But I take issue with banning sugary, hydrogenated things. The problem with the modern diet isn't that a kid drinks a Coca Cola with his McDonald's fries once a month when he goes out for a treat with his mom after swim practice. The problem is that the poor lack both the skills, the time, and the money to prepare healthy and tasty food. I made homemade beef chutney last night. Mango, two different types of onions, red peppers, other peppers, etc. It was delicious. Cost about $4 or $5 per person just in food, not counting my Wustof knives or $200 non-teflon non-stick pan.

Kraft dinner would have taken 1/10th the time, at 1/5th the cost, with absolutely no knowledge or skill. If we want the poor to eat healthier we need to show them options that are cheap, easy, and fast. Tuna fish on Rye with an orange. That type of thing.

You can go well beyond a slow cooker in time and money with a one time purchase of a solid pressure cooker. I have a 21-qt All American that I can produce tasty brown and black bean based meals at less than the cost of the Mac-n-Cheese. I'd cook about 15 quarts of beans in one evening, freeze 12 and eat the other 3 over the next few days.

If you were to ban ready-to-eat foods high in sugar and hydrogenated fats, you'd force people to learn about these alternatives. The benefit of banning is that it eliminates the path of least resistance where people remain ignorant of alternatives.

If people still want sweet foods and other things that are bad for them, they can still have them, but they have to do some work by cooking those sweet things themselves.

Even if you are right, and the only way for people to learn about slow cookers is by banning McDonalds / Chinese take out, I still wouldn't do it.

Although the slow cooker is a pretty good idea.

Once that is done, I would take items that are known health hazards and classifying them as toxic for consumption such as HFCs and hydrogenated oils. They are basically slow acting poisons. You would still be able to buy them and use them in your own home as an individual citizen, but food companies cannot buy them and use them to make food. Instead they need to use the healthier alternatives by default. This way all the junk food we enjoy today would still exist, but we would mitigate how unhealthy they are for us, since food companies would have to use the least unhealthy recipe possible.

I see this as reasonable since it preserves individual freedom, but prevents corporations, which have a fiduciary duty to psychopathy, from producing maximally unhealthy foods in search of a profit.

If those least unhealthy options were still economically attractive to the poor after the elimination of food subsidies and classification of cheaper, less healthy substances as unfit as an ingredient in manufactured foods, I would then look into how to incent people to choosing the healthier alternatives.

I think the best option here would be to make it easy for a family to acquire a cheap slow cooker and recipes and subsidize a ready-made pack of food that contains spices and other bulk ingredients used in the slow cooker recipes. The latter option is already done in Brazil under the name "cesta basica". Here's an image of the foods included in the "cesta basica"

http://www.utahpreppers.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/cesta...

You can feed an entire very well for very cheap on it. It's also available to everyone regardless of income.

Pasta costs next to nothing, as does rice, as do beans. Veg and dairy are a bit more but still cheap by any standards. Cigarettes and alcohol, on the other hand, are expensive. As is running a car, or going to McDonalds.

So maybe try subsidising your meals by smoking less, or drinking less, or eating out less, or walking more.

   How do poor people have less time to cook than well off people? We all work the same hours.

But not all poor people are like that, so what about the ones who have jobs with regular full-time hours, or less than full-time? Well, a lot of their time might be spent looking for another job, or some other way to supplement their income, that you, with your good income, don't have to worry about. That's time they can't spend cooking or thinking about how to cook well. And if they can't afford a car? Walking to whatever job they have, which you apparently think would be an unadulterated good for them, probably takes a lot longer than driving would- less time to cook or eat well. And in bad weather it may be impossible, meaning that they have to take public transportation, because that's all they can afford right now, even though it's more expensive that owning a car in the long run- again, less money they can spend on food, and still less time than if they had their own vehicle.

And add to all of that the psychological toll of knowing that you in poverty and exercising the willpower to deal with all of the above problems and others that come with poverty, and it's freakin' hard to find both the time and mental energy to figure out how to eat both healthy and cheap.

