Thursday, August 21, 2008
Why I'm Not In Charge
"They" say that obesity is the biggest public health problem since smoking. Of course, most of the problem stems from the fact that the FDA, medical community, and diet industry are most likely completely wrong on what is a healthy diet. Gary Taubes points out many counter examples to the orthodoxy's hypothesis that eating less and exercising more is the answer, in this amazing video.
As a quick aside, the NYT has a ridiculous article about a girl who can't afford to go to fat camp. This puts the establishment weight loss theorists in the untenable position of saying this girl is too poor to eat less!
Whatever. I know most of you can't get past the massive cognitive dissonance inherent in what you think you know about the subject, so I would like to propose a way to answer the question once and for all.
It, like many of my ideas, involves prison. Why not take several prisons, divide the populations in half, and put half the population on a typical american diet, and the half on Zone /Atkins /Primal / Weight Watchers / Special K / etc diets.
Resolving this would benefit society immensely. Prisoners owe society. Prisoners would have 100% compliance. It's a no f-ing brainer.
There are some of you who will probably have a problem with experimenting on prisoners. To that I say, first, fuck you, and second, do you think it will be hard to convince them to voluntarily give up prison chow for a year?
The only problem I see is that the weight watchers prison will have to be a women's prison, because no man in his right mind would do that diet.
"They" say that obesity is the biggest public health problem since smoking. Of course, most of the problem stems from the fact that the FDA, medical community, and diet industry are most likely completely wrong on what is a healthy diet. Gary Taubes points out many counter examples to the orthodoxy's hypothesis that eating less and exercising more is the answer, in this amazing video.
As a quick aside, the NYT has a ridiculous article about a girl who can't afford to go to fat camp. This puts the establishment weight loss theorists in the untenable position of saying this girl is too poor to eat less!
Whatever. I know most of you can't get past the massive cognitive dissonance inherent in what you think you know about the subject, so I would like to propose a way to answer the question once and for all.
It, like many of my ideas, involves prison. Why not take several prisons, divide the populations in half, and put half the population on a typical american diet, and the half on Zone /Atkins /Primal / Weight Watchers / Special K / etc diets.
Resolving this would benefit society immensely. Prisoners owe society. Prisoners would have 100% compliance. It's a no f-ing brainer.
There are some of you who will probably have a problem with experimenting on prisoners. To that I say, first, fuck you, and second, do you think it will be hard to convince them to voluntarily give up prison chow for a year?
The only problem I see is that the weight watchers prison will have to be a women's prison, because no man in his right mind would do that diet.
