But why trouble yourself to distinguish anyway? 30% of the Irish are obese, 28% of the UK, nearly a quarter of Belgians and Germans. If over a fifth of your population is sick, does it really bolster your national ego so much that some other place is sicker?

Does it really bolster your national ego so much that some other place is as sick as you?

Italy is 21%

(Common mistake when making generalization about "the developed world".)

But a world where literally millions of people are on a “lifetime drug” to reduce their bodyweight seems to be exactly what the big pharmaceutical companies are hoping for. They will make tens of billions of dollars every year if this is the case. Hell, there are endless commercials where middlemen (e.g., Ro) are hyping these drugs, telling you they can get you prescriptions, etc. If there wasn’t HUGE money in it, this wouldn’t be the case.

Yes, there are some people who have medical conditions that make weight loss very difficult. And these drugs can be a literal lifesaver for them. But for every one of them, there are dozens and dozens (or more) who simply make bad choices about food and exercise. Things that, if changed, would lead to a lifetime of improved health without any of the concerns or side effects of taking a drug forever. Our culture seems to be evolving to where it’s perfectly acceptable to translate “this is not easy” to “I can’t possibly be expected to do this, no matter how good it would be for me."

I’ve been accused of “hating fat people” for this take, but it’s the furthest thing from the truth. I encourage people to actually change their lives in a sustainable, healthy way, because I care about them. It’s not about shaming them.

Can you be “healthi-ER” taking these drugs than if you don’t exercise and eat too much and too many awful foods? Sure. But I’d prefer to see them EVEN healthier by treating their bodies better in every single case where that’s possible.

The amount of mental and physical effort required to lose and maintain weighloss is absolutely not commensurate with what the average non-obese person needs to feel and do. Anyone that has lost considerable amount of weight will tell you this. In addition to that, the long term efficacy of lifestyle adjustments w.r.t weight loss hovers around 20%. Once you have had the fat in your body, your hormonal profile is forever changed. Those fat cells sit and make "FEED ME" hormones until they are lysed, which can take between 2 and 10 years.

They (and other elements of our healthcare industry) already make a lot more than that on treating the side effects of widespread obesity.

This raises a thought I hadn't considered before: given how much money gets made off of obese people, it wouldn't be surprising if there would be significant commercial interests that would want to try to actively hamper anything that'd systematically reduce the overall population percentage of obesity. We've seen plenty of examples in the past (and ongoing) of perverse incentives. In turn, I wonder if it's actually a small silver lining that the drugs are so wildly profitable for the short term, in that the producers are incentivized to lobby against any efforts to legally hobble them. And then in the longer term it will all go off patent.

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074...

Just because someone is making a boatload on a problem existing doesn't mean someone else doesn't want to make a truckload undercutting that business, even if the first business might try to stop it, well, sometimes a different set of bad guys wins.

But if people stopped killing themselves in their 60s and 70s, we'd have gobs of people living until their 80s and the cost for dementia and Cancer Care would be ginormous.