More and more, I'm starting to come to the awful conclusion that most people have very little control over how their lives go. They maybe have a few key decision points in their life - but maybe not all that many.

And the rest is autopilot. They watch some subset of the new movies, new TV programs, websites they stumble across. They eat whatever's more or less served near them and eaten by people they associate with. They pick the political party that matches their friends and relatives, or no party, or maybe they pick up a book that has an emotional impact on them and swear loyalty to that. Maybe.

I hate this idea, because it seems to subtly advocate for totalitarianism, which I've been against my whole life. But then there's nagging voice that says, "well, just ban all the food that's unhealthy, and people will eat better..." - but we know where that road leads.

sigh

It's strange being someone who strives to be self reliant, studies and analyzes to make ethics from scratch, constantly examines and re-examines everything... I think there exists less people like this than I originally thought. No, less than that. Okay, divide that number by 10 again.

Less than that, even? Maybe.

Scary thoughts. I'm going to go eat some oatmeal now.

I'm sticking with Occam's razor on this one - "the simplest explanation is more likely the correct one".

A world awash with kilojoules means any life forms around human civilization will be a little more plump.

Charlie Stross does give a hat tip to the overwhelming desire by some sectors to see obesity categorised as a disease / epidemic: "many large corporations would love to see the obesity epidemic pinned on something other than their own sub-standard food products".

However he pulls a quote from Nikhil Dhurandhar at the Pennington Biomedical Research Centre to talk about AD-36 as a potential significant factor in obesity. I just wonder as the largest nutrition research centre in the world, with 600 researchers, whether there is ever any institutionalised bias towards concluding / promoting the idea that obesity is a disease / epidemic?

Obviously baseless speculation on my part, but a quick Google finds such Pennington-run conferences as 'Childhood Obesity and Public Health', which is sponsored by...Coca Cola? http://www.pbrc.edu/childhood_obesity_conference/default.htm

I fail to see how accepting this kind of sponsorship money is healthy for independent research in this area.

Sin, disease...

What's wrong with a plain old fact?

Are you overweight? Then you're overweight. Are you downright fat? Then you're fat. Religious dogma aside (as I don't care about it), I'm going to say you're not committing a sin or evil act by being heavy. Barring the adenovirus hypothesis panning out or your having a known glandular issue, I'm going to guess that you don't have a disease. You just have a fact.

Are you overweight enough to affect your health? Are you unappealing to the men or women you want to date? Do you just dislike having the weight? Then you have complaints.

Do whatever complaints you have bother you more than you enjoy the aspects of your lifestyle and diet that lead you to being overweight? Then you have a problem.

Problems can addressed, researched, and analyzed. Problems can even be solved, or at least ameliorated. Mind, it's hard to guilt, intimidate, or infantilize people by noting that they might have a problem - assuming you literally mean "problem" and not as a euphemism for disease or sin...

I don't find it surprising at all that the rats that feed on the scraps of human food are getting obese - they get the same trans fats, refined carbs and sugars and other stuff that people get. Laboratory animals, again, are fed by humans. Are they fed strictly following the natural diet of fresh food they would eat in the wild? I doubt that - most likely at least some of it is substituted with cheaper option.

From my point of view, searching for a malicious virus that somehow makes us obese or some other obscure reason is just overcomplicating the issue.

When eating at our canteen at work I can peek into people's plates and the reflection of their choice of food on their size is fairly obvious in most cases.

Edit: just heard the sound of munching, which reminded me of an anectode: a colleague of mine quit smoking a couple of months ago. Now it looks like every time he feels like smoking a cig, he's eating a cookie instead. He also recently complained that after having a stable weight for years, he suddenly gained 5 kilos. Hmm, either he got stung by that virus, or too many cookies - pick your choice ...

What is surprising me most is the black-and-white approach: It's either a disease or modern lifestyle and diet.

Organisms tend to be highly complex and there is a myriad of variables that come into play. I feel it is very unlikely that you can identify one sole cause for something as general as obesity.

Also linked in the comments at Stross's site:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/2as/diseased_thinking_dissolving_que...

I'm not buying it. There are too many outside variables. And as one commenter points out, this disease seems unusually concentrated in the USA. Also, any animal in constant proximity to humans is likely less lean than its wild counterparts.

It's a problem in general when we pin the fault of something on a moral failing. It's a cop-out that does nothing to solve the problem. If we want to discourage some behavior in our society we have to look at the causes and try to mitigate them. Unfortunately many people refuse to even consider the reasons for people's behavior.

Imagine you're a food industry executive. You want people to buy your product, and you want to make a profit. Therefore you are optimising for tastiness and chewapness. While you're not specifically optimising against nutritional quality, or ability to deliver calories without sating appetite, you're not optimising against them either.

Becauee technology is good, and getting better fast, the things optimised for -- taste and cheapness will improve, even if it detracts from other qualities that're perhaps desirable but not optimised for. Therefore over time, food is likely to have a higher tendency to get people overweight.

PG has written an essay on this: http://www.paulgraham.com/addiction.html

Interesting obesity epidemic might be related to disease, specifically: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Adenovirus_se...

"And before you write it off as fat folks feeding Fido far too much"

As it turns out, there isn't necessarily a correlation between pets' bodyweights and owners' bodyweigts. At least, cats' bodyweight isn't (although I seem to remember reading about another study that even showed a negative correlation): http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPag...

>However, it would be unpleasantly ironic if it turns out that our culture's moralizing fixation on the association between obesity and sinfullness — painting it as the just the reward of sloth and gluttony, and only legitimately to be avoided by drudgery and self-denial — has allowed a dangerous viral pandemic to rage undetected for decades.

If those without the virus can't become obese through sloth and gluttony he has a point, otherwise he seems hell-bent on tying those with "traditionalist religious views" [I think he means Christian but doesn't want to appear to be just be reacting against his local culture] to the problem of obesity for no reason other than that they consider sloth and gluttony wrong.

Do atheists, humanists, neo-wiccans, animists, etc., consider sloth and gluttony to be virtuous? I know corpulence has often been considered positive but that is not the same as sloth or gluttony.

It's likely much simpler than that. Stop eating and subsidizing cheap carbohydrates - acquire health.