
It’s also not just a choice, it’s dozens of choices every day, forever.
You’re way oversimplifying it. We’re not going to magically get better humans, so maybe changing the systems would be a better way to get results than relying on people and industry to change their behavior (which is obviously not working).
Even if you only have access to garbage food you can still limit your caloric intake. I eat fast food every day I work and I’m a healthy weight. It’s not difficult at all.
Plenty of philosophers over the centuries have thought long and hard about the free will problem, and not all of them have come out on the side of it existing. David Hume, for instance, had to resort to religion to solve his issues with it (God made us have free will), and several contemporary philosophers have come down firmly on the “deterministic but complex enough to look non-deterministic” side of the fence. in essence, that free will is an illusion, but a good enough one that we still feel like we have it.
…the average American had between 400 and 500 calories worth of snacks a day, which is typically more than what they ate at breakfast. Even worse, the snacks usually carried little to no nutritional value
All food has gotten expensive due to inflation/greedflation, but (at least in my area) snacks, desserts, and some sugary drinks got hit especially hard. Except maybe for people living in food deserts, snacks are way more of a luxury good than “whole” foods are nowadays.
Also fucked up is that fat doesn’t = bad. I dunno when this came about but you can be unhealthy and skinny as well, and you can be unhealthy and jacked. I won’t say that, kind of along the lines of a bodybuilder, it’s easy to be healthy and be fat, but you can do it. Sumo wrestlers. You want that subcutaneous fat, and not that visceral fat, and you wanna have good cardio and heart health.
Part of the reason why people become super fat is because they enter a kind of death spiral where they don’t believe they’ll ever get better, and then they eat more, because what’s the point if you’ll never get better at all. Part of the reason why they think they’ll never get better is because people are constantly telling them that’s the case, and that they’re at fault for being the way they are, when usually people get really fat through some childhood trauma or mental disorder. I’m not gonna blame someone for that, or demand they “take responsibility” for it. Especially if them “taking responsibility” for it just ends up making them eat more slop.
It’s really not that complicated. Positive reinforcement and active help is a lot better in these situations than demanding that people be held accountable for being so fat, or that it’s their choice, or whatever. I don’t really care to argue the semantics of philosophies of “free will” or whatever, I’m just saying people need to not be dicks to fat people, because that’s more productive to making them be healthy.
Hear hear. And it wouldn’t matter to me even if being fat were automatically a death sentence and the only reason people got that way was laziness. Even if it were a simple choice that someone made, it’s still none of my business, y’know?
It’s both none of my business, and being a dick isn’t an effective way to get them to change. I dunno why so many people kind of have that as like, a default response. I guess it makes sense to get mad when someone you care about “chooses” to self-destruct, but people are complicated and delicate machines, and they require better maintenance than the nuclear option, and ultimatums.
I think part of why people have this sort of desire for everyone to have agency, they have this narrative, is because it’s the only way that they’ll be able to keep dealing with all these shitty things in their life. It’s like a really bad survival strategy, or something, people become kind of fucked up and then they only function if they have this dire sense of internal pressure at all times, that they’re responsible for everything that happens in their life. It’s weird, and I don’t really get it.
I think you have great points, but I also don’t want to absolve personal responsibility entirely. I think I saw Boogie for on the Financial Audit and spends $900 per month on fast food? There’s definitely food deserts and busy people with busy lives and bad education. Absolutely. I also find that healthier living was easier in the UK as grocery stores had ready-made meals easier to access with better options. However, I do think there’s also a component of personal accountability for those that know the right thing to do and choose not to.
Both things can be true. People can be addicted or have limited access to food, but still choose poorly from their limited choices. It’s a “diminished capacity” to make and choose healthy food.
Yes, premade food has gotten more expensive and worse nutritionally. So choose better among your limited choices. There’s no one who actually has no options for fruit, vegetables, or meat. It just takes time to shop and cook.
I don’t disagree with you, but one aspect I think people overlook is addiction. Food has become a cheap form of entertainment for people who don’t have time to actually do anything fun, and food has also been formulated to be as addictive as possible through both chemistry and psychological trickery.
