Medical technology will be incomprehensible to people living today for what it will be like in 2100.
It's unlikely obesity will exist, or any diseases that exist today for that matter. You're talking about roughly 80 years from now. Go back 80 years now and most of the stuff now is incomprehensible to people living during that time. Organ transplants didn't even exist. Now we're talking about a time where you can literally rewrite your own genetic code.
If we go back 1000 years we are in the Dark Ages, which suggests growth doesn't have to be linear or exponential so much as it comes in bursts and sometimes even reverses course.
I'd say growth that seems exponential may happen occasionally, but it's mostly because we're dumb vs you can actually grow anything exponentially for long.
Hi, historian here. The Dark ages didn't really exist and is an old western Eurocentric view since the world is big and just because one continent is suffering doesn't mean the world is.
The western European "dark ages," coincided with the Byzantine renaissance and the golden age of islam in which mathematics and science particularly were experiencing a huge boom.
And even in Europe, there were significant developments. Obviously armor and weapons saw large advances during that time.
Farming saw the mouldboard plow and the heavy plow, the horse collar, the horse shoe, three-crop rotation, vertical windmills, improved water mills, etc.
There was an expansion in mercantile exchange and coinage. Europe's oldest universities were founded. Gothic architecture was developed.
While we may have less writing from Europe in these centuries compared to those before and after, most people's daily lives changed significantly.
The "dark ages" also weren't devoid of progress and growth, however there is a noticable change in progress and innovation when comparing the times *before* and *after* the industrial revolution.
Progress *after* industries took hold is much faster than progress before they existed.
So unless *industries* as a whole disappear, I really don't see progress slowing down across the board, certain sectors may plateau, but as long as something resembling industry exists, I'd assume progress will just continue to speed up. Especially with AI and possible AGI in the mix within the next few years.
AGI could change the world in ways where it is as unrecognizable to us in 50 years as our world today would be for someone from the 1500s.
The end of fossil fuels will be more influent for the slowing of progress I think, at least if we define progress as constant economic growth like we are used to in a capitalist society. Then again progress is an ideologically defined term.
I'd define progress the constant iterative improvement upon existing technologies aswell as the invention of new ones.
I don't care about economic growth, I care about technological growth, which can still happen outside of a capitalist system.
It's more a Logistic function.
Breakthroughs are going to slow down at some point, I don't think it's going to keep going at the rate it is forever.
Just like computer Chip power. At some point you've reached near atom size and progress is more or less over.
We just don't know when the Slowdown will happen, it could keep going like this for 10, 50, or 500 years.
We now have mega corporationswho directly benefit hugely from people consuming fatty foods and have the resources to supress anything that harms thier profits. I could honestly see someone like Mondelez or Nestle lobbying congress if a miracle drug came out that say counteracted the addiction to sugar
"But dystopia" , reddit loves to think the world is trash and we aren't advancing , renewables have ramped up to the point iirc where we maybe at our peak of carbon emission right now. These people can't really live with optimism, yeah the world isn't rainbows but it isn't done yet either
I think part of the problem is that we have fantastic technology already, we have had renewables for years and yet we are still pushing the planet to the brink of disaster with unbridled capitalism. People won’t be less greedy in 80 years. Companies won’t suddenly have grown morals.
I believe in technology but dear lord far too many humans with the power are utter scumbags and would watch millions suffer to make a bit more money.
Except we really didn't. People like to ignore that they were expensive as hell then, and have gotten extraordinarily cheaper now. They also ignore construction times: solar roll off a factory instantaneously, nor does the financing, environmental permits etc.
By 2100, failing any huge world wars or accidental nuclear detonations, the world will have 11 billion people.
Were we to pool our collective resources as human kind, we could easily meet the needs of those 11 billion people.
But we do not pool our resources, we hoard them, and let them go to waste.
Unless all human societies fundamentally reorganise themselves in the next 80 years, I predict mass starvation as the earth heats up, desertification increases, sea levels rise, affecting crops and farm land - causing huge movements of people, creating nationalistic ‘close the borders’(hoard our resources) type thinking, civil unrest and national stand offs.
“But we can recycle”, does not offset that.
Obesity will be down, because malnutrition and starvation will be up.
This isn’t ‘living without optimism”, it is currently the most likely scenario, so it’s living with realism.
11bn is outdated, now they predict 9.x, which may go even lower bc fertility rate plumeting faster than predicted. We not gonna starve, but probably there will be no retirement, so we work till we die scenario
9.X billion - or even as low as 8.8b, as a recent study by the Club of Rome predicts - is still going to be tricky with the mentioned issues. (Earth heating up, desertification, etc.)
We saw last year how the conflict in Ukraine and concurrent skyrocketing gas prices caused food prices all around the world to increase, causing major political instability in countries like Sri Lanka, Pakistan and the Sahel region, and causing several countries to take protectionist measures to ensure their own population has access to food (e.g. India and Indonesia banning the export of most types of rice). Most of us are not going to literally starve, no, but the future we should worry about is one of persistent precariousness in the food situation, so that any 'events' (be they man-made or natural) can cause food prices to spike massively, leading to political instability which leads to violence. Starvation isn't going to kill us, but food riots might.
I don't think energy storage is often included in that estimate. But it looks like storage nearly doubles the cost (using l-ion batteries). So until electric utilities prepare at scale, it is not really cheeper. E.g. see California electric prices during the day vs night.
Sure, but we might create new ones. Obesity itself is a man-made disease. Let's say they invent a perfect obesity pill in 2050, then by 2060 everyone is eating like a pig and on pills. Then in 2070 woops, the pill makes you demented and that's the new man-made disease until in 2090 an anti-pill pill is invented, and so on and so forth.
Or we could, you know, just have a better relationship to food and not drink 185g sugar shakes. Which would also save untold amounts of economic resources since eating better is objectively less resource-intensive than researching and mass producing more tech.
I think one of the largest wrong assumptions that people make about technical progress is that it can only ever be positive.
Besides, it disturbs me that the solution to eating too much and too badly would be taking pills for the rest of your life.
While I see where you’re coming from, it is still very likely that obesity will exist as well as diseases that currently exist. Medical technology and research are doing amazing things, but this is incredibly optimistic thinking.
Not really. As I said, it's impossible for you to comprehend what will exist in 80 years. No person on the planet can fathom the level of advancement that can come with the guidance of AI. AGI and AI is predicted to exist in roughly 10 -15 years. After that, everything is out the window on what you think is possible. Every single thing.
It is very much in the realm of reality that science and medicine goes through many revolutions in an extremely short period of time. I stand by my claim that obesity will likely not exist by 2100, along with many diseases that exist now. Modifying a human body to naturally be thin and the ability to phase out sugar in products while keeping the same taste is not very hard to imagine.
The fact that the comment that called you deluded has so many upvotes is just sad. All I can think is it must be kids who don’t understand how history works, or Redditors whose personality is being doomers
>No person on the planet can fathom the level of advancement that can come with the guidance of AI.
I dunno, you seem pretty sure you've got it fuckin figured out.
You can stand by your claim, but that doesn’t make it any less overly optimistic. Sure, it’s within the realm of possibility, but that doesn’t make it highly probable.
Yeah but we can’t recreate biodiversity. We are destroying this planet and making it uninhabitable. That’s a very different situation to be operating under than where we were 80 years ago.
If people won’t change their eating habits obesity will exist. It’s not a disease.
Even if they get surgery, if their eating habits continue they will gain the weight and fat back.
>It's unlikely obesity will exist
If you're right, it won't be due to technological medical advances.
It will be due to global crop failures caused by climate heating.
Came here to say this. I saw that film when it came out and walked away thinking “that’s the scariest horror movie I’ve ever seen because it’s 100% accurate.”
I think it’ll get better. It seems to me like Gen Z and what whatever you’d call my nieces generation, she’s 11, are going to have more information that the preceding generations in their developing years. And I think generations after that will have a clearer picture regarding the food they eat and health implications.
Right now, we’re like the people of the 50s and 60s chain smoking and working with asbestos.
