Warning: Your ass is too big! - Page 3

i was speaking metaphorically, and chose the first crappy food i could think of to make an example.

*** sits back, scratches head...ponders the source of this paranoid delusion that there is a widespread, deliberate and active effort by companies to knowingly sell products that will kill their customers ***

Chris Cuilla:


Acknowledging reality and creating effective policies to solve problems is a pretty good indication and positive responsibility.


No, it is not, it is a regulation as to what can be produced. There is a difference.


Nice straw man!

Corporations routinely weight costs of lawsuits resulting from death against the potential costs of policy change. This happens all the time.

Yeah, it comes up in class actions all the time.

Erin Brockovich, too.

Really? I only heard of it in Erin Brockovich and with regards to the Ford Pinto.

But your assumption is that these must be government policies.


Yes, it is. If you prohibit the production of something then you have effectively prohibited the consumption.

The problem is that you "small-government" types don't always enter the discussion with an eye on problem-solving. You care more about maintaining the integrity of an absolutist ideology (small government at all costs) than about solving problems. Here's a prima-facie example which I'm pretty sure of your answer:

• Chris, if you agree that a certain government program does a better job at solving a certain problem than leaving it to the private sector, would you support that program?

The problem is that you "government should fix our societal problems" types always enter the discussion with an eye towards government solving these problems. You care more about trying to achieve some perfect utopian society than about how individual liberties are incrementally eroded over time.


Yes.

oh shit. It's Locke again. DON'T TELL DMZ!!!

midwinter, I'm doing a Poli-Sci index -- don't even go there.


I will not be fit for man 'nor beast till it's done..... I hate indexes.....

lol... does he have individual phrases on forum subscription?

Oh, you wanna rumble, huh? YOU WANNA RUMBLE?!

Don't make me cap a syllabus in your ass.



As an aside, I used to hold that academic arguments should be reduced to "Uh huh" and "Nuh uh." As as result of you, DMZ, I no longer believe that. Now, I believe that academic arguments should be totally gangsta rap posturing. Imagine it, at some conference on something: "And THAT, muthafucka, is why Derrida's argument that..."

Hilarity.

I hear you....

Who cares? You're prohibiting the unnecessary lacing of foods with toxic chemicals, you're not prohibiting the production of food.

here is a list of chemicals legally allowed to be added to food.
http://www.grokfood.com/additives/

You already have NO choice, NO freedom - everything you eat is laced with toxic crap, where is the choice to go into the supermarket and buy food that is natural and free from crap?

Until supermarkets put up big signs saying 'food in this section is full of toxic chemicals' and 'food in this section is free of toxic chemicals', then you have no choice and no freedom to make a decision.

stuff that fucks you up, but should be included to allow for the notion of choice and freedom.

http://altmedangel.com/additive.htm
http://www.cspinet.org/reports/chemcuisine.htm
http://www.opposingdigits.com/additives/

Doesn't the UK have markets which sell "organic" foods which are more or less free of this "crap" you speak of, clearly labeled as such? Labeling requirements for food?

I realize those system aren't perfect (producers sometimes cheat, people argue whether the legal requirements for labeling something as "organic" are strict enough), but saying people have "no choice" doesn't strike me as true -- people just have to put more effort into watching what they buy, and often have to pay more for "organic" foods because those foods cost more to produce.


There are and have been things put into our foods which aren't the healthiest things to consume. But I object to the underlying assumption that many people seem to make that pretty much anything we put in our food today that you couldn't have found on a rural farmhouse 300 years ago is TOXIC CRAP!!!!!

Average human life spans have been slowly and steadily increasing throughout the industrialized world right along with the development and increasing use of artificial food additives. Obviously many factors contribute to increased longevity, like improved sanitation and improved medical care, and I'm not saying that this stuff you call "toxic crap" is likely to be part of a great positive impact, but if the effect is negative, just how negative could it be? Are we being robbed of even greater and faster increases in life span? How would you know that's the case?

Consider further that many of the ill health effects we see from current life styles, like increased heart disease and diabetes, are maladies which afflicted the "indolent rich" of the past as well, and can largely be attribute to a combination of sedentary living and fatty foods -- even all "natural", completely "organic" fatty food. Much of the increase in cancer we've seen simply comes from living long enough to get killed by cancers which had the time to develop because infectious disease and malnutrition didn't kill us off first.