No one wants to talk about this because it asks uncomfortable questions about free will.
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Healthy food is absolutely not a luxury item. I’ll accept the argument that the time to prepare healthy food is a luxury, but in almost every corner of the US you will find basic ingredients (eg rice, beans, carrots, celery, corn, potatoes, pasta) are way less expensive than the pre-prepared slop in boxes in the middle aisles of the store. People are addicted to that sugary shit and actively choose it
You just used addicted and choose it in the same sentence.
I don’t think those are mutually exclusive. However, it takes energy and willpower to make a choice that goes against the nature of the addiction.
Addiction means you have a strong impulse for it, but at the end of the day you’re still choosing.
That is not, at all, the meeting of addicted.
Addiction is the inability to stop doing something.
With the acknowledgement that addiction is a disease, what’s happening is a part of the brain cannot stop choosing to do something, for a variety of legitimate chemical and habitual reasons
“Cannot stop choosing”
Come on.
You choose to walk a direction, you choose to look out a window. Choice is a critical component of being human.
Addiction is the chemical overriding of the prioritization of choice.
"compulsively committed or helplessly drawn to a practice or habit or to something psychologically or physically habit-forming "
Again: “compulsively” “helplessly”.
Look, if you’re not interested in admitting that words have meaning, you’re not arguing in good faith and I’m done with you. Have a good one.
As someone who has had physical and psychological dependency on substances I guess I’ve never been addicted
Psychological dependency is described in my comment via chemical and habitual
“People are addicted” and “actively choose it” are contradictory statements. Addiction is a disease, not a personal failing.
I’d only refute the "active"part.
You physically choose to locomote towards the counter to make the purchase, you physically choose to lift the cup to your mouth.
The problem is your own mind is working against you to make that physical choice seem absolutely mandatory, via the importance of chemical signaling
They still are choosing sugar?
I’m addicted to nicotine and I actively choose to hit my vape, for example.
Agree it’s a disease, but it’s also a choice. You choose to buy a big gulp when you crave it.
That’s like saying losing chess against a grandmaster is a choice because you pick where the pieces go.
How is choosing to buy a sugared drink instead of water the same as playing a game of chess against a grandmaster? What exactly about it makes your analogy fit?
Here’s a few ways:
Information: does an individual know chess rules? Openings? En passant? Do they want to spend the time and effort to learn? Are they getting their info from reliable sources or are they learning bongcloud and knooks?
Difference in skill level: the food and diet industries have thousands of specialists on their side with experience in psychology, advertisement, economics, lobbying, etc. Grandmasters can set up traps that new like a good idea to their opponent while thinking 10 steps ahead.
Complexity: chess and diet are not a single choice, but a series of choices, some of which make later moves more difficult.
Effort: it takes a long time to learn enough to even put up a decent resistance to a grandmaster, let alone win. It’s more than I’d care to put in. I don’t want to think about chess all the time. That’s called a chessing disorder.
So your point is that it’s difficult to resist the urge to buy sugared drinks due to distinct factors such as lack of information about it being unhealthy (which I seriously doubt nowadays) and people being psychologically manipulated through advertisements and making their product economically competitive. I agree some of these factors make it easier to be unhealthy, but I disagree that it’s enough to say people don’t have and make a choice. The choice to be healthy is just a harder one to make than it should.
You’re straw manning me. I’m not saying people don’t have a choice. But they’re still going to lose. It doesn’t matter that I have a choice of which piece to move when the point is not to move pieces, but to checkmate. Saying there are choices misses the point.
Someone never heard about food deserts.
Way to victim-blame both addicts and people with little to no healthy choices available.
Huh, guess I might technically live in a food dessert
More than 1 mile in suburban areas is extremely common, but I wouldn’t consider most of them to be good desserts.
Low healthy food demand == choosing sugar
First of all, that’s one “devil’s advocate however” in an article full of information to the contrary.
Second of all, I’d be interested in seeing who funded those studies. Lobbying groups for different unhealthy foods as well as grocery stores looking for excuses to not cater to poor people often fund junk studies that say exactly what they want them to. Just like Big Tobacco did and political groups still do.