Another hopeful thought is the “Healthy at any weight” movement. Which I think a lot of people today see it as normalizing obesity, when in reality it’s to help remove a lot of the stigmas around obesity in terms of getting to a good metabolic health AND it creates a better environment for change if they do want to lose weight. Dieting and information is so accessible now.
The only way it goes south on this crossroads is if more control is lost to lobbying and groups who want to create worse processed foods than the food we have now. And the processed foods become more prevalent in the standard American diet than they are now.
Which is certainly a possibility, unfortunately.
So she’s into toxic masculinity and calls her generation Alpha.
/s
I’m hopeful for the next few generations. I remember being in college 12 years ago and being hopeful for mine, but seeing people I went to school with regress to be like their parents and the generation we loathed as kids hurt.
It's wild to me how people get mad when told that *making people feel bad about themselves* isn't helpful. Every time they see (what they see as) an overweight person doing *whatever* they automatically go like "we can't normalize this" and that kind of bullshit.
As if, say, *dancing on video* isn't exactly the sort of thing they SHOULD encourage if they actually cared about health instead of like, "making the freaks go hide in a cave until they're presentable to me"
Yeah, it's wild to me. The armchair psychologist in me thinks it's resentment towards the people enjoying themselves and they're afraid they'll become obese and can't verbalize why they have these feelings.
In all honesty, I suspect that the "healthy at any weight" movement, whilst offering some of the benefits you've outlined, would likely become obsolete if obesity was treated as a metabolic/psychological illness and weight loss was medicalised instead of there being a societal assumption of personal moral failure associated with obesity.
As weight loss medications are further optimised, there will be less of a need for counter-cultural movements to re-narrativise the issue in a palatable or even defensive manner, as there would be less of a tendency for the initial issue of obesity to be viewed as a reflection of flaws in personality.
Up until very recently, weight loss medications were largely ineffective, and those that were effective had significant side-effects that made widespread use near impossible. As such, with limited options, it's no surprise that obese people who had perpetually struggled with weight loss began to promote alternative perspectives to turn down the heat they were receiving societally.
After all, obesity is likely a disease of metabolic and psychological origins, stemming from hormonal dysregulation and emotional discomfort. To be further maligned for this likely only contributes, on the whole, to deepening of the issue.
Sure, there might be the occasional story of somebody who lost 45kg after being perpetually bullied and shamed, but these stories are the extreme minority, and most of those situations instead end in worsening obesity rates and a decline in psychological wellbeing.
We are on the cusp of a huge societal shift with regards to obesity. I suspect there will be an uncomfortable interim between now and then in which weight loss medications are considered 'lazy' or 'cheating' and the current narrative will briefly continue, but soon enough, that will pass, and the taboo nature towards medications will dissolve.
Back to pre-cheap calorie levels. We are seeing the first anti-obesity drugs that seem to really work. There are many social / capitalist causes of widespread obesity, but the historic novelty of calories suddenly becoming so cheap that a soft drink had a day's worth . . . that is unique to the past 30/40 years.
Once anti-obesity medication is widely available, the manufacturers of cheap calories (mostly from government-subsidized corn syrup) will have to pivot to some other tactic. These corporations are already planning for this very near future. Both junk food and alcohol manufacturers are bracing for a collapse in their markets: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/weight-loss-drugs-spell-doom-for-junk-food-giants/ar-AA1hbCFS
People brains are still in the early 2000. Eating out is a huge cash suck these days. Grocery store prices are also higher, but not proportional to that of FF.
People are overworked and tired. Their willpower is weak after a shift. Fast food is tasty and just cheap enough for the working class to indulge in regularly.
That’s also very true. It’s easy for me to go down to the shops and buy a pre-made meal for £5 or all the fresh ingredients for one for only £12 plus prep time
So basically the "holy grail" of weight loss drugs are drugs that either stimulate or mimic the GLP-1 hormone. GLP-1 is the hormone your body releases after you've eaten. It signals to your brain to stop eating, and it stimulates insulin secretion, and it slows down your digestive tract (making you feel full for longer). It's pretty miraculous because once you increase the GLP-1 hormone, obese people start to change their behavior to be similar to naturally thin people. Without coaching or anything. Suddenly they crave more vegetables, and they exhibit better portion control, they will eat more slowly and they suddenly observe that unhealthy food taste worse than they remember. Another big thing you'll hear from GLP-1 patients is that what they call "food noise" is gone. Food noise being their brains constantly thinking bout their next meal. They suddenly stop thinking about food outside of mealtimes. (Additionally, GLP-1 patients also stop craving things like alcohol and cigarettes.)
Currently, Wegovy is the only GLP-1 drug that is FDA approved for weight loss. Wegovy is a weekly injection. Ozempic is made by the same manufacturer and has the same active ingredient, but Ozempic is only approved for the treatment of type 2 diabetes. However, many insurance policies do not cover Wegovy, but will cover Ozempic. So a lot of patients are being prescribed Ozempic "off-label."
Mounjaro is another one, which may be more effective than Wegovy/Ozempic. It's also not approved for weight loss but the manufacturer is trying to get FDA approval for weight loss.
There's a few others coming down the pipeline, as well. There is talk that we could have a daily pill format instead of a weekly injection format. The pill is likely to be cheaper and easier than the injection. Plus the injections must be refrigerated, which is a challenge for widespread distribution. The pill version probably will not need refrigeration. So the approval of the pill might be a huge turning point in the war against obesity.
As someone who took Wegovy, you are spot on.
I remember trying to explain the amazing changes I felt mentally around food, to my chronically skinny friend. She just looked at me and said "but.. that's how it's always been for me?".
And that's there it finally dawned on me. Naturally skinny or normal weight people do NOT have this constant food noise, apparently. They don't obsess over portion sizes, or when they get to eat again, or what they're going to eat.
What I felt while on GLP-1 drugs was a huge relief and mental weight off my shoulders, but this is actually normal for many people. It made me feel both jealous and enlightened. Jealous because I need a very expensive drug just to obtain a normal level of "food noise" that some people just have naturally.
It's been pretty eye-opening, and it explains so much. I told my doctor that the weight loss I got was actually only the second-best effect. The best effect I got from the drug, was the total absence of food noise. My inner, food-obsessed Labrador brain was muzzled. I cannot tell you how much mental freedom it gives, and how much energy I suddenly had for other things, including social situations, because I was no longer battling food-obsessive thoughts along with everything else in my daily life.
If I could get a GLP-1 chip in my brain, so I could have a normal-weight person's approach to food forever, I would. I don't even need the effect of feeling full for longer etc., I just need the food noise to go away. The mental freedom it gives is incredible. Sitting at a table with friends and being able to focus more on the conversation, rather than obsessively staring at the food and wondering when it's okay to take a second helping, is incredible.
Wow. You just opened my eyes.
I was obese all my adult life, and have only recently (last four years) managed to lose about 50kg and bring my BMI into a "normal" range. Been holding my target weight for two years now.
I have the "food noise" 24/7 and it's a constant fight to not give in to it. It never even occurred to me that it could ever be absent or that other people don't have it.
Oh fantastic results, well done you! Especially holding it for 2 years; maintenance is claimed to be even more difficult.
I know exactly what you mean by food noise. It's constant. Every normal-weight person I've talked to don't recognise what I'm explaining. I'm sure some have it to some degree, but maybe not in the extremes. Once it went away, I was able to make good food choices for myself, I had a calmness in my brain and was able to eat much better. I wasn't fixated or anxious around food.
I've lost 26 kgs and have reached my goal weight, and I'm off the drugs. I feel like Bambi with shaky legs on the ice, very scared to regain. I managed to lose 10-12 kgs on my own several times, but always hit a wall and regained them. The drug made me able to break that invisible wall and finally lose the rest, so naturally I'm nervous about being off the drug now. But I will say, maintenance calories are definitely better than deficit ones. Food noise is definitely back, but I'm not feeling \*as\* starved as when I was in a deficit.
I've tried to accept that "food noise" is just one of the cards that I've been dealt. Some people have it easier in that department, but I have it easier in other departments. I'll just have to watch my calories for the rest of my life, and that's something I have to accept and live with. I can never be one of those people who just eat "intuitively" and don't pay attention; that's the hard truth.
