[Bitcoin_McPonzi]

There is certainly a need for a new category beyond "Type I" and "Type II".

Estimates are that of Type II Diabetics who are overweight or obese, 85% of them would be asymptomatic if they simply reduced their weight to a healthy one, and didn't consume more calories than they burned each day.

Obese people with "Type II" should be reclassified as "Type F Diabetes". This will help our healthcare system allocate funds and resources better. Why spend money on a population who has a free, safe, and natural remedy (eating less) available to them?

[glenra]

It would be lovely to live in a world in which telling obese people they should "just eat less" reliably allowed more than a tiny percentage of them to drop to a "normal" weight range and stay there for >5 years, but alas, that is not the world we do live in.

[jack9]

> It would be lovely to live in a world in which telling obese people they should "just eat less"

Why would it matter? Telling cigarette smokers to just smoke less didn't work either, but it's just as prescriptive. People rather fail than change, so there's really no reason to lump the funding (type I vs type II) together.

I welcome the discerning scrutiny in research, described which should properly aim the funding.

[watwut]

It seems to be that a lot of this "just eat less" is more of result of hate and wish to punish those people. It is not an attempt to describe what heatly eating looks like.

[fludlight]

Obesity should be taxed, but indirectly. Taxing people with an eating disorder seems mean. Let's nudge them in the right direction by adding a massive federal healthcare tax to sugars at the wholesale level. Let's see how many Oreos you eat when they go from $2 to $20 per box.

This is politically challenging because people hate taxes and farmers & processed food companies like money and they're organized. That said, we managed to tax cigarettes despite tens of millions of smokers and plenty of tobacco farmers and even RJR Nabisco.

[carlmr]

While I agree in principle, I have my trouble with politicians deciding what's healthy and what's not. With sugar it seems to be a clear cut case by now. But just imagine your policy implemented in the 90s. They would have heavily taxed fat and eggs. The obesity epidemic would have been even worse, because poor people would have substituted with carbs.

Nutritional "science" is less science than advice. And it's often wrong.

Just look at the number of bs studies on chocolate is healthy, wine is healthy etc. They're famous because everybody likes chocolate and wine. My best guess is that having a glass of wine in the evening is correlated with people who are a) more well-off, b) cook at home and c) have enough moderation not to drink a whole bottle of wine. Having moderation is generally good for you. People who eat dark chocolate? Well they probably aren't people with such a sweet tooth (otherwise they'd eat milk chocolate), and that is in general a healthy thing to have.

Nutritional science is 99% bunk, and filtering through that noise is nigh impossible. I'm wary of politicians calling shots on this basis.

[apatters]

This approach is super goofy because refined sugar and corn syrup are already heavily subsidized by the federal government. Instead of adding another layer of distortions to correct the first one we should start by looking at why the current regulations exist and what the consequences will be if we unwind them.

[nopinsight]

In the short run, we could even use some of the taxes to compensate producers and induce them to switch to producing healthy food. That should help take some objection away from agribusiness.

For consumers, the taxes should be earmarked to subsidize healthy food and thus increase demand for it. Therefore, consumers do not pay more taxes in aggregate and that should reduce objection from fiscal conservatives.

[bufferoverflow]

That will just create a black market. Prohibition doesn't work.

[tathougies]

You know,.. I actually agree with you. For whatever reason, my below average weight wife has persistently elevated insulin, but normal blood sugar. Still, it was high enough for her doctor to wonder whether she had pancreatic cancer (she doesn’t, thankfully). Shes athletic and active and doctors can’t say she her body simply produces more insulin.

It’s really awful to be doing research and read over and over that those with high insulin should lose weight. If my wife loses 10 pounds she would actually be underweight. When she was pregnant last, she lost ten pounds and the doctors were starting to get worried.

The shittiest part is that my fat diabetic family try to give her diet advice while simultaneously having no discipline. We’ve tried diets to lose what weight she has left and bring her insulin down, but no dice. Meanwhile, my family says they’ll diet, eats trash, are fat, and have diabetes and act as if they and my wife have the same disease.

Ultimately focusing all our attention on people engaging in self destructing behaviors lessens the amount of time spent helping people who actually have a disease

[AstralStorm]

This just shows how little we know about metabolic diseases. She might have one of the genetic insulin resistance variants - a few are already known.

As long as blood sugar is controlled (check with Hb1Ac test) and cancer is thoroughly excluded (not just pancreatic, other ones can cause this too), higher than typical insulin should be no real problem...

Not a licensed medical advice of course.

[mft_]

A female (whose weight was already very much on the lower end of 'normal') was diagnosed as pre-diabetic a while ago, and was able to control/improve things with a fairly strict low-carb --verging on keto-- diet. Sounds similar, and a similar approach may be worth trying?