Third, addiction still ≠ choice and sugar is more addictive than most narcotics.
Just on your last point, sugar is not more addictive than narcotics. That’s complete bunk. Provide a primary source for that claim if you want to refute me, but all those headlines about that topic were sensational and were basically based on sugar lighting up the same part of the brain as narcotics, namely the pleasure areas. So we like them both, but that has no bearing on addictiveness.
I know about the uk but not USA. Food inequality is quite a big problem for low-income households.
https://www.turn2us.org.uk/T2UWebsite/media/Documents/Communications documents/Living-Without-Report-Final-Web.pdf
(Millions of Britons live without a freezer or oven)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8976549/
(A large number of britons who dont own a car live over a mile from an outlet selling healthy food)
Etc
I was also reading an article about nutritional quality of food itself has been declining over the last 50 years. So to get the same nutritional amount, you need to eat more food period.
There’s also bigger systemic issues about food access that is driving people to “choose” it. Lack of time, cost, availability, transportation all factor in that are beyond a simple idea if a person having a pure choice between two equal (or even somewhat equal) options.
Totally agree with this
Many people in the US also live in food deserts where easy access to healthy food IS a luxuary due to simply not being able to buy it where they live or work.
“potatoes and rice and corn and pasta” HEALTHY INGREDIENTS
Maybe it’s a bit of both though. People still have free will. You can eat unhealthy shit and not become morbidly obese.
Free will is a lie we tell ourselves.
Is someone force-feeding you?
I was only commenting on the concept of free will. Doesn’t matter where you apply it, we’re all just following our programming.
Obviously, the program is incredibly complex, otherwise the illusion of free will wouldn’t be so easy to believe.
However, there are many examples where the programming becomes apparent.
The best example of this is a radio lab episode about a woman with transient global amnesia. Her memory reset every 90 seconds, and she kept repeating the same conversation over and over for hours. Like a program stuck in a loop.
Radiolab, Transient Global Amnesia - SoundCloud https://m.soundcloud.com/ssealy/radiolab-transient-global-amnesia
She couldn’t choose to say something else. Given the same input, she would repeat the same response every time. She didn’t have the ability to realize she had already said it, so she just kept looping.
Yeah, but this post is about fat people and not transdimentional whatever the fuck you’re talking about
Is that really the only scenario you can think of that limits your food choices?
It’s
“Hmmm this food that I have right now has a lot of calories, maybe I should change it or eat less of it”
VS
“ayyy lmao, it’s the big food industry leaving me no choice, imma destroy this fucking burger”
More like:
“I can spend a ton of executive function thinking about and preparing food in a way contrary to what the food industry and their advertisers, food engineers, psychologist, etc., try to get a person to do while having only a slight chance at losing weight if I’ve already gained it. I’ll probably do so by getting involved in the super scammy diet industry.”
Vs
“I don’t want to spend that much of my life thinking about, preparing, tracking food (maybe because I have an eating disorder/medical issue/mental health issues, maybe because it’s just not worth it to me)”
It’s also not just a choice, it’s dozens of choices every day, forever.
You’re way oversimplifying it. We’re not going to magically get better humans, so maybe changing the systems would be a better way to get results than relying on people and industry to change their behavior (which is obviously not working).
Lol, nah
Yeah, on second thought, you do make a good point.
Even if you only have access to garbage food you can still limit your caloric intake. I eat fast food every day I work and I’m a healthy weight. It’s not difficult at all.
“It’s easy for me, therefore it’s easy for anybody.”
It’s simple math if you can’t do that idk what to tell you.
It’s not simple math. It’s biology, sociology, psychology, medicine, etc.
You dropped your tinfoil hat
I don’t wear tinfoil hats. What about not believing in free will means I’d wear a tinfoil hat?
Why not? I’m actually curious now.
Wait… Why not wear tinfoil hats or why not believe in free will?
The free will part. It’s just usually I’ve heard it from people that think we’re in a simulation.