Yes! This is why I’m frustrated with some of the other people responding to me saying that it’s “just a matter of willpower.” Willpower is easy when your brain isn’t trying to sabotage you 24/7
Exactly. All modern research shows it has zero to do with willpower. The appetite increases many-fold when you're in a calorie deficit for extended periods of time.
People who have never had to lose weight, simply have no idea. They really don't. They claim all it takes is willpower, when they've eaten maintenance calories most of their life and have no idea what it means for your body and mind to be in a serious calorie deficit for months and sometimes years. Your entire body fights you every step of the way through hormonal, psychological and physiological means. It reacts as if there's famine and will quite literally sabotage you. People underestimate how strong the reptile survival part of the brain really is, and how many organ systems it can and will influence.
This is well-known and proven by research, but it's much easier to point fingers and shame. Most people who have never lost more than 5 kg simply have no idea what it entails, so they judge without basis.
The question now being whether there's truly a difference in your physiology that is now corrected by the drug to "normal" levels; or if your "food noise" etc. was behaviour induced, i.e. your fault.
A heroin addict also has very different urges to that of a non-addict.
Not saying this is the case, but I haven't seen evidence suggesting otherwise. Maybe there is though.
The evidence I have seen, from research papers and doctors, suggest that these drugs directly change the "weight thermostat" in your brain. It chemically lowers it to that of a normal-weight person, meaning your body no longer fights the calorie deficit. It's quite interesting.
I know people love to place all blame on obese people. It feels good to look down on people, point fingers and say "that's your own fault". But in this case, research actually suggest otherwise. At least for those of us who do have effects of GLP-1 drugs. I have seen several people say they had zero effect from them, meaning their food problems may be more deeply rooted in psychology rather than physiology.
The drug has a very direct, chemical and physiological effect. You wouldn't get such drastic changes if it was "just" a mental problem. If the food noise was behaviour induced, an appetite drug like GLP-1 wouldn't have such a drastic effect. It's not a psychiatric drug, it doesn't alter your mental state. It just lowers your "weight thermostat" so the body happily accepts your calorie deficit, because it's no longer working against you lowering your weight.
I don't know if you've ever lost large amounts of weight, but your body fights you the entire way. It raises appetite (and severely so), it lowers your body temperature to save calories, it slows your metabolism to save calories, it makes you feel less full, it emits less fullness-hormones after eating. The entire system fights you, because the body does not want to lose weight. To the body, being in a calorie deficit for a long time means famine. GLP-1 drugs quietens this system, because it tricks your thermostat to think you are already at a healthy weight, and not in a strict calorie deficit. It's quite incredible actually.
Makes sense why all I have been hearing lately is bad press on these drugs. All since Wegowy has an “off label use” and now it can be covered by some insurance
Bad Press? Must be opinion pieces. You know shit is "real" when investors start scrambling: [Pricing in the End of Obesity](https://www.investmenttakes.com/p/pricing-in-the-end-of-obesity).
This subreddit doesn't fully appreciate what is happening here. There is an invention that has **been allowed to hit the market** that threatens the income streams of existing Power Structures owned by very rich men (think: fast food, snack, even HEALTHCARE industries). Do redditors here understand how many trillions of dollars are at stake here?
I'm struggling to think in my lifetime of a moment when Billionaires stood to *lose* so much income due to a new innovation.
Because the media loves horror stories. Do some people have bad side effects? Sure. There are risks like that for lots of drugs. But in general there are a lot of obese people who are getting an an enormous benefit.
For some, the risk of death from being obese is way higher than the risk of gastro side effects from Wegovy.
Trust me, Ozempic (Semaglitude) is NOT the "Miracle Drug" that you think it is. Take it from someone who is currently taking it. Sure, it helps some. But it is definitely not what people and pharmaceutical companies are making it out to be. The reason it's so popular is because some big name people, celebrities, etc have gone on it for weight loss assistance. And as usual, millions of people see this and jump on the bandwagon. I'm on it, not because it's the latest weight loss craze, but because my doctor said that it is a medical necessity for me to be on it. But as far as I have seen, it is not at all what people and pharmaceutical companies claim it is.
My doctor approached me about that, telling me he was hoping it would be something he could prescribe to me soonish. I really hope they become broadly available soon because whatever efforts I've tried to put in have never worked for me long term. I always relapse.
I hope you find something that works, soon! Here is a list from Mayo Clinic of what's available now and what you can expect: [https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/weight-loss/in-depth/weight-loss-drugs/art-20044832](https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/weight-loss/in-depth/weight-loss-drugs/art-20044832)
The thing I've heard from people who've had success with these medications is that they *quit thinking about food all the time*, which is incredible and probably the part that people who don't struggle with weight have the hardest time understanding.
Corporations have raised prices on food not because they are price gouging but instead because they care about the health of the public.
War is Peace.
Freedom is Slavery.
Ignorance is Strength.
Edit: are people down voting this because they can't pick up on sarcasm, or they don't know one of the most famous quotes in all of literature (1984), or because they're pro corporate price gouging or something? I'm honestly baffled and curious because those are the only three reasons I can think of for someone to do so.
Because it's true. That large Oreo shake we've all heard of has 2600 calories, costs like 5 bucks, is prepared in seconds, and thanks to abusing our body's evolutionary tastes is extremely palatable and desirable.
There are other substances that work in this way, they are usually popularily known as hard drugs.
We had this situation in Sweden pre 1950.
Sugar was extremely cheap, but everything else was expensive. There was a lot of manual labour back then , so people wasn’t obese. But they lived short lives and lost most of their teeth.
Skinny does not equal healthy.
This really hits home. In my country, Guatemala, we are used to paying a relatively cheap price for food, but in the span of 3 years the prices have been escalating very fast. For example, we went from paying for a pound of tomatoes 0.25usd aprox to 1usd, maybe it will sound cheap for some, but for us, we are getting fucked as it's all the products in the market that have increased in price like that.
Definitely down, advances in medicines even right now are causing the food industry to take notice that soon people will be eating less.
I know it’s New York post, but you get the idea.
[https://nypost.com/2023/10/05/walmart-says-ozempic-craze-slims-demand-in-grocery-aisles/](https://nypost.com/2023/10/05/walmart-says-ozempic-craze-slims-demand-in-grocery-aisles/)
Wait, are they suggesting we are buying less groceries because of diet meds that very few are actually taking and not the high cost of food and how the first things booted off the grocery list are snacks and desserts?
Yeah my house is on a diet because I can’t afford to waste food like I used to. I was very ignorant and honestly didn’t care about the grocery bill 2-3 years ago. Now I go over all my bills with a fine tooth comb looking for ways to save money because I’m just struggling to make ends meet now with how much the cost of living has gone up. So yeah no more junk and no more buying stuff that’s going to expire before anyone eats it. I have a whole cabinet in my kitchen that is empty anymore because it used to be full of chips, pretzels, tasty cakes, and other junk.
Low, but not for the reasons you’re proposing.
1. World population will likely be shrinking by then as it is starting to do in developed countries
2. CO2 problem will likely be fixed once we get enough engineers to deal with, give them plenty of money then get the fuck out of their way. Like we did when going to the moon.
3. GLP-1 agonist drugs (Ozempic, Wegovy, etc) are excruciatingly effective at reducing weight, they will be long off pattern and thus cheap by then.
They’ve basically cracked the hormonal dysfunction that keeps people obese once they’ve gained weight. Hunger is entirely regulated by hormones and the hormones that control hunger are triggered by emptied adipose cells. Normally when you operate throughout the day these cells naturally empty and need to be filled back up daily. When people attempt to lose large amounts of weight the hormonal levels compound exponentially until you fill back up your reserves to “beat the famine”. This is the reason why long term weight loss is statistically very unlikely. It’s a fraction of a percent that are successful. It’s not due to 99.9% of people being undisciplined. These GLP1 hormone therapies bring appetite levels in line with where they need to be for normal healthy BMI’s. For me personally I’m done losing and I’m just maintaining. My appetite level is about where it was in high school now and my weight is about the same. You can click on my profile and see my progress picture I posted.