Ever try to buy groceries without a car? How much time would you add to your day if you had to take the bus from work to the supermarket, and then the bus back to your house. A 15 minute 2 stop car trip becomes an hour+ with all the waiting, shuffling to and from the bus stop, etc.

Also, ever notice how those big supermarkets with the cheap prices aren't really present in poor neighbourhoods? All you can find are cheap bodegas and convenience stores in those neighbourhoods.

Finally, a lot of poor people have 2 jobs or try to get as much overtime as they can to supplement their income, so 'We all work the same hours.' is a bit of a fallacy.

  Finally, a lot of poor people have 2 jobs or try to get as much overtime as they can to supplement their income, so 'We all work the same hours.' is a bit of a fallacy.

This is almost undoubtedly false. 40 hours at the federal minimum wage doesn't come anywhere close to providing a livable income, particularly if the person is supporting a family; many low-income workers work multiple jobs.

Eating well is relatively Expensive. Sure you can cut out the car and carbs and obviously all poor people have their liquor and smoke money set aside... Or maybe poverty is a bit more complex than your overly simplistic and a bit dickish analysis... Just let them eat cake (Preferably gluten free)...

To make good food on the cheap, you need a bit of equipment and you need an upfront investment in spices and staples, all of which are significantly cheaper in the long run in bulk. Besides the investment, you need to plan long term, something the poor often struggle with (being poor is rarely only a question of lacking money).

With that in mind, it's pretty naïve to expect banning marketing to achieve much improvement in poor people's diets.

Not to mention the difference in commute time between owning a car versus taking a bus and walking in many areas. It takes me fifteen minutes to get to work; if I took the available buses it would be nearly three hours each way.

(We'll leave aside whether cheap pasta and rice are actually healthy eating.)

"Why don't we teach effective nutrition and cooking in school?" We do. It's called home economics.

"Why don't we teach effective exercise, sports, and fitness in schools?" We do. It's called gym.

"If we can ban alcohol and tobacco sales to children, why not things like added sugar, hydrogenated oils, corn syrup, etc?" Go tell a 6 year old they can't have cake on their birthday.

"If we can ban alcohol and tobacco advertising to children, why not products with added sugar, hydrogenated oils, corn syrup, etc?" Lobbyists

"Why don't we limit advertising on fast and junk "food"?" Lobbyists

"Why don't we provide healthy lunches to school children instead of using them to subsidize agricultural conglomerates for low quality food?" We kinda do: http://www.fns.usda.gov/nslp/national-school-lunch-program

"Why don't we stop subsidizing fossil fuels so much so people would walk and ride bikes more?" How many times do I have to say this: LOBBYISTS.

"Why don't we align our medical system with prevention instead of expensive and risky cures?" That's a good question, actually.

EDIT: I like falcolas' answer: Money. Long term care is more profitable than prevention.

Um no, and that's part of the problem. In my experience, gym class was a Hunger Games like spectacle for the athletically (but not otherwise) gifted to enjoy their brief decade in the sun at the expense of those who will peak much later in life (but of course, they're more likely to be sedentary in part because of such a negative early impression of physical activity). Evidence? Do I need to mention anything else beyond Shirts vs. Skins Battle Ball? What kind of %$*!ing psychotic thought this sounded like a good idea at the time?

"Why don't we align our medical system with prevention instead of expensive and risky cures?" That's a good question, actually.

No money in it for big pharma, a segment increasingly under attack from the FDA for many of its practices and for which many critical drugs are facing patent expiration. So now they're trying to play good guy by increasingly focusing on orphan diseases ($10K to $500K/year per patient) where if someone blocks a promising therapy, its entire population of victims is doomed. And since these are the long-tail, it also creates an effective barrier to entry for smaller competitors.

But a lot of tenured gym teachers I've met as an adult are the same people who were tormentor jocks in their childhood. So I've never moved further on it.