Plenty of philosophers over the centuries have thought long and hard about the free will problem, and not all of them have come out on the side of it existing. David Hume, for instance, had to resort to religion to solve his issues with it (God made us have free will), and several contemporary philosophers have come down firmly on the “deterministic but complex enough to look non-deterministic” side of the fence. in essence, that free will is an illusion, but a good enough one that we still feel like we have it.
I mentioned my reasoning in another post in the thread
Sounds like an excuse to me
Healthy food is very cheap.
Time to prepare and access may contribute, but the food itself is not a luxury item.
This little bit of news has been hitting the media circuit this week: Americans are eating a meal’s worth of calories in snack foods every day
All food has gotten expensive due to inflation/greedflation, but (at least in my area) snacks, desserts, and some sugary drinks got hit especially hard. Except maybe for people living in food deserts, snacks are way more of a luxury good than “whole” foods are nowadays.
Why is it either or? I can see a world where computer enthusiasts tend to be a bit more physically inactive than the median
Can be either or both
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Yeah but they fuck their food so there is none left to eat
Also fucked up is that fat doesn’t = bad. I dunno when this came about but you can be unhealthy and skinny as well, and you can be unhealthy and jacked. I won’t say that, kind of along the lines of a bodybuilder, it’s easy to be healthy and be fat, but you can do it. Sumo wrestlers. You want that subcutaneous fat, and not that visceral fat, and you wanna have good cardio and heart health.
Part of the reason why people become super fat is because they enter a kind of death spiral where they don’t believe they’ll ever get better, and then they eat more, because what’s the point if you’ll never get better at all. Part of the reason why they think they’ll never get better is because people are constantly telling them that’s the case, and that they’re at fault for being the way they are, when usually people get really fat through some childhood trauma or mental disorder. I’m not gonna blame someone for that, or demand they “take responsibility” for it. Especially if them “taking responsibility” for it just ends up making them eat more slop.
It’s really not that complicated. Positive reinforcement and active help is a lot better in these situations than demanding that people be held accountable for being so fat, or that it’s their choice, or whatever. I don’t really care to argue the semantics of philosophies of “free will” or whatever, I’m just saying people need to not be dicks to fat people, because that’s more productive to making them be healthy.
Hear hear. And it wouldn’t matter to me even if being fat were automatically a death sentence and the only reason people got that way was laziness. Even if it were a simple choice that someone made, it’s still none of my business, y’know?
It’s both none of my business, and being a dick isn’t an effective way to get them to change. I dunno why so many people kind of have that as like, a default response. I guess it makes sense to get mad when someone you care about “chooses” to self-destruct, but people are complicated and delicate machines, and they require better maintenance than the nuclear option, and ultimatums.
I think part of why people have this sort of desire for everyone to have agency, they have this narrative, is because it’s the only way that they’ll be able to keep dealing with all these shitty things in their life. It’s like a really bad survival strategy, or something, people become kind of fucked up and then they only function if they have this dire sense of internal pressure at all times, that they’re responsible for everything that happens in their life. It’s weird, and I don’t really get it.
I think you have great points, but I also don’t want to absolve personal responsibility entirely. I think I saw Boogie for on the Financial Audit and spends $900 per month on fast food? There’s definitely food deserts and busy people with busy lives and bad education. Absolutely. I also find that healthier living was easier in the UK as grocery stores had ready-made meals easier to access with better options. However, I do think there’s also a component of personal accountability for those that know the right thing to do and choose not to.
Both things can be true. People can be addicted or have limited access to food, but still choose poorly from their limited choices. It’s a “diminished capacity” to make and choose healthy food.
Yes, premade food has gotten more expensive and worse nutritionally. So choose better among your limited choices. There’s no one who actually has no options for fruit, vegetables, or meat. It just takes time to shop and cook.
I don’t disagree with you, but one aspect I think people overlook is addiction. Food has become a cheap form of entertainment for people who don’t have time to actually do anything fun, and food has also been formulated to be as addictive as possible through both chemistry and psychological trickery.
No one wants to talk about this because it asks uncomfortable questions about free will.