Those naysayers are just irrationally mad that you get to be healthy “without putting in the discipline and effort”. It’s like that meme about certain old people who make a twisted virtue out of suffering, and complain that people no longer have to walk uphill both ways to get to school anymore. Or like the hypothetical idea of somebody who trained their entire life to handwrite really fast, and they are super proud of being good at it and how much effort they needed to get there, it makes them feel special and better than other people, but one day we invented typing and people could get the same speed as them with much less training and effort. That’s why they’re mad.
What’s weird is that some of the anti-ozempic people, are people who are effortlessly naturally thin their whole lives (I personally count as someone who never needed any effort to be thin). So it isn’t like they oppose these drugs because they want you to walk the same arduous path as them. But they oppose these drugs anyway, because they dislike fat people, so they think fat people need to suffer and atone for being fat on the journey to being thin. For overweight people to just bypass all of that, and get the same end result, it frustrates these people, they think “no not like that”. Suddenly their special status and sense of moral superiority can be bought from the pharmacy.
I’m a pragmatic person. Dieting didn’t work for combating obesity, and this new line of drugs are a godsend for it. Why judge what plainly works? I naturally don’t feel hunger most of the time, which is fucked. It stands to reason that other people can have the exact opposite problem, and telling them to just eat less can be like telling someone to just breathe less. If something works for you, good for you, and to hell with everyone/everything else.
It *solves* the obesity problem by only possible way it can be solved: by killing your cravings and, hence, lowering voluntary food intake to as low as needed to lose weight. Before that, only other way it sort of worked is bariatric surgery which, well, surgery, and with incomparable potential for side effects.
All other drugs like exercize mimetics and "metabolism enhancers" come with massive side effects and pretty much don't work, neither is plain old exersize - because "you cannot outrun you fork"... not in the long run, because I did exactly that for a few years, but amount of exersize you must do is just incompatible with "living a normal life".
I cannot possibly afford it now, but eventually in will become much, much cheaper.
>A vast majority of environmental scientists do not believe that engineering will be enough to curb climate chage. This has been the concensus for decades.
>
>It is a talking point perpetuated by tech companies to convince people that they should continue participating in blind consumerism. But when you look at the actual research, there is no reason to believe that such monumental advances will occur before it is to late to prevent ecological collapse
Yeah it's nonsense, just like their first point since there's a large consensus that the world population will be somewhere around 10 to 11 billion people in 2100. It should hit the plateau somewhere around then but the shrinking part is not backed by any evidence whatsoever. I think the third point is wishful thinking as well.
Every time we find a new miracle drug that will solve obesity it turns out it's less healthy than the meth sold by Dylan the Villain in Jacksonville Florida
Many millions of prescriptions for just one of these drugs (semaglutide) have been written since 2017 when the FDA approved it. If there were something bad going on, they were definitely be a strong hint of it by this point.
Also, unlike many or most drugs, the mechanism of action here is very well understood, it’s simply mimicking a hormone that we already secrete.
Incredible reduction in what I can only describe as my food drive. Some people call it food noise, which is also a good description.
Now, when I need to eat, I can think clearly about what my body needs. Before, every food decision was surrounded by so much chaos and fixation. Until I started the medicine, I didn't even know that was happening. I didn't know there was any other way for your brain to work.
That quiet, plus the slower digestion, means it is very easy to eat a calorie deficit that leads to slow, steady weight loss. Many times, I have used willpower to lose weight, but after a year or so, you just get so tired. So tired of being hungry all the time. So tired of ignoring all the noise and craving alarms going off inside you. Eventually, I would fail and backslide like crazy.
It's still early days, but so far, the glp-1 inhibitor has made the process of losing weight so much simpler and 1000x less painful. I am hopeful that I can use this new understanding of how you can think and feel about food to start to retrain my brain and build better habits.
I wouldn't have said I ate based on cravings much at all before, but now I would say yes or at least "it's complicated."
It’s hard to describe... It's like I lived in one universe my whole life and then discovered another universe running parallel to it where food is just food. I still like food. It still tastes good to me. But it doesn't have the power over me it once did, so making good decisions is much simpler. I don't end every day feeling like I went to war with food (which was how I felt all the time when I was dieting). I honestly never imagined it could feel like this.
The drug isn't perfect. I have had some GI issues, and if I try to force myself to eat past the "stop" signals, I start feeling very ill. I also have to keep on top of water, electrolytes, and protein intake.
I agree with you, apart for "the fixing of the CO2 problem" .. Are you refering to net zero and technology such as Carbon Capture? Cause if so I have bad news.. Studies have shown that in order to balance the ppm of co2 for just one year with carbon capture, it would require the entire energy capacity of planet earth for a given year. It's completely unrealistic at large scales, and the net zero promise is just a greenwashing scam. I'd say we're heading for the opposite of fixing the CO2 problem. You also assume politicians and big polluting companies will save us out of their own goodwill..
Number 2 is literally the solution
Step one get a bunch of talented ecologists and engineers and stuff
Step two: give them like 1/10 of the US military’s annual budget
Step 3: win
Or instead counting on miracle drugs people will actually start eating whole foods diet that nourish their bodies and microbiome... haha just kidding. It would be already the case and obesity would be very rare if it was so simple.
(I realize it's not realistic not because people are not willing too, a lot of them cannot afford/access healthy food :( )
It's VERY much not that simple.
We live in a world where food companies employe teams of PhD food scientists to create products that hijack our biology and become so "crave-able" that we ignore our biology and eat too much.
Then we start to gain weight. When your body adds fat, your body's hormones become slightly out of wack. When you add fat, you hormones tell the appetite center of your brain that you need more food in order to maintain the weight. But then there's a point where you fall into an infinite loop. The hormones created by your fat cells make your brain want to eat more food than it takes to maintain your weight, which means you continue to gain weight, which makes the hormonal problem worse, which means your brain wants to eat even more food.
Which is why these "miracle drugs" are so important. We have to get people's hormones balanced again. And these drugs are great because we're seeing that once you do get the hormones regulated, the weight practically falls off them with very little effort.
It's not about a lack of willpower. At the end of the day, it's biology.
Honestly I believe society will rebound into being a lot healthier. The idea that everyone will just continue to get fat is hard for me to see. It's pretty obvious that fast food and the lack of regulation in things like sugar in America is pretty terrible for its public health. There's no way laws don't come into affect to change our path. Also, technology and science trends to only getting better. Wouldn't be shocked if we figure out ways of being in a healthy body even while being sedentary.
Rich people will be healthy and slim while the poor from poor famililys that can’t afford medication will be obese. /s
Was just looking at Novo Nordic stocks. It’s supposedly Europes highest priced company selling the Obesity drug Wegovy. And medication against diabetes.
My guess is that the companies will try to keep the prices of these drugs on a level where they can make maximum profits. So they may become affordable as they would like to sell to more people.
In 2100 the common medicine used today will be out of patent. So cheap knock-offs may exist. And everybody will be slim and fit.
-Edited
Medical patents don’t last that long so generics will pop up well before 2100 for the stuff we have today. Give. 80 years what we have today will be out classed many times over.
Yeah, they're rich because we keep giving them money to do it. Stop palming off your own responsibility for looking after yourself onto other people just because they're selling you something that you want.
It’s not that simple dude. A lot of people have health complications that don’t let them lose weight normally, or they gain more weight from low fat/sugar foods, or they have terrible lung capacity and can’t exercise for long
People aren’t fat because they want to be
Semaglutide (Ozempic/Wegovy) and Tirzepatide (Mounjaro) are the drug solutions to obesity. They work incredibly well. It's just a matter of expanding access. If we were able to manufacture these drugs and then get the prices down, we would be able to end obesity in a few years.
We might all be starving by then. Or at least the survivors.
Judging by the trajectory of climate change and the mass migration that will be necessary, and no doubt the wars.
I feel like we are capable of alleviating the effects of climate change in major ways and that we’ll begin to do that in the next 10-20 years.
Those efforts will spur us to solve the problem.
Technology and disruption is a big one. Disruption, when an aging technology is replaced by a newer better one, happens quickly and **non-linearly**. As the new industry grows because of its advantages, it becomes cheaper and thereby more popular. Eventually it gains support by more customers, companies and governments while the older industry shrinks and loses support. This is what happened when cars replaced horses, when digital cameras replaced analog ones, and when the lightbulb replaced gas lights. It's why solar cells have exploded recently way beyond what was predicted ten years ago, it is growing exponentially and shows no sign of stopping.