Things like trans-fats have proven to be bad. We probably should be more careful about what we put into food, directly and indirectly (the indirect stuff being things like pesticides, drugs and hormones fed to livestock), but I think that much of the furor over "toxic crap" in our food is driven by a completely irrational and unproven technophobic assumption "NATURAL = GOOD!!!, ARTIFICIAL = BAD!!!"

EDIT...

Another irony of modern health problems: it's now seeming very likely that many of the increases we've seen in allergy problems are due to too much clean living. Studies have shown that children raised in very clean environments fail to fully develop their immune systems as they should, and their bodies end up later in life having excessive overreactions to substances they'd otherwise have learned to recognize as harmless, or to fight off by better means (T2 immune system instead of a T1 reaction).

So...which words would you eliminate to make it not a straw man?

"there is a widespread, deliberate and active effort by companies to knowingly sell products that will kill their customers"

widespread? deliberate? active? knowingly? kill?

yes there are organic products. There are 2 problems with this.

1. they are vastly more expensive than the toxic crap and
2. the range makes up such a small proportion of your total shop, that any benefit of not eating toxic crap is lost by all the things you have to buy that do contain toxic crap. Its mostly psychological and profiteering.


there is no choice if you cant afford to pay the premium for safe food. There is no choice if you cant afford to invest the time in making the effort to source the safe food.

Frankly, it shouldn't need to be a choice whether you spend considerable time, money and effort sourcing safe food, or eating toxic crap. All food should be safe. Period.

Its the very people, the poor, undereducated, who least understand the issue, who are forced to eat this rubbish. Those who are least able to be able to afford financially the premium on safer food, can least afford the heath care that comes in fixing themselves up after years of dieting on toxins.

It should boil down to this - any person who wants to buy, say an Apple, should by default be able to go into any shop and buy an Apple that is not sprayed with carcinogenous chemical sprays - regardless of whether they are poor, uneducated, rich, famous or whatever.

Chris would want there to be an option to buy a poisoned Apple and a safer one. Why? Why? Why? You just want to buy an Apple - you shouldn't need to spend time money and effort making sure you're not buying an Apple that fucks you up. All Apples for sale should be safe and free of toxic crap. Its an option i'll happily go without thankyou very much.


look through the list i gave above? Really, really, does 95% of that stuff need to be added to food? No. Precisely because there is a small niche market of safer food, that is bought to market just as well as the toxic crap, PROVES that all this stuff is unnecessary. And it exists just because it adds a few buck to the bottom line and because, in reality there is no real choice. You're forced into accepting the default.


If this trend in obesity continues, you will see that life expectancy starts falling. I dont have data - its obvious - fat people kill themselves early, now if the majority are fat...do the math. The problem here is that we are pumping people full of shit, and then pumping them full of shit to try to cure them. Its largely unavoidable if they weren't being screwed from the moment they opened their mouths.

There will always be fat people, lazy people, stupid people, uneducated people, poor people - you cant change that, what you can do is help the unfortunate by not assisting them in screwing themselves because of their inherited circumstances.

Some people will always stuff themselves with cake and get fat, its their choice - but we dont have to screw them even more by having 50 toxic chemicals that they become addicted to, in the cream just so the cake has a shelf life of a few hours extra. (allegorical argument)

Fine - have the cream cake - why should it be a forced option to invest considerable time, effort and money into buying a cake that doesn't fuck you. All cakes should be as safe as possible from the outset. Its a choice and freedom i'll happily go without.

I just wanted a cake, not the option to buy a safe cake or a toxic one.


is there any need for trans-fat? No, its just a way for companies to add a few bucks to the bottom line. It should be outright banned - they dont care if their product is killing people - why give a fuck if they are forced to use a slightly more expensive safer oily product if the goods require it.

The Mc donalds empire is not falling apart because a few countries have banned trans-fatty oils for frying their food. Now consider this - if I go into mcdonalds and they have a counter that sells food that is all cooked in trans-fat, clearly labelled that "this product contains trans-fats very damaging to your health" - and next to that is a counter that sells exactly the same product that is cooked in healthy oils and it is virtually the same price and it is marked up as such - which counter is near everyone going to go to? That is a 'real informed choice'

You dont really need these freedoms and choices. There is no value to them, because at the moment the choices are illusionary anyway.


completely agree.

I absolutely agree with you. And I feel your pain, brother. When I'm in the 200-210 range people think I'm sick. I look "healthy" in the 220 range. However, because I'm a film editor by trade, it means I sit in front of the edit bays for 8-12 hours a day. So it's no surprise that I balooned up at 300lbs. Thankfully, I only weight about 265 now and on my way down.