How do you propose reforming it with people like that blocking the way? Because I think America needs an intervention, Europe isn't far behind, and Asia is doing its level best to catch up right now.

There were a bunch of absolutely awesome ads in the subways of Hong Kong last year that showed a woman's flabby mid-section with a timebomb strapped to it. Contrast this with last week's Facebook kerfuffle between Maria Kang and Curvy Girl which demonstrated (to me) that anything but the most vanilla criticism of this situation in the US is apparently hate speech. Gag me.

Money. Long term care is more profitable than prevention.

In the end I think the answer is "because we, society, allow it.". It is very hard to lobby for things we really do not want.

You could probably answer every question with "People in power use their fortunes to preserve power" and you'd nail it 90% of the time.

Basically, thought experiment: imagine a population where everyone starts with a fixed N dollars. Random-walk each dollar a few iterations and you end up with a bell curve of money distribution. Now start again and instead of random-walking them, apply a probabilistic walk, where having more dollars makes you a proportionately more likely recipient. You end up with a skewed distribution with a few rich controlling most of the resources. Now imagine being a congress-critter in that skewed world. Who are you going to have to cut deals with? And you can make the rich-get-richer rule steeper now, because the dollar-owners are cutting deals to make dollar-taking easier. And now your wealth distribution looks like the real world.

The answer is simply that money itself, the alienable control of resources, is the cause. In a society organized by money, corruption and misrule will result. Any "symptom control" amounts to pumping the distribution flatter - it's a sisyphean task, structurally opposed to the power that money creates, and hence metastable at best.

Maybe you had better gym classes than me, but mine were tedious and boring and turned me (along with most other "nerds" in my class) off from sport until I reached high school and discovered weight lifting. I always liked Kelly Starrett's motto of "all human beings should be able to perform basic maintenance on themselves" and I wish that point was more emphasized during physical education.

I don't know of many schools in my state that still have the budget to provide a home economics class/pay a teacher to teach it. The most my school went into nutrition was in the 1 semester of health class that everyone took.

Their goal is to reduce the cost of treatment by encouraging prevention. I'm not sure how many people make use of it.

It's looking at a problem in a systemic way rather than isolated events, at least according to me.

Anecdotally I've been overweight most of my life and it is only through a change in lifestyle (cycling to work and a shift to low carb diet i.e. low sugar) that I have seen significant weight loss.

That's not to say prescription diet pills wouldn't work, but without underlying lifestyle changes I would expect the person to using the pills to be going on and off them for the rest of their life.

And that's the difficult thing people aren't willing to do. Taking a pill might help for the near term (we are so short sighted these days!) but it won't address the long term. "I've been taking this pill so now I'm not overweight [so now] I don't need to take the stairs over the elevator!" A few years later, you might not be overweight but you still aren't healthy!

"it is only through a change in lifestyle"

Reminds me of a coworker that complains about his financial situation. He complains about not making enough money and thinking that if he made more then he'd be able to "pay his bills and get ahead"... that might work for the short term, but without a change in how he handles money he's going to end up as "poor" as he is now.

(Preface: He makes more than the average American, this isn't about true poverty) If you live paycheck to paycheck because you are unwilling to make the difficult change in your lifestyle by living slightly under your income level in an effort to pay off debt and save for the future, you will continue to live paycheck to paycheck after you get a raise (that you claim is what you need to "get ahead"). If you spend what you make, you'll just spend more when you make more.

Discipline. It's not easy.

However, I think we need to think more about why people overeat, and then address that problem directly. It's closely related to why they smoke, why they gamble, why they take drugs, even why they swear. It's not just a health issue. Trying to coerce people into being 'virtuous' often has the opposite effect to that intended: one of the reasons why teens smoke and swear is seemingly because they know that authority figures don't like them to, for instance. Trying to live up to the expectations of other people is tiring and stressful; people look for ways to relieve that stress -- guess what they choose.