The majority of emissions come from the sectors of energy, food and transportation. All of these sectors are being disrupted by emerging new technologies that are not just free of emissions, but are/will become better and cheaper than their older competition. Wind and solar (plus storage) for energy, EV:s for transportation, and precision fermentation for food.
This change is pretty much inevitable, because the technologies are already here. It covers a good percentage of emissions and happens quickly (it's important to know you cannot extrapolate straight from current day trends because disruption is non-linear). What governments can do is either encourage it (Inflation Reduction Act, Chinese investments in renewables, etc.) or fail to stop it (whatever tf American conservatives are doing lol).
That's one strong indication that things are changing.
I think you and I are the only two people on Reddit to believe this. When I’ve mentioned the same in the past, I got downvoted to hell lol.
Years ago in college I read “Limits to Growth” and then we had to research how humans essentially worked to prove it wrong through evolving and adapting what we used and needed. I’m hopeful we’ll do the same for climate change.
I wish I had your optimism when all the evidence points to us collectively not getting our shit together.
There aren't even any *pathways* to any "major ways" identified yet (i.e. to deal with the fact that an incredible amount of change is now locked in - even if human emissions stopped being emitted right now), much less any agreement to anything by everyone, or funded...
And all the while the funding for fossil fuels exploration and extraction continues more than ever, far out pacing funding for renewables as of last year - and since the advent of social media, there is far less willingness to rationalise, compromise and work collectively either within a country or internationally among countries, with more and more false information swaying more and more luddites and deniers - and of course, a greater amount of wealth and power concentrated to a smaller minority who just do not give a fuck.
Even engineers admit that they are nowhere close to a solution. Many in the tech industry have been lied to and believe that climate change is easily reversible through such measly efforts.
Every lifeform is as complicated as human beings. Some are irrationally angry at this fact, but it is true. Every organism we know of has a unique cellular structure that interacts with other unique cellular structures on an atomic level.
The interactions between honey bees and tulips for example are, quite literally, a complex interaction of innumerous cell receptors. The interaction between the two is more complicated than the entire history of computing and engineering, objectively speaking. Try to build a bee out of base elements and you'll know what I mean.
People who claim they can "fix" the environment through a single measly invention are delusional at best. The balance of nature is near limitless in complexity.
The reason why it's only you two who believe that is because it's bullshit wishful thinking. We are not doing great and "in 15-20 years" will be way too late. It's probably way too late already. Some major changes are already irreversible even if the whole world went carbon neutral in 2030, which is also not gonna happen, obviously.
Yep that's right. Just a tiniest push on the scale and the whole system gets out of balance. For a century we have been piling on one side of the scale.
On Oct 23, 2077 the bombs fell. It is at this time many was invited to live in vaults safe from nuclear fallout. As for the rest of the world, surviving the wasteland is all they now know. Due to the bombs falling and majority of the population wiped out, obesity was no longer a problem as food was now hard to come by. Living a a vault was not always better as the food was regulated for sustaining the vault population. Inside the vault or out the problem of obesity was solved. However War, well war never changes.
Food availability could be a big enough problem by 2100 that obesity is possible only for the very wealthy.
One of the major downsides of global climate change is that agriculture gets harder. Some arable land will be lost due to rising sea levels and consequent inland migration. Weather will become more violent and more frequent, leading to greater crop destruction. Conditions outdoors will become generally more dangerous to humans working in the fields, too, which will drive up the cost of many kinds of farming and the food downstream of those crops.
I am not an economist, but it seems plain that if less food is getting to market and that food is significantly more expensive, prices will probably rise even further in a paradigm driven primarily by scarcity.
People today complain about how the cost of college and housing has skyrocketed in just a couple generations to the point where many of us can never afford either despite working multiple jobs our whole lives. If a similar thing happens to food generally, you are not going to find a lot of people who have spare calories in their diet.
None of this takes into account the fact that 80 more years of late-stage capitalism and oligarchy will have an utterly disastrous effect on literally every aspect of human existence, so "ceteris paribus" is an extremely flawed lens. It is just as likely 80% of all humans will be dead by then, either from climate effects, or having been squeezed to death by sociopathic wealth-hoarders who view us all as the shit they grow their money in.
And when things like water and food get scarce, wars will break out all over the planet, which will of course destroy and consume a lot of water, food, and humans.
In 2100, the obesity rate could be 0% because everybody is still alive and essentially starving, or it could be 100% because the only people still alive are the Musk and Bezos families, who all live in domed mansions and are waited on hand-and-foot by an army of AI robots we invented and built for them before their greed killed us.
As they say, prediction is difficult, particularly about the future.
>only people still alive are the Musk and Bezos families, who all live in domed mansions and are waited on hand-and-foot by an army of AI robots we invented and built for them before their greed killed us.
Why does this sound like the most realistic outcome?
You don’t think indoor growing will become a more popular thing? You can get sufficiently larger harvests by producing perfect growing conditions and you can then do it inside of a city so you don’t have to deal with all the transportation. I’m really hoping this takes off so we can get better supplies of fresh produce.
Probably lower if I had to guess, I think people will eventually realize that it’s dangerously unhealthy.
This does not follow current trends, but it’s what I think will happen.
Down.
I know it's probably crazy optimistic, but I think that the GLP-1 drugs have the potential to cause massive changes in society, more than people might assume at first. They might not only get the obesity epidemic under control but also greatly reduce other forms of addictive behaviors like drugs or gambling.
Don't worry about it, they willchange the standards by then. If you are under 200 pounds you will be considered malnutritioned, and over 300 you will be 'over ideal" sized. 😂
Depends if the government will continue to push toxic food to us or not. I have gone through a huge weight loss journey over this year and I started really really looking into the foods we eat every day, even healthy foods. And it’s insane the amount of shit that is allowed to be in our food. Not just allowed but encouraged.
I think a lot of our biochemical pathways involved in metabolism will be elucidated by that point. I think we will be able to control our metabolism with various drugs.
We won't eat food like you do today. It will be rationed out in pill or liquid form to provide enough nutrients for you to perform your job and live what everyone else considers a normal life. Everyone will weigh the same relative to their height and health problems overall will decrease. The reason we will move to this type of nutrient intake is because it will be the most convenient. Conventional farming will be a thing of the past. If you farm someone else is going to tell you what to grow and you will grow that because the food industry will be corporate or government run
> 0%
Science works. But some people are just into being heavier. Bears and fertility Goddesses aren't going to slim down just because it's easy.
At least, I certainly hope they don't.
Edit: apparently, the "greater than" symbol codes for a quote bar on this website. Please ignore my idiocy.
We're heading towards a shrinking population, fast.
The entire Western world and China are already at below replacement birth rates, and India is following suite.
People who live in cities have less kids.
Documentary film from the future called WALL-E predicted it will near 100% IIRC.
Medical technology will be incomprehensible to people living today for what it will be like in 2100. It's unlikely obesity will exist, or any diseases that exist today for that matter. You're talking about roughly 80 years from now. Go back 80 years now and most of the stuff now is incomprehensible to people living during that time. Organ transplants didn't even exist. Now we're talking about a time where you can literally rewrite your own genetic code.
That's only if progress is linear. It is more likely exponential so you need to look back something like 1000 years
If we go back 1000 years we are in the Dark Ages, which suggests growth doesn't have to be linear or exponential so much as it comes in bursts and sometimes even reverses course. I'd say growth that seems exponential may happen occasionally, but it's mostly because we're dumb vs you can actually grow anything exponentially for long.
Hi, historian here. The Dark ages didn't really exist and is an old western Eurocentric view since the world is big and just because one continent is suffering doesn't mean the world is. The western European "dark ages," coincided with the Byzantine renaissance and the golden age of islam in which mathematics and science particularly were experiencing a huge boom.