Basically, I had to give up carbs, sugar, dairy and peanuts. I'm on the Paleo diet. Meat. Fruits. Vegitables. That's it. Especially nothing harvested like wheat, corn or rice.

However, the bastard who works next to me eats McDonald's every day, drink four Starbuck's a day and pounds the peanut M&Ms. He probably weights 180 soaking wet. And he's constantly railing on "fatties" and their (my) supposed drag on our healthcare system.

First of all, you say it "shouldn't" cost more to by "safe" food, but you've also already bitched that supposedly "toxic" ingredients are used just to save a bit of money.

Well, guess what? If you use more expensive ingredients, your products will cost more. If your farming techniques are most costly, because you use more difficult, labor-intensive pest control procedures rather than spraying insecticide around, your products will cost more.

I'm no utterly laissez-faire capitalist, but I'm not in favor of turning the entire food industry into a socialized government-run business (collectivized farming was such a success!), and unless you do that, I don't see how you expect to mandate your version of food safety (which, while you haven't come out and said so flat out, sounds like nothing but organically-raised food with little or no artificial ingredients allowed -- everything else being "toxic crap"), enough variety to keep consumers happy, and affordable prices. How's this idealized food world of yours supposed to work? Just pass a bunch of strict regulations and price controls on top of that and hope that it all works out?


So I don't have to guess what you mean anymore, please define "safe". Please define "toxic crap".

I'll bet if you subjected "natural" foods -- paprika, black cherries, snow peas, oysters -- to the same kind of testing artificial additives get, like feeding rats the equivalent of 800 servings a day or listing every time 0.02% of the population has a bad reaction to those foods, you'd find that "natural" isn't hugely better.


Are there any chemical sprays you approve of? Or all they all to be considered carcinogenic, or otherwise toxic, by default?

Have you ever even stopped to consider what would happen to world food production, and production costs, if the use of all or most pesticides was banned? Are you certain that the only distance between food as it is now and food as you think it should be is a bunch of greedy, predatory profiteering -- profiteering which can safely be cut leaving nothing but nice healthy food at exactly the same prices, feeding just as many people?

Got you all beat with a svelte 150.

All muscle.

Oh yeah.

I have weighed as little as 139 and as much as 194. In my 20s, I sat around 155-160, in my 130s, I'm in the 170s, although I ballooned last year to 194 and have dropped to about 182. I want to get back to about 160. I max out at about 175 for muscle weight (when I was 17) and was uncomfortable being that big; I couldn't put my arms down at my side without forcing them and I couldn't find shirts with an 18 inch neck.

Still trying to get the hang of my post-30 metabolism, although I dropped 14 pounds this past summer.

I really don't see why you are attacking me, nor do I think you understand my point. Some people watch what they eat and still are heavier than others. That is a fact. I know I am one of those people. I'll certainly lose weight as my diet improves and my physical activity level goes up, but I won't look like people such as my brother, for example. You're right concerning burning more than you consume and vice versa, but that's the whole point. People have naturally different metabolisms. Have you not seen skinny people that can eat nearly anything they want without exercising.....and still don't gain weight? I have. I also know heavier people that can't lose weight to save their lives. Exercise and diet are only part of the equation. To weigh 210 lbs, I have to eat almost no fat ,reduce my carb intake and run 3 miles a day. And, that's when I was 22. At 31 it's much harder. By the time I hit 27-28, my usual walk of 2-3 miles a day wasn't cutting it anymore. It's a fact that people's metabolisms are different....a fact that you cannot change just because you wish to view heavier people as fat and lazy.

That's a ridiculous and misguided principle.

What?

"If it's effective then it's good policy." Is that statement out of context or is that how you meant it?

I'm talking about reasonable policy solutions to the obesity problem.

What do you mean by "reasonable?" My point is that we shouldn't do something just because it's effective. The government could outlaw all fast food and make people submit to daily weigh-ins under penalty of death....and they'd lose weight and get in shape....but would you support that? I realize that's an extreme example, but where is the line drawn when the only criteria for a policy is it's effectiveness?

That's not the point.


Um.

Obviously.


You're really testing my patience here.


That's certainly not what I'm saying.

I'm responding generally to people who tend to attack government policies not on reasonable grounds like effectiveness but only by virtue of being government policies! Yes there's more that goes into policy-making, but people should at least entertain the question of whether it works before writing it off. So that's what I'm talking about.

