Study links sugar-filled drinks to millions of heart disease and diabetes cases
bgr.com107 points by hochmartinez 2 months ago
107 points by hochmartinez 2 months ago
IMO a substantial (not 100%) root cause of all this is that many Americans are highly stressed, in precarious financial positions, with toxic work environments, pushed to work at above 100% effort (meaning, unsustainable) permanently, so they turn to excessive amounts of calories, caffeine, prescription or illegal drugs, to try to continue to function as long as possible. This leads to all kinds of medical issues down the road, which then is handled by emergency medical services, or very severe health problems that are very difficult to treat.
Perhaps, and we should continue to work on that, but exploitative and exhausting labor has been an issue for ten millenia or so at least. We may well not see it fixed in our lives.
But the particular failings of the modern western diet are relatively new and might still be remedied or reversed without waiting for the whole labor and exploitation issue to be sorted.
The difference is that the previous methods of exhausting labor provided physical exercise as a side effect.
As brutal as that was on the body, it did have some health benefits.
In contrast to modern American/Asian work culture, which is high stress and sedentary.
While there exists a lot of sedentary work in the US and that has consequences, there's still a great deal of physical work done in the US as well, and a very high number of non-working people with plenty of time for personal exercise if they wanted to pursue it. Yet the profound wellness problems we're talking about apply to all of those groups.
The hollowing out of American agriculture and manufacturing employment (sequentially) was a major shift, that moved those employees to sedentary jobs.
Optional exercise (after work) is not the same this as mandatory exercise (for work).
There's some truth there, but no matter how active one is, one can still out-eat the exercise with sugar.
And since the Industrial Revolution, any labour is highly repetitive and therefore leads to RSI.
> which is high stress and sedentary
Soon, we might even reach low stress and not back-breaking! *Gasp*!
Some of us grew up with childhood friends who cleaned the meat plants at night. A practice that continues to this day. You can always tell - they stink of bleach in the morning.
Before the industrial age sustained exhausting labor was still a temporary thing reserved for planting and harvest times, and even then you were still deciding your own hours, it was just obviously the most profitable time to put in the most work so people did it.
Workers in industrial societies work way more hours than their ancestors did. There's enough resources for people to work less hours.
I'm with you that things suck now and don't need to be this way, having carefully not said otherwise.
But I also think you might be underestimating how many people's ancestors were slaves, serfs, miners, and laborers during hose prior several millenia of settled, urbanizing civilization. We don't all come from aristocratic or even subsistence farming stock.
It can be less bad than it is, we might want to strive to make it less bad than it is, but it's been pretty darn bad for a long while. For pressing modern problems we also need to commit to more immediate tactics.
I'm not saying everyone had it better. Chattle slavery is definitely worse. Maybe I'm naive, but I don't think we needed to have slaves to make progress. I want to push back against this idea that it's inevitable to have to work as much as we do. A worker today is significantly more productive. We could probably make life a lot easier for everyone by finding a more equitable way to distribute resources and by breaking up and regulating all the rent-seeking monopolists who makes things more expensive than they need to be.
> I want to push back against this idea that it's inevitable to have to work as much as we do
I'm with you. Has anyone here said that?
Yes, someone responded to me saying just that and it's also a position I've seen frequently on HN. I think plenty of people have that as a gut reaction to any proposed change in the status quo.
Your first sentence is a false factoid repeated online [0][1]. And anyway, there is always more work to be done, so I don't understand why people think working hours would ever decrease; as soon as we build one thing, another problem crops up. We would only stop working until all problems in the world would have been solved, which is never.
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/z38k5p/i_h...
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/im1lqu/is_...
Maybe we could get off the hedonic treadmill and be content with a certain level of material affluence.
I don't know about you, but I don't want to die of now-curable diseases that were only able to be cured due to the hard work of many, many humans over generations. To think that that human progress is akin to a personal hedonic treadmill is misguided.
One doesn't have to come at the expense of another. Cf. 'Steady State Economy'.
Which goods would you cut out?
Most people I know spend a lot of time doing unnecessary things for their job. I don't have a magic solution to fix all the bureaucratic bullshit people are subject to but acknowledging it's a problem is a start.
Sure, there are lots of things that are inefficient. I think everyone recognizes that. That doesnt mean there is an obvious and viable alternative.
Stock buybacks. They serve nothing but short term driving up of profits purely to increase the value of management's stock options. They have no place in the functions/purpose of a healthy stock market.
How would that free up worker time while preserving the same amount of physical goods and services available for consumption?
Lets say every company stops buybacks, that doesnt mean workers can make more "stuff" with fewer hours.
It's because the people who say things like the above have no real alternative solution in place and simply say things that sound good in theory (or are even wholly unrelated, as you explained) but fundamentally don't change anything about the world.
Weak response personal attack is weak and lame.
It's not really a personal attack, it's an observation. You haven't actually elaborated on the parent's question but for some reason replied to me instead, which proves my point.