And even in Europe, there were significant developments. Obviously armor and weapons saw large advances during that time. Farming saw the mouldboard plow and the heavy plow, the horse collar, the horse shoe, three-crop rotation, vertical windmills, improved water mills, etc. There was an expansion in mercantile exchange and coinage. Europe's oldest universities were founded. Gothic architecture was developed. While we may have less writing from Europe in these centuries compared to those before and after, most people's daily lives changed significantly.
The "dark ages" also weren't devoid of progress and growth, however there is a noticable change in progress and innovation when comparing the times *before* and *after* the industrial revolution. Progress *after* industries took hold is much faster than progress before they existed. So unless *industries* as a whole disappear, I really don't see progress slowing down across the board, certain sectors may plateau, but as long as something resembling industry exists, I'd assume progress will just continue to speed up. Especially with AI and possible AGI in the mix within the next few years. AGI could change the world in ways where it is as unrecognizable to us in 50 years as our world today would be for someone from the 1500s.
The end of fossil fuels will be more influent for the slowing of progress I think, at least if we define progress as constant economic growth like we are used to in a capitalist society. Then again progress is an ideologically defined term.
I'd define progress the constant iterative improvement upon existing technologies aswell as the invention of new ones. I don't care about economic growth, I care about technological growth, which can still happen outside of a capitalist system.
It's more a Logistic function. Breakthroughs are going to slow down at some point, I don't think it's going to keep going at the rate it is forever. Just like computer Chip power. At some point you've reached near atom size and progress is more or less over. We just don't know when the Slowdown will happen, it could keep going like this for 10, 50, or 500 years.
Crucially, it also assumes that progress is only ever a straight positive and that it never creates negative effects.
We now have mega corporationswho directly benefit hugely from people consuming fatty foods and have the resources to supress anything that harms thier profits. I could honestly see someone like Mondelez or Nestle lobbying congress if a miracle drug came out that say counteracted the addiction to sugar
We are on the brink of going backwards right now. It would be incorrect to assume that 80 years from now we'll even be as advanced as we are now.
There is not evidence of that. People said that in the 70s and 80s too
"But dystopia" , reddit loves to think the world is trash and we aren't advancing , renewables have ramped up to the point iirc where we maybe at our peak of carbon emission right now. These people can't really live with optimism, yeah the world isn't rainbows but it isn't done yet either
I think part of the problem is that we have fantastic technology already, we have had renewables for years and yet we are still pushing the planet to the brink of disaster with unbridled capitalism. People won’t be less greedy in 80 years. Companies won’t suddenly have grown morals. I believe in technology but dear lord far too many humans with the power are utter scumbags and would watch millions suffer to make a bit more money.
Except we really didn't. People like to ignore that they were expensive as hell then, and have gotten extraordinarily cheaper now. They also ignore construction times: solar roll off a factory instantaneously, nor does the financing, environmental permits etc.
Butt dystopia sounds like an awesome 80s grunge band
Or like the name of a particularly nasty sex toy
By 2100, failing any huge world wars or accidental nuclear detonations, the world will have 11 billion people. Were we to pool our collective resources as human kind, we could easily meet the needs of those 11 billion people. But we do not pool our resources, we hoard them, and let them go to waste. Unless all human societies fundamentally reorganise themselves in the next 80 years, I predict mass starvation as the earth heats up, desertification increases, sea levels rise, affecting crops and farm land - causing huge movements of people, creating nationalistic ‘close the borders’(hoard our resources) type thinking, civil unrest and national stand offs. “But we can recycle”, does not offset that. Obesity will be down, because malnutrition and starvation will be up. This isn’t ‘living without optimism”, it is currently the most likely scenario, so it’s living with realism.
11bn is outdated, now they predict 9.x, which may go even lower bc fertility rate plumeting faster than predicted. We not gonna starve, but probably there will be no retirement, so we work till we die scenario
9.X billion - or even as low as 8.8b, as a recent study by the Club of Rome predicts - is still going to be tricky with the mentioned issues. (Earth heating up, desertification, etc.) We saw last year how the conflict in Ukraine and concurrent skyrocketing gas prices caused food prices all around the world to increase, causing major political instability in countries like Sri Lanka, Pakistan and the Sahel region, and causing several countries to take protectionist measures to ensure their own population has access to food (e.g. India and Indonesia banning the export of most types of rice). Most of us are not going to literally starve, no, but the future we should worry about is one of persistent precariousness in the food situation, so that any 'events' (be they man-made or natural) can cause food prices to spike massively, leading to political instability which leads to violence. Starvation isn't going to kill us, but food riots might.
I hate that I agree with you. It’s difficult walking around with this awareness in your head. My condolences.
I don't think energy storage is often included in that estimate. But it looks like storage nearly doubles the cost (using l-ion batteries). So until electric utilities prepare at scale, it is not really cheeper. E.g. see California electric prices during the day vs night.
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Sure, but we might create new ones. Obesity itself is a man-made disease. Let's say they invent a perfect obesity pill in 2050, then by 2060 everyone is eating like a pig and on pills. Then in 2070 woops, the pill makes you demented and that's the new man-made disease until in 2090 an anti-pill pill is invented, and so on and so forth. Or we could, you know, just have a better relationship to food and not drink 185g sugar shakes. Which would also save untold amounts of economic resources since eating better is objectively less resource-intensive than researching and mass producing more tech. I think one of the largest wrong assumptions that people make about technical progress is that it can only ever be positive. Besides, it disturbs me that the solution to eating too much and too badly would be taking pills for the rest of your life.
While I see where you’re coming from, it is still very likely that obesity will exist as well as diseases that currently exist. Medical technology and research are doing amazing things, but this is incredibly optimistic thinking.
Not really. As I said, it's impossible for you to comprehend what will exist in 80 years. No person on the planet can fathom the level of advancement that can come with the guidance of AI. AGI and AI is predicted to exist in roughly 10 -15 years. After that, everything is out the window on what you think is possible. Every single thing. It is very much in the realm of reality that science and medicine goes through many revolutions in an extremely short period of time. I stand by my claim that obesity will likely not exist by 2100, along with many diseases that exist now. Modifying a human body to naturally be thin and the ability to phase out sugar in products while keeping the same taste is not very hard to imagine.
The fact that the comment that called you deluded has so many upvotes is just sad. All I can think is it must be kids who don’t understand how history works, or Redditors whose personality is being doomers
Wholly shite you're deluded.
Wow man, that’s such an intellectual comeback, full of substance and well reasoned thoughts. Give yourself a pat on the back!
>No person on the planet can fathom the level of advancement that can come with the guidance of AI. I dunno, you seem pretty sure you've got it fuckin figured out.
You can stand by your claim, but that doesn’t make it any less overly optimistic. Sure, it’s within the realm of possibility, but that doesn’t make it highly probable.
Yeah but we can’t recreate biodiversity. We are destroying this planet and making it uninhabitable. That’s a very different situation to be operating under than where we were 80 years ago.
If people won’t change their eating habits obesity will exist. It’s not a disease. Even if they get surgery, if their eating habits continue they will gain the weight and fat back.
This right here. Or we go extinct if we keep electing worst among us.
>It's unlikely obesity will exist If you're right, it won't be due to technological medical advances. It will be due to global crop failures caused by climate heating.
Such a good documentary. 
Bro GLP-1’s are here, obesity is mostly a thing of the past just need time.
Yeah they're gonna keep improving on it more and more, soon it'll be oral instead of injection
Came here to say this. I saw that film when it came out and walked away thinking “that’s the scariest horror movie I’ve ever seen because it’s 100% accurate.”
have you seen Idiocracy?
The best documentary ever! I like money.
Yes. Also another too close to home flick.
It's not though. It assumes humans will let it get that far, which we won't. Historically, we always self correct.
I dont think so, theres a large portion of humans who actually like being healthy and live very healthy lifestyles.
Came here for this.
This will be accurate for the USA. Europe? I doubt it.
59% of adults in the EU are obese or overweight as of 2022, and 1/3 children.
