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ruraljuror10/12/20242 repliesview on HN

> Nobody is forcing you to eat those.

No, I think force feeding junk food is pretty rare but that seems like a straw man.

Consider children. Their brains are not fully developed and they have little agency in determining the food they have access to. Childhood obesity is on the rise. So blame the children’s choices?

Ok, sure, blame the parents. I agree of course it is the parents responsibility, but the cards are often stacked against parents by big corporations with government subsidies (in the us).

It’s really weird to me to argue that this is completely a problem at the individual level and not a social one—and I see no other way to interpret your comment.


Replies

unlikelytomato10/15/2024

The point is that the isn't some mysterious force we cannot comprehend. If the odds are stacked against us, change the odds instead of medicating everyone.

At the same time, we are all still individuals. We agency to make life decisions. I generally don't subscribe to the notion that people are helpless even in the face of a big scary corporation. There are two competing ideas. Either 1 there is some unknown force creating this problem(but doesn't extended to the entire human population for some reason) or 2 we know there are environmental causes. For #2, why systemically stack a drug on top if we know what the boogy man is? #1 we need to seriously buckle down on research on what the environmental/behavior factor is so we can bring everyone back to human baseline. Using drugs for people already in great suffering is one thing, but that is very different from widespread distribution as a preventative.

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wiseowise10/12/2024

> Consider children. Their brains are not fully developed and they have little agency in determining the food they have access to. Childhood obesity is on the rise. So blame the children’s choices?

Been there. It’s always bad parenting. I had to fix shitton of issues myself, because of idiot parents.