Maybe it’s a bit of both though. People still have free will. You can eat unhealthy shit and not become morbidly obese.
Comment on Here as well
PP_BOY_@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I love posts like this because it always has the subtle insinuation that weight gain is some moral failing on individuals instead of the natural result of allowing food producers across the board to sell the most unhealthy slop you could ever dream of while simultaneously making healthy food (literally just fresh, unprocessed items - i.e. the things that everyone ate for tens of thousands of years) a luxury item. This, of course, happening after food lobbyists successfully brainwashed entire generations of people with their shareholder-approved “food pyramid.”
End of rant
IWantToFuckSpez@kbin.social 6 months ago
NABDad@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Free will is a lie we tell ourselves.
MYCOOLNEJM@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
Is someone force-feeding you?
NABDad@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I was only commenting on the concept of free will. Doesn’t matter where you apply it, we’re all just following our programming.
Obviously, the program is incredibly complex, otherwise the illusion of free will wouldn’t be so easy to believe.
However, there are many examples where the programming becomes apparent.
The best example of this is a radio lab episode about a woman with transient global amnesia. Her memory reset every 90 seconds, and she kept repeating the same conversation over and over for hours. Like a program stuck in a loop.
Radiolab, Transient Global Amnesia - SoundCloud m.soundcloud.com/…/radiolab-transient-global-amne…
She couldn’t choose to say something else. Given the same input, she would repeat the same response every time. She didn’t have the ability to realize she had already said it, so she just kept looping.
irmoz@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Is that really the only scenario you can think of that limits your food choices?
yamapikariya@lemmyfi.com 6 months ago
You dropped your tinfoil hat
NABDad@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I don’t wear tinfoil hats. What about not believing in free will means I’d wear a tinfoil hat?
Cold_Brew_Enema@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Sounds like an excuse to me
GBU_28@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Healthy food is very cheap
fireweed@lemmy.world 6 months ago
This little bit of news has been hitting the media circuit this week: [www.msn.com/en-us/health/nutrition/…/ar-AA1lGv3y](Americans are eating a meal’s worth of calories in snack foods every day)
…the average American had between 400 and 500 calories worth of snacks a day, which is typically more than what they ate at breakfast. Even worse, the snacks usually carried little to no nutritional value
All food has gotten expensive due to inflation/greedflation, but (at least in my area) snacks, desserts, and some sugary drinks got hit especially hard. Except maybe for people living in food deserts, snacks are way more of a luxury good than “whole” foods are nowadays.
FierroGamer@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
Why is it either or? I can see a world where computer enthusiasts tend to be a bit more physically inactive than the median
vsh@lemm.ee 6 months ago
if kernel developers can afford a PC, then they can afford fucking food
RagingHungryPanda@lemm.ee 6 months ago
not with the PC they bought
guiguinofake@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
Yeah but they fuck their food so there is none left to eat
Kusimulkku@lemm.ee 6 months ago
Can be either or both
lobut@lemmy.ca 6 months ago
I think you have great points, but I also don’t want to absolve personal responsibility entirely. I think I saw Boogie for on the Financial Audit and spends $900 per month? There’s definitely food deserts and busy people with busy lives and bad education. Absolutely. I also find that healthier living was easier in the UK as grocery stores had ready-made meals easier to access with better options. However, I do think there’s also a component of personal accountability for those that know the right thing to do and choose not to.
daltotron@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Also fucked up is that fat doesn’t = bad. I dunno when this came about but you can be unhealthy and skinny as well, and you can be unhealthy and jacked. I won’t say that, kind of along the lines of a bodybuilder, it’s easy to be healthy and be fat, but you can do it. Sumo wrestlers. You want that subcutaneous fat, and not that visceral fat, and you wanna have good cardio and heart health.
Part of the reason why people become super fat is because they enter a kind of death spiral where they don’t believe they’ll ever get better, and then they eat more, because what’s the point if you’ll never get better at all. Part of the reason why they think they’ll never get better is because people are constantly telling them that’s the case, and that they’re at fault for being the way they are, when usually people get really fat through some childhood trauma or mental disorder. I’m not gonna blame someone for that, or demand they “take responsibility” for it. Especially if them “taking responsibility” for it just ends up making them eat more slop.