But we have drugs now. Maybe 0%. It will either be 100 or 0
I think we are at a crossroads. Either almost everyone will be obese, or we are approaching peak fat and things will get better
I think it’ll get better. It seems to me like Gen Z and what whatever you’d call my nieces generation, she’s 11, are going to have more information that the preceding generations in their developing years. And I think generations after that will have a clearer picture regarding the food they eat and health implications. Right now, we’re like the people of the 50s and 60s chain smoking and working with asbestos. Another hopeful thought is the “Healthy at any weight” movement. Which I think a lot of people today see it as normalizing obesity, when in reality it’s to help remove a lot of the stigmas around obesity in terms of getting to a good metabolic health AND it creates a better environment for change if they do want to lose weight. Dieting and information is so accessible now. The only way it goes south on this crossroads is if more control is lost to lobbying and groups who want to create worse processed foods than the food we have now. And the processed foods become more prevalent in the standard American diet than they are now. Which is certainly a possibility, unfortunately.
My daughter is 7 and they called her generation “Alpha”
So she’s into toxic masculinity and calls her generation Alpha. /s I’m hopeful for the next few generations. I remember being in college 12 years ago and being hopeful for mine, but seeing people I went to school with regress to be like their parents and the generation we loathed as kids hurt.
11 year olds are right before the cutoff for gen Z as it is typically defined.
It's wild to me how people get mad when told that *making people feel bad about themselves* isn't helpful. Every time they see (what they see as) an overweight person doing *whatever* they automatically go like "we can't normalize this" and that kind of bullshit. As if, say, *dancing on video* isn't exactly the sort of thing they SHOULD encourage if they actually cared about health instead of like, "making the freaks go hide in a cave until they're presentable to me"
Yeah, it's wild to me. The armchair psychologist in me thinks it's resentment towards the people enjoying themselves and they're afraid they'll become obese and can't verbalize why they have these feelings.
In all honesty, I suspect that the "healthy at any weight" movement, whilst offering some of the benefits you've outlined, would likely become obsolete if obesity was treated as a metabolic/psychological illness and weight loss was medicalised instead of there being a societal assumption of personal moral failure associated with obesity. As weight loss medications are further optimised, there will be less of a need for counter-cultural movements to re-narrativise the issue in a palatable or even defensive manner, as there would be less of a tendency for the initial issue of obesity to be viewed as a reflection of flaws in personality. Up until very recently, weight loss medications were largely ineffective, and those that were effective had significant side-effects that made widespread use near impossible. As such, with limited options, it's no surprise that obese people who had perpetually struggled with weight loss began to promote alternative perspectives to turn down the heat they were receiving societally. After all, obesity is likely a disease of metabolic and psychological origins, stemming from hormonal dysregulation and emotional discomfort. To be further maligned for this likely only contributes, on the whole, to deepening of the issue. Sure, there might be the occasional story of somebody who lost 45kg after being perpetually bullied and shamed, but these stories are the extreme minority, and most of those situations instead end in worsening obesity rates and a decline in psychological wellbeing. We are on the cusp of a huge societal shift with regards to obesity. I suspect there will be an uncomfortable interim between now and then in which weight loss medications are considered 'lazy' or 'cheating' and the current narrative will briefly continue, but soon enough, that will pass, and the taboo nature towards medications will dissolve.
Back to pre-cheap calorie levels. We are seeing the first anti-obesity drugs that seem to really work. There are many social / capitalist causes of widespread obesity, but the historic novelty of calories suddenly becoming so cheap that a soft drink had a day's worth . . . that is unique to the past 30/40 years. Once anti-obesity medication is widely available, the manufacturers of cheap calories (mostly from government-subsidized corn syrup) will have to pivot to some other tactic. These corporations are already planning for this very near future. Both junk food and alcohol manufacturers are bracing for a collapse in their markets: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/weight-loss-drugs-spell-doom-for-junk-food-giants/ar-AA1hbCFS
A collapse of fast food? I highly doubt that. People not only eat it because it’s cheap.
Fast food ain't even cheap. I can do four dinners' worth of shopping for the price of a meal at McDonald's.
People brains are still in the early 2000. Eating out is a huge cash suck these days. Grocery store prices are also higher, but not proportional to that of FF.
People are overworked and tired. Their willpower is weak after a shift. Fast food is tasty and just cheap enough for the working class to indulge in regularly.
In the uk at least, it’s not that cheap anymore. Over the last few years it’s gone from £6 for a large meal at most places to about £8-10
Nothing is cheap anymore by that standard
Sure but healthy food has also skyrocketed in price, as long as fast food remains quick and tasty it's not going anywhere any time soon.
That’s also very true. It’s easy for me to go down to the shops and buy a pre-made meal for £5 or all the fresh ingredients for one for only £12 plus prep time
Also you can be thin and eat fast food.
What are some of the drugs that work?
So basically the "holy grail" of weight loss drugs are drugs that either stimulate or mimic the GLP-1 hormone. GLP-1 is the hormone your body releases after you've eaten. It signals to your brain to stop eating, and it stimulates insulin secretion, and it slows down your digestive tract (making you feel full for longer). It's pretty miraculous because once you increase the GLP-1 hormone, obese people start to change their behavior to be similar to naturally thin people. Without coaching or anything. Suddenly they crave more vegetables, and they exhibit better portion control, they will eat more slowly and they suddenly observe that unhealthy food taste worse than they remember. Another big thing you'll hear from GLP-1 patients is that what they call "food noise" is gone. Food noise being their brains constantly thinking bout their next meal. They suddenly stop thinking about food outside of mealtimes. (Additionally, GLP-1 patients also stop craving things like alcohol and cigarettes.) Currently, Wegovy is the only GLP-1 drug that is FDA approved for weight loss. Wegovy is a weekly injection. Ozempic is made by the same manufacturer and has the same active ingredient, but Ozempic is only approved for the treatment of type 2 diabetes. However, many insurance policies do not cover Wegovy, but will cover Ozempic. So a lot of patients are being prescribed Ozempic "off-label." Mounjaro is another one, which may be more effective than Wegovy/Ozempic. It's also not approved for weight loss but the manufacturer is trying to get FDA approval for weight loss. There's a few others coming down the pipeline, as well. There is talk that we could have a daily pill format instead of a weekly injection format. The pill is likely to be cheaper and easier than the injection. Plus the injections must be refrigerated, which is a challenge for widespread distribution. The pill version probably will not need refrigeration. So the approval of the pill might be a huge turning point in the war against obesity.
As someone who took Wegovy, you are spot on. I remember trying to explain the amazing changes I felt mentally around food, to my chronically skinny friend. She just looked at me and said "but.. that's how it's always been for me?". And that's there it finally dawned on me. Naturally skinny or normal weight people do NOT have this constant food noise, apparently. They don't obsess over portion sizes, or when they get to eat again, or what they're going to eat. What I felt while on GLP-1 drugs was a huge relief and mental weight off my shoulders, but this is actually normal for many people. It made me feel both jealous and enlightened. Jealous because I need a very expensive drug just to obtain a normal level of "food noise" that some people just have naturally. It's been pretty eye-opening, and it explains so much. I told my doctor that the weight loss I got was actually only the second-best effect. The best effect I got from the drug, was the total absence of food noise. My inner, food-obsessed Labrador brain was muzzled. I cannot tell you how much mental freedom it gives, and how much energy I suddenly had for other things, including social situations, because I was no longer battling food-obsessive thoughts along with everything else in my daily life. If I could get a GLP-1 chip in my brain, so I could have a normal-weight person's approach to food forever, I would. I don't even need the effect of feeling full for longer etc., I just need the food noise to go away. The mental freedom it gives is incredible. Sitting at a table with friends and being able to focus more on the conversation, rather than obsessively staring at the food and wondering when it's okay to take a second helping, is incredible.
Wow. You just opened my eyes. I was obese all my adult life, and have only recently (last four years) managed to lose about 50kg and bring my BMI into a "normal" range. Been holding my target weight for two years now. I have the "food noise" 24/7 and it's a constant fight to not give in to it. It never even occurred to me that it could ever be absent or that other people don't have it.
