[Agent Steel]

@Godstud
@Drlee

A new message is being put out now by RFK, that is relevant to this issue. Please watch, let me know what you think:

Everything he says here vindicates the position I have held on this topic. Obesity is not due to a lack of personal responsibility or a personal failing, but something else, something on a national scale.

[QatzelOk]

@Godstud
@Drlee

A new message is being put out now by RFK, that is relevant to this issue. Please watch, let me know what you think:

Everything he says here vindicates the position I have held on this topic. Obesity is not due to a lack of personal responsibility or a personal failing, but something else, something on a national scale.

I am happy to see RFK promoting a better food supply. This is a huge part of the current obesity issue. (I won't call it "an epidemic" because it's not a contagious disease).

However, there are two other important causes of the fattening up of Western slaves (which most of us are).

1. Lack of physical movement in the modern economy

2. The domestication of any animal leads to obesity and genetic decay (increasing levels of sickness).

...We know from our domestic animals, even from wild forms bred in captivity, how quickly social-behavior patterns disintegrate when specific selection is missing. In several fish species, bred for a few generations by commercial dealers, the genetic pattern of brood tending is so disturbed that, among dozens of fishes, one barely finds a pair still capable of caring for their young. As in the deterioration of culturally determined social behavior norms, here, too, the most highly differentiated and historically youngest mechanisms seem to be particularly susceptible to disorder. The old, ubiquitous drives, such as feeding and pairing, often tend to become hypertrophied. We must, however, consider that man as a breeder selects for indiscriminate, greedy feeding and for the same kind of mating drives; at the same time, he aims to breed out undesirable aggression and flight impulses.

Seen as a whole, the domestic animal is indeed a sad caricature of its owner. In a former work, “Part and Parcel in Animal and Human Societies” (1950), I showed that our aesthetic sense of values is clearly associated with those physical changes that occur in the evolution of the domestic animal: muscular atrophy and fatness, with resultant pot belly, shortening of the base of the skull and the extremities, are typical characteristics of domestication and seem ugly in animal and man, while the opposite characteristics appear “noble.” Correspondingly, we value intuitively those behavior characteristics that are destroyed, or at least endangered, by domestication: mother love, self-sacrifice in the interests of family and society are behavior norms just as instinctively programmed as eating and mating, but we regard them unequivocally as better and nobler than these...

Humans living in civilizations... tend to domesticate themselves into sickly livestock. And livestock often features lots of fat (bacon, lard, cream, butter, etc.)

[Godstud]

RFK is wrong. I don't agree with you and I have seen too many people CHOOSE to lose weight, and do because they work at it. It's not a disease in any reasonable or logical sense, despite what you might believe. Facts are facts. If you run a caloric deficit you will lose weight.

I've lost 15 lb in the last few months while weight training and including lots of walking and swimming. It's work and I regulate my diet, accordingly. Everyone can do that. There's apps to help you do that.

[Agent Steel]

@Godstud I think normally I would agree with you on that point, but I just feel there's a need to show more compassion for people who DO work to lose weight, and yet no matter how hard they try, they fail. Congrats on being successful at it, but not you nor I can truly know the depth of their battle, because we're different individuals living in different shoes. Again, people's bodies are built differently. More importantly, people's brains are built differently. There are folks who work just as hard as you or I, or perhaps harder, yet still fail. How can that be? They HAVE been making the conscious choice to lose weight, and they've been choosing and working like hell at it, but they are not succeeding. That is tragic and that deserves compassion and understanding.

[Truth To Power]

RFK is wrong.

He's right that the subsidies promote unhealthy food. It started back in the 1960s with subsidization of the sugar industry to depress the world price of sugar as economic warfare against Cuba, and is now pervasive throughout the food system. The US also allows use of endocrine disrupting hormones, antibiotics, etc. in livestock that are banned in other advanced countries.

I don't agree with you and I have seen too many people CHOOSE to lose weight, and do because they work at it. It's not a disease in any reasonable or logical sense, despite what you might believe. Facts are facts. If you run a caloric deficit you will lose weight.

It's not that simple. Many people are effectively addicted to sugar and bad fats because of how common they are in so many heavily advertised foods, and how the human body responds to them.

I've lost 15 lb in the last few months while weight training and including lots of walking and swimming. It's work and I regulate my diet, accordingly. Everyone can do that. There's apps to help you do that.

Keto seems to be very effective, and not that hard.

[Red_Army]

It's hilarious to me that RFK Jr had 2 close family members assassinated (with probable involvement by the CIA) and got addicted to heroin (drug trade controlled and manipulated by the CIA) and he chooses to be pissed at the FDA. Some things he's talking about are reasonable, most of his shit is inane nonsense - but I feel like he's pointed in a confusing direction. If my dad and uncle were both killed in murky ways I would care more about that than I would about vaccines that I don't understand.

[Unthinking Majority]

Which rights are fat people denied? I could see seating being an issue. That becomes a disability accommodation I would think.