It’s really not that complicated. Positive reinforcement and active help is a lot better in these situations than demanding that people be held accountable for being so fat, or that it’s their choice, or whatever. I don’t really care to argue the semantics of philosophies of “free will” or whatever, I’m just saying people need to not be dicks to fat people, because that’s more productive to making them be healthy.
Kase@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Hear hear. And it wouldn’t matter to me even if being fat were automatically a death sentence and the only reason people got that way was laziness. Even if it were a simple choice that someone made, it’s still none of my business, y’know?
daltotron@lemmy.world 6 months ago
It’s both none of my business, and being a dick isn’t an effective way to get them to change. I dunno why so many people kind of have that as like, a default response. I guess it makes sense to get mad when someone you care about “chooses” to self-destruct, but people are complicated and delicate machines, and they require better maintenance than the nuclear option, and ultimatums.
I think part of why people have this sort of desire for everyone to have agency, they have this narrative, is because it’s the only way that they’ll be able to keep dealing with all these shitty things in their life. It’s like a really bad survival strategy, or something, people become kind of fucked up and then they only function if they have this dire sense of internal pressure at all times, that they’re responsible for everything that happens in their life. It’s weird, and I don’t really get it.
protist@mander.xyz 6 months ago
Healthy food is absolutely not a luxury item. I’ll accept the argument that the time to prepare healthy food is a luxury, but in almost every corner of the US you will find basic ingredients (eg rice, beans, carrots, celery, corn, potatoes, pasta) are way less expensive than the pre-prepared slop in boxes in the middle aisles of the store. People are addicted to that shit and actively choose it
peopleproblems@lemmy.world 6 months ago
You just used addicted and choose it in the same sentence.
MataVatnik@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Addiction means you have a strong impulse for it, but at the end of the day you’re still choosing.
zero_spelled_with_an_ecks@programming.dev 6 months ago
That is not, at all, the meeting of addicted.
Robin@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I don’t think those are mutually exclusive. However, it takes energy and willpower to make a choice that goes against the nature of the addiction.
JackRiddle@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
“People are addicted” and “actively choose it” are contradictory statements. Addiction is a disease, not a personal failing.
moriquende@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Agree it’s a disease, but it’s also a choice. You choose to buy a big gulp when you crave it.
zero_spelled_with_an_ecks@programming.dev 6 months ago
That’s like saying losing chess against a grandmaster is a choice because you pick where the pieces go.
gears@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
They still are choosing sugar?
I’m addicted to nicotine and I actively choose to hit my vape, for example.
GBU_28@lemm.ee 6 months ago
I’d only refute the "active"part.
You physically choose to locomote towards the counter to make the purchase, you physically choose to lift the cup to your mouth.
The problem is your own mind is working against you to make that physical choice seem absolutely mandatory, via the importance of chemical signaling
Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Someone never heard about food deserts.
Way to victim-blame both addicts and people with little to no healthy choices available.
gears@sh.itjust.works 6 months ago
Low healthy food demand == choosing sugar
Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world 6 months ago
First of all, that’s one “devils advocate however” in an article full of information to the contrary.
Second of all, I’d be interested in seeing who funded those studies. Lobbying groups for different unhealthy foods as well as grocery stores looking for excuses to not cater to poor people often fund junk studies that say exactly what they want them to. Just like Big Tobacco did and political groups still do.
Third, addiction still ≠ choice and sugar is more addictive than most narcotics.
mob@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Huh, guess I might technically live in a food dessert
SuperIce@lemmy.world 6 months ago
More than 1 mile in suburban areas is extremely common, but I wouldn’t consider most of them to be good desserts.
original2@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I know about the uk but not USA. Food inequality is quite a big problem for low-income households.
…org.uk/…/Living-Without-Report-Final-Web.pdf
(Millions of Britons live without a freezer or oven)
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8976549/
(A large number of britons who dont own a car live over a mile from an outlet selling healthy food)
Etc
Thwompthwomp@lemmy.world 6 months ago
I was also reading an article about nutritional quality of food itself has been declining over the last 50 years. So to get the same nutritional amount, you need to eat more food period.
There’s also bigger systemic issues about food access that is driving people to “choose” it. Lack of time, cost, availability, transportation all factor in that are beyond a simple idea if a person having a pure choice between two equal (or even somewhat equal) options.
protist@mander.xyz 6 months ago
Totally agree with this
onkyo@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 months ago
Many people in the US also live in food deserts where easy access to healthy food IS a luxuary due to simply not being able to buy it where they live or work.