First: the lipostat mechanism needs fixing, because evolution built what worked, not what would be ideal. Exposure to overeating should not result in a life sentence of obesity.

Second: replace capitalism. There is a reason why there are food deserts, why people have to make the choice of nutrition versus quantity, why people aren't educated on nutrition, why people don't have the time or emotional energy to work at food after they've done working at work, and it's capitalism. Or more precisely, any money-and-work economy. Capitalism just makes it run wildly out of control.

https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/food-desert-myth-article...

edit: Also NY Times, if that is a more authoritative source for some.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/18/health/research/pairing-of...

The number of issues that would need addressing to make it possible for everyone to eat a healthy diet (hell how do we go about making cheap, convenient, healthy food on such a scale?) vastly exceeds the number involved in coming up with post-hoc remedies.

More relevant questions are surely those which enable us to do something about the problem in the foreseeable future (such as diet pills) rather than pondering about how things could be better if we were able to solve dozens of complex issues over an unrealistically short timespan?

We need people to stop worrying about "casual gaming at scale" and start worrying about "living a good life at scale".

It's just that, there's not usually as much profit in the solutions that actually work or matter.

I'm a healthy male in my 20's, I eat well and exercise regularly. I'd be PISSED if everyone stopped working on games and tried to solve all the eating problems of my friends because they're too lazy to do it themselves, instead of catering to what people who already try to live healthily want to do.

I mostly eat tacos for dinner, beans, occasionaly rice, random vegetables, a little bit of hot sauce, sometimes eggs.

Its cheaper than mcdonalds and takes about 5 minutes to make.

1.) Spices. there are loads of really interesting, amazing spices out there, but even a simple sautée of olive oil, lemon juice, garlic, salt, and black pepper can make almost any vegetable taste amazing.

2.) Stop eating over-flavoured foods. Doritos etc. have a ridiculous amount of flavouring; if you eat foods like this consistently then you'll desensitise your palette to the subtler but still absolutely lovely tastes of vegetables, in the same way that staring into a spotlight makes it difficult to appreciate the aesthetic qualities of twilight. You can't re-sensitise your palette by simply cutting down on hyperflavoured food; you need to eliminate it almost completely. After a while, you'll discover that brocoli and green beans are wonderful, and Doritos are absolutely brutal on the tongue.

For example, I'll roast some cauliflower for 45 minutes, and then I can eat it like that or mash it like potatoes (tastes way better than mashed potatoes to me).

String beans I'll coat with olive oil and chipotle powder and that tastes great.

I ask because taste bud response varies; one common reference is the supertaster-taster-nontaster continuum, which is focused on perception of bitter component found in some vegetables.

If you're a supertaster, you might not be able to do anything to make them completely acceptable to you; they're always going to be a bit over-bitter. Hate to say it, but cheese, butter, and gentle use of honey may be your best bets.

On the other hand, if you're a taster, the suggestions here will help... and if you're a non-taster like me, you might discover that fresher -- and weirder -- produce has a more intense flavor that you enjoy, though you might need to acquire a taste for it.

Because corn has at least some value, and letting the land lay fallow would cost the tax payer even more (though that is sometimes subsidized too) in order to maintain the stabilization?

Or are you suggesting that farms don't need the stabilization program at all? As a farmer who farms in a country without subsidies, I would agree with that, but I understand the reasons why Americans value the program when you look at it from a threat of war point of view.

It's like anything in life. You have to put in the hard work to get the results you want. I feel like giving people a pill is taking the easy way out.

I wouldn't want to do that, either. That's miserably slow. A pound per week (which is a fairly slow weight loss, equivalent to a roughly 500 Calorie/day deficit) loses you about 24 pounds in 6 months. Two pounds per week is still well within the healthy range and gets you nearly 50 pounds lost in 6 months.

That's a long time. Go keto and drop 5 pounds a week.