Fat people have been put on the cover of magazines as models. But what about ugly people? Toothless grin and crooked nose on the cover of the Victoria Secret catalog?

[Red_Army]

@Unthinking Majority That seems fine. I don't think anyone cares about catalogs or magazines anymore. An ugly mag with a centerfold of a toothless, one-eyed, leprotic guy with vertiligo might get me to subscribe.

[MadMonk]

Aesthetics are far more important than they should be but that is not what we should be talking about. Heart disease is the number one global killer and obesity is the largest contributing factor in developing heart related illnesses as well as diabetes, another major contributor of heart illnesses. I may be biased as I'm a nurse on a cardiac ward, but obesity, diabetes and CAPD. Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease related to smoking, are all highly prevalent among my patients.

In the US it is estimated that 42-43% of the adult population are obese today. At the other end of the spectrum, the numbers for Japan, South Korea and India stand at 6-7%. Comparing with other western nations, you have France at 10%, Denmark at 14%, Spain and Sweden at 16% and so on.

​The US spends approximately 3% of its entire GDP yearly on costs related to obesity among its citizens. This is a widespread disease that is not getting solved simply by shaming people for their bad choices. We need to recognize that our modern societies encourage this behavior, of sedentary lifestyles and unhealthy food and drinks.

[Unthinking Majority]

Aesthetics are far more important than they should be but that is not what we should be talking about. Heart disease is the number one global killer and obesity is the largest contributing factor in developing heart related illnesses as well as diabetes, another major contributor of heart illnesses. I may be biased as I'm a nurse on a cardiac ward, but obesity, diabetes and CAPD. Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease related to smoking, are all highly prevalent among my patients.

In the US it is estimated that 42-43% of the adult population are obese today. At the other end of the spectrum, the numbers for Japan, South Korea and India stand at 6-7%. Comparing with other western nations, you have France at 10%, Denmark at 14%, Spain and Sweden at 16% and so on.

​The US spends approximately 3% of its entire GDP yearly on costs related to obesity among its citizens. This is a widespread disease that is not getting solved simply by shaming people for their bad choices. We need to recognize that our modern societies encourage this behavior, of sedentary lifestyles and unhealthy food and drinks.

American store shelves are filled with non-food made from white floor and corn syrup and other garbage nobody eats in the natural world. Americans don't even know what food is anymore and so their fat asses get fatter and fatter.

Probably best to solve that problem that's killing them instead of trying to make fat people feel less bad about themselves because they shovel processed sludge down their throats.

[QatzelOk]

Aesthetics are far more important than they should be...

Yes, and we have been watching screens for a century. Screens are the role models for our children in Western suburbs. They don't get to know enough adults or older children to form well-rounded personalities, or to feel part of any kind of society. This means that all social issues are filtered through the lens of corporate media role models - Michael Jackson, Roseanne, Sigourney Weaver, etc.

Social media has imitated this coronation of mediocrity by offerring us brain-dead influencers who, like Hollywood actors - live off of their physical attractiveness and recital of popular memes.

...Heart disease is the number one global killer and obesity is the largest contributing factor in developing heart related illnesses as well as diabetes, another major contributor of heart illnesses...

...42-43% of the adult population are obese today. At the other end of the spectrum, the numbers for Japan, South Korea and India stand at 6-7%. Comparing with other western nations, you have France at 10%, Denmark at 14%, Spain and Sweden at 16% and so on.

...sedentary lifestyles and unhealthy food and drinks...

This is a good synopsis of the problems that sedentarism has caused. But the cure(s) will come from actually attacking and overturning our current social model - and that is never easy. Guillotines will change our society, not memes created by people who never leave their computer screens.

[Godstud]

@Agent Steel I don't care about RFK's personal opinion. His is no more valid than mine.

Fact: If you operate with a caloric deficit, you will lose weight,. That is objective reality.

Fat people are NOT discriminated against, any more than short or tall or skinny people are. Obesity is a CHOICE. What you put in your mouth is a CHOICE.

Addicted to sugar? Nonsense. People just lack will power. Sugar isn't a new invention.

[QatzelOk]

@Agent Steel I don't care about RFK's personal opinion. His is no more valid than mine.

...

RFK has published books, co-written by well-respected doctors. He has spent a lot of time researching medical subjects, and has almost infinite family resources ($$$) to this cause.

His opinion - while not perfect or infallible - is not on the same level of validity as yours. Once you've published a few books on the subject, spoken to a few doctors at length, and done lectures all over the country... you can put your own opinions on the same level as RFK's.

This does NOT mean that RFK is correct, only that he has researched and debated this subject at a much deeper degree than you or I.

***

After the Fat Civil Rights movement, I think the USA will be ready for a Stupid Civil Rights movement, for all those people who defend the validity of their never-researched opinions against those that have been arrived at through patient research and reflexion.

The comments section of many news sites would be a good place to start this Crusade against the pretentious non-stupid.

[Agent Steel]

@Agent Steel I don't care about RFK's personal opinion. His is no more valid than mine.

Fact: If you operate with a caloric deficit, you will lose weight,. That is objective reality.