First- I'd like to say thanks to Chris (and everyone here) for your generous tax money in the form of Federal grant money to make my neighborhood and surrounding towns beautiful and allowing us to have such an elevated lifestyle that is healthy and happy. I'd highly suggest you take the same approach as my county in getting your own piece of the many federal grants that are awarded to various states so they can do beneficial projects such as build bike paths. It sure beats lawn mower races!

Second, as much as there seems to be a perceived lack of freedom because you might not be able to seek out and eat pure trans fat balls fried in margarine and encased in a twinkie, well, I am glad for it. Ironically, I deplore the loss of freedoms that come about due to warrentless wire taps and other such intrusions from my government.

but hey- I always did succeed due to my powers of prioritizing matters and such.

fatties are an evolved mutant virus

http://www.newscientist.com/article/...ur-weight.html

Look, it's one of both: either it's an individual problem, and so it's ok to judge the fat individuals, or it's a socio-cultural problem, in which case the governement is the most appropriate way towards a solution.
One more thing, please stop the 'it's biology' and 'it's different metabolism' bs. Open your eyes and you will notice the US is by far the fattest country around. The UK is catching up quickly, but they always had the most lousy food. Look anywhere else, and you don't see fatties wobbling around everywhere you look. And metabolism has nothing to do with that.

No.

They're not mutually exclusive.

Socio-cultural problems are not completely outside the control of the individual-- but certainly *very strong* factors.

I think that the distinction of an obese person and a large person needs to be made.

When you see a large person who has obvious muscle tone, but they are thick.... that is not obesity. That is genetics and metabolism.

When you see someone who has a crotch that is in effect a secondary beer belly and they are motoring by (nay- lumbering past it's designed capacities) in a scooter designed for the elderly to assist in mobility- that is obesity at it's sickest.

That is someone who eats the worst possible food in gross amounts and the only exercise they see is their arm lifting the next bon bon to their lips- that is unnatural. That has nothing to do with metabolism or genetics. That is gluttony.

And it happens on a smaller scale too often and you find people trying to excuse it. Sure it's a personal freedom to chow yourself into a grave- but I think it's irresponsible and it shouldn't be sugar coated (pardon the pun). It should be dealt with like the problem it is. Not excused for the problem it is in the way of taking the responsibility out of the obese person's hands (or mouth). And if the government removes harmful dietary foods out of reach and puts healthy alternatives in it's vacuum- that's a win win situation. And if the government funds an infrastructure that gives it's citizens the opportunity to be healthier and more educated citizens- that also is a win win situation.

For a government to sit back and do nothing when it could easily benefit everyone with win win situations it's a waste and nothing but lost opportunities. There is a great halo effect when your citizens are healthy and feel good about themselves. I see it in my community, and it is hardly an intrusion into anyone's freedoms. I'd say it offers greater freedoms.

Why is it a governmental problem? The government has no right to tell me how to eat and what I can eat.

And if you're denying that indiviudals have different metabolisms and that biology plays a big part, well then you're on crack. Yes, lifestyle plays a big role, including diet and exercise. But we live where we live...we're born where we're born. Even given the various cultural influences, there are still people that can more easily metobolize food and can burn more calories. You can't just say "The Us is a fat country, therefore the biology argument is BS." That's an absurd statement.

Microbes in intestines give a clue as to why some are fat and some not.


Let me say this again: We are biological machines.

if the government has no right to tell you what to eat or how, then you have no right to turn to the government for any consequence of your action.

Except this wont happen, you'll get obesely fat and ill through your own self-willed (hehe) actions and then you'll turn to the government to sort out your self-imposed ignorant mess, who under your rules would have every right to tell you to fck-off, but they wont, and you'll expect every god-damn benefit and payout to keep yourself alive.

Besides, a nation of fatties is a national security issue. Islamic terrrists aren't fatties - infact they seem to be slim, athletic young men, and if they decide to invade in force, how are all you fatties going to run away or fight????

The Food and Drug Administration begs to differ.

Read you some of Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" to get a handle on the history of the pre-regulation food industry.

As a matter of fact- the FDA needs to do a better job......

I'm really not sure where to begin here nor am I sure what you're arguing exactly. I'm saying that it's not necessarily the government's job to address obesity with measures that invade personal freedom. I agree that obesity costs money. I also agree that we need regulations in terms of disclosing the ingrediants food, programs to promote physical fitness, public service messages, etc. I draw the line at the government requiring special labels for clothing and/or banning fattending substances.