I think the personal responsibility mindset is healthy for individuals, but not useful for policy design.
If we’re trying to figure out how to prevent obesity from a society-level view, then I agree with your overall point – it’s not tractable to increase everyone’s temperance. But as I understand it, one finding from positive psychology research is that taking responsibility for your decisions and actions does genuinely improve your mental health. And you don’t need to be rich or have a PhD in nutritional biochemistry to eat mostly grains, beans, frozen vegetables and fruit, and nuts.
Similarly, I think there’s only so much that marketing can do to influence a society’s culture. We can and should taboo unhealthy foods, through simple decisions like what restaurant to go to with friends or what food to buy for a party.
When you’re doing effective altruism or policymaking, then I agree that corporations pushing processed food is the relevant factor to focus on. And the public should not be misled about this. But in your personal life, I think personal responsibility becomes the relevant way to think about it.
From an individual-level analysis, I agree that adopting personal responsibility is the way to go. The problem is that it doesn’t seem to work en masse.
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Research suggests that “~80% of people who shed a significant portion of their body fat will not maintain that degree of weight loss for 12 months” and that “dieters regain, on average, more than half of what they lose within two years.”
Obesity and related chronic diseases are systemic issues. They’ll likely only be solved through systemic means rather than via the determination of individuals trying to stand against the system that’s intent on keeping them fat and sick.
My point is not that individual people shouldn’t try to improve their health. It’s that, ultimately, people are a reflection of their environment. And the environment we’ve created over the past 100 years is killing us.
I think the personal responsibility mindset is healthy for individuals, but not useful for policy design.
If we’re trying to figure out how to prevent obesity from a society-level view, then I agree with your overall point – it’s not tractable to increase everyone’s temperance. But as I understand it, one finding from positive psychology research is that taking responsibility for your decisions and actions does genuinely improve your mental health. And you don’t need to be rich or have a PhD in nutritional biochemistry to eat mostly grains, beans, frozen vegetables and fruit, and nuts.
Similarly, I think there’s only so much that marketing can do to influence a society’s culture. We can and should taboo unhealthy foods, through simple decisions like what restaurant to go to with friends or what food to buy for a party.
When you’re doing effective altruism or policymaking, then I agree that corporations pushing processed food is the relevant factor to focus on. And the public should not be misled about this. But in your personal life, I think personal responsibility becomes the relevant way to think about it.
From an individual-level analysis, I agree that adopting personal responsibility is the way to go. The problem is that it doesn’t seem to work en masse.
(I added the following to the main text of this post.)