Fat people are NOT discriminated against, any more than short or tall or skinny people are. Obesity is a CHOICE. What you put in your mouth is a CHOICE.

Addicted to sugar? Nonsense. People just lack will power. Sugar isn't a new invention.

I keep hearing you state what you think is an obvious fact of science, that being at a caloric deficit will certainly make you lose weight. And as I pointed out already, my comments in this topic are directed towards the unfortunate souls who cannot lose weight even when they are at a caloric deficit, because they suffer from exceptional conditions. These are the people who need compassion.

I want to ask you something. Have you ever heard of a Frenchman name Tarrare? Though some say it's only a legend, his life story violates what you think is proven science. Look him up if you haven't, but he was a man who had a freakish appetite and could eat insane amounts of food without gaining weight. He was a circus showman, otherwise known as the "insatiable" Tarrare.

The point is, there are cases of people who defy your claim. I just want you to acknowledge that such people exist, that's all. Then you will see that your comments are harmful to such folks.

[QatzelOk]

...your comments are harmful to such folks...

This is a very woke concept: that comments that could make someone lose their smile... must be avoided at all times. I understand why this might be the corporate motto of a place like Disney World. But real life contact with your community?

People who are obese... deserve to not hear about this from other people who are probably obese themselves. By not saying anything, these obese people can feel good about themselves and smile.

You could also say that "warning someone lying on railroad tracks that there is a train coming..." would also take the smile off of their face and thus should be avoided. Just let that train crush their smiling body... it's the right thing to do, right?


Don't anyone tell here there's a highspeed train coming or she might stop smiling

[Agent Steel]

@QatzelOk I don't use the term "woke". I don't adopt modernized trendy language. It sounds like something a black person would say, and I don't talk that way.

But it is true that the reason I began this thread is out of heartfelt compassion for the plight of other people. I was in a really good mood at the time, and when life is going good for me, I tend to want to try to help others.

But yeah. Obesity is a real struggle for many folks, and I feel really bad for them, don't you? They probably live with a lot of guilt and shame, and that's got to be very tough.

[Hakeer]

RFK is wrong. I don't agree with you and I have seen too many people CHOOSE to lose weight, and do because they work at it. It's not a disease in any reasonable or logical sense, despite what you might believe. Facts are facts. If you run a caloric deficit you will lose weight.

I've lost 15 lb in the last few months while weight training and including lots of walking and swimming. It's work and I regulate my diet, accordingly. Everyone can do that. There's apps to help you do that.

It would be hard to get obese on a whole food plant-based diet. Americans load up on animal fat, sugar, salt, processed junk. The food industry is a big part of the problem.

[QatzelOk]

@QatzelOk I don't use the term "woke". I don't adopt modernized trendy language. It sounds like something a black person would say, and I don't talk that way....

Okay, so you don't want to sound black. But you would like to sound obese, right, because being obese is fantastic and life-affirming. Right?

...I began this thread is out of heartfelt compassion for the plight of other people...

Every Crusade starts with good intentions, mixed with boredom and lack of insight.

***

It would be hard to get obese on a whole food plant-based diet. Americans load up on animal fat, sugar, salt, processed junk. The food industry is a big part of the problem.

The "Processed food" part of the equation is the main problem. Sugar is the ultimate processed food, with a smaller percent of the original plant than cocaine.

Also, a lot of food (like corn chips) are made from the jettisoned remainders of other processed foods (corn oil).

Q. Why not just eat corn fresh?

A. Because that would cost a fraction of what it costs to process it into semi-poison.

[Agent Steel]

But yeah, anyways...

I too have taken great personal measures to keep myself strong and lean. It is very demanding and requires a lot of hard work and discipline. And because of this I have at times also taken on an attitude of someone like @Godstud.

So I don't know. I guess I see and understand both sides of this issue.

But it's just ironic because @Godstud at times will often defend civil rights issues and attack me for not agreeing with his positions on them, but here's a civil rights issue that he doesn't show real compassion for. I guess he's not able to see how much of the problem is not due to personal choice. That's the root of the problem, or one of them anyway.

[Godstud]

@Agent Steel You used an Appeal to Authority fallacy. You followed immediately by using exceptions to make an argument. Neither is valid.

Fact: When people cannot get enough food, they do not get fat.

Civil rights has no place in even the same sentence as obesity, because obesity is a choice(rare exceptions are irrelevant). I never said we should not feel compassion for these people. You make a Strawman argument. When I see a fat person in the gym, I am actually impressed with them and will assist them, if I can. We all have the same goal of self-improvement. I was in their shoes at one time.

We can get rid of obesity if we stop trying to normalize it. We can get rid of it by teaching people to good foods, whole foods and controlling their diet. We can get rid of obesity by teaching people to take care of their bodies, get more exercise, and have some self respect.

I am fit and strong because I eat good whole foods, regulate my food intake and exercise regularly. It's not easy, but anything worth anything isn't. I am also a role model for my son, and am passing on this mindset to him, and teaching him that self respect is part of it.