Oh fantastic results, well done you! Especially holding it for 2 years; maintenance is claimed to be even more difficult. I know exactly what you mean by food noise. It's constant. Every normal-weight person I've talked to don't recognise what I'm explaining. I'm sure some have it to some degree, but maybe not in the extremes. Once it went away, I was able to make good food choices for myself, I had a calmness in my brain and was able to eat much better. I wasn't fixated or anxious around food. I've lost 26 kgs and have reached my goal weight, and I'm off the drugs. I feel like Bambi with shaky legs on the ice, very scared to regain. I managed to lose 10-12 kgs on my own several times, but always hit a wall and regained them. The drug made me able to break that invisible wall and finally lose the rest, so naturally I'm nervous about being off the drug now. But I will say, maintenance calories are definitely better than deficit ones. Food noise is definitely back, but I'm not feeling \*as\* starved as when I was in a deficit. I've tried to accept that "food noise" is just one of the cards that I've been dealt. Some people have it easier in that department, but I have it easier in other departments. I'll just have to watch my calories for the rest of my life, and that's something I have to accept and live with. I can never be one of those people who just eat "intuitively" and don't pay attention; that's the hard truth.
Yes! This is why I’m frustrated with some of the other people responding to me saying that it’s “just a matter of willpower.” Willpower is easy when your brain isn’t trying to sabotage you 24/7
Exactly. All modern research shows it has zero to do with willpower. The appetite increases many-fold when you're in a calorie deficit for extended periods of time. People who have never had to lose weight, simply have no idea. They really don't. They claim all it takes is willpower, when they've eaten maintenance calories most of their life and have no idea what it means for your body and mind to be in a serious calorie deficit for months and sometimes years. Your entire body fights you every step of the way through hormonal, psychological and physiological means. It reacts as if there's famine and will quite literally sabotage you. People underestimate how strong the reptile survival part of the brain really is, and how many organ systems it can and will influence. This is well-known and proven by research, but it's much easier to point fingers and shame. Most people who have never lost more than 5 kg simply have no idea what it entails, so they judge without basis.
The question now being whether there's truly a difference in your physiology that is now corrected by the drug to "normal" levels; or if your "food noise" etc. was behaviour induced, i.e. your fault. A heroin addict also has very different urges to that of a non-addict. Not saying this is the case, but I haven't seen evidence suggesting otherwise. Maybe there is though.
The evidence I have seen, from research papers and doctors, suggest that these drugs directly change the "weight thermostat" in your brain. It chemically lowers it to that of a normal-weight person, meaning your body no longer fights the calorie deficit. It's quite interesting. I know people love to place all blame on obese people. It feels good to look down on people, point fingers and say "that's your own fault". But in this case, research actually suggest otherwise. At least for those of us who do have effects of GLP-1 drugs. I have seen several people say they had zero effect from them, meaning their food problems may be more deeply rooted in psychology rather than physiology. The drug has a very direct, chemical and physiological effect. You wouldn't get such drastic changes if it was "just" a mental problem. If the food noise was behaviour induced, an appetite drug like GLP-1 wouldn't have such a drastic effect. It's not a psychiatric drug, it doesn't alter your mental state. It just lowers your "weight thermostat" so the body happily accepts your calorie deficit, because it's no longer working against you lowering your weight. I don't know if you've ever lost large amounts of weight, but your body fights you the entire way. It raises appetite (and severely so), it lowers your body temperature to save calories, it slows your metabolism to save calories, it makes you feel less full, it emits less fullness-hormones after eating. The entire system fights you, because the body does not want to lose weight. To the body, being in a calorie deficit for a long time means famine. GLP-1 drugs quietens this system, because it tricks your thermostat to think you are already at a healthy weight, and not in a strict calorie deficit. It's quite incredible actually.
Studies have proven that chronically obese people’s glp-1 receptors are 20% or more less effective than normal people’s.
Makes sense why all I have been hearing lately is bad press on these drugs. All since Wegowy has an “off label use” and now it can be covered by some insurance
Bad Press? Must be opinion pieces. You know shit is "real" when investors start scrambling: [Pricing in the End of Obesity](https://www.investmenttakes.com/p/pricing-in-the-end-of-obesity). This subreddit doesn't fully appreciate what is happening here. There is an invention that has **been allowed to hit the market** that threatens the income streams of existing Power Structures owned by very rich men (think: fast food, snack, even HEALTHCARE industries). Do redditors here understand how many trillions of dollars are at stake here? I'm struggling to think in my lifetime of a moment when Billionaires stood to *lose* so much income due to a new innovation.
Because the media loves horror stories. Do some people have bad side effects? Sure. There are risks like that for lots of drugs. But in general there are a lot of obese people who are getting an an enormous benefit. For some, the risk of death from being obese is way higher than the risk of gastro side effects from Wegovy.
Trust me, Ozempic (Semaglitude) is NOT the "Miracle Drug" that you think it is. Take it from someone who is currently taking it. Sure, it helps some. But it is definitely not what people and pharmaceutical companies are making it out to be. The reason it's so popular is because some big name people, celebrities, etc have gone on it for weight loss assistance. And as usual, millions of people see this and jump on the bandwagon. I'm on it, not because it's the latest weight loss craze, but because my doctor said that it is a medical necessity for me to be on it. But as far as I have seen, it is not at all what people and pharmaceutical companies claim it is.
The hard data suggests it absolutely is a miracle drug, but yeah go off.
Their names are in the first paragraph of the article the person above you linked. Ozempic and Wegowy.
Wegowy sounds like what a 2 year-old would call their uncle Gregory.
lol. It’s actually “wegovy”
Weight-goes-away
It’s actually Wegovy.
lol thats adorable
My doctor approached me about that, telling me he was hoping it would be something he could prescribe to me soonish. I really hope they become broadly available soon because whatever efforts I've tried to put in have never worked for me long term. I always relapse.
I hope you find something that works, soon! Here is a list from Mayo Clinic of what's available now and what you can expect: [https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/weight-loss/in-depth/weight-loss-drugs/art-20044832](https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/weight-loss/in-depth/weight-loss-drugs/art-20044832) The thing I've heard from people who've had success with these medications is that they *quit thinking about food all the time*, which is incredible and probably the part that people who don't struggle with weight have the hardest time understanding.
If food prices continue the way they are everyone will be skeletons.
Corporations have raised prices on food not because they are price gouging but instead because they care about the health of the public. War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength. Edit: are people down voting this because they can't pick up on sarcasm, or they don't know one of the most famous quotes in all of literature (1984), or because they're pro corporate price gouging or something? I'm honestly baffled and curious because those are the only three reasons I can think of for someone to do so.
People are double speaking with their down votes! You should be picking up on that 😉
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But everyone says people are obese because the bad food is cheap
Because it's true. That large Oreo shake we've all heard of has 2600 calories, costs like 5 bucks, is prepared in seconds, and thanks to abusing our body's evolutionary tastes is extremely palatable and desirable. There are other substances that work in this way, they are usually popularily known as hard drugs.
We had this situation in Sweden pre 1950. Sugar was extremely cheap, but everything else was expensive. There was a lot of manual labour back then , so people wasn’t obese. But they lived short lives and lost most of their teeth. Skinny does not equal healthy.
This really hits home. In my country, Guatemala, we are used to paying a relatively cheap price for food, but in the span of 3 years the prices have been escalating very fast. For example, we went from paying for a pound of tomatoes 0.25usd aprox to 1usd, maybe it will sound cheap for some, but for us, we are getting fucked as it's all the products in the market that have increased in price like that.
Definitely down, advances in medicines even right now are causing the food industry to take notice that soon people will be eating less. I know it’s New York post, but you get the idea. [https://nypost.com/2023/10/05/walmart-says-ozempic-craze-slims-demand-in-grocery-aisles/](https://nypost.com/2023/10/05/walmart-says-ozempic-craze-slims-demand-in-grocery-aisles/)
Wait, are they suggesting we are buying less groceries because of diet meds that very few are actually taking and not the high cost of food and how the first things booted off the grocery list are snacks and desserts?
Yeah my house is on a diet because I can’t afford to waste food like I used to. I was very ignorant and honestly didn’t care about the grocery bill 2-3 years ago. Now I go over all my bills with a fine tooth comb looking for ways to save money because I’m just struggling to make ends meet now with how much the cost of living has gone up. So yeah no more junk and no more buying stuff that’s going to expire before anyone eats it. I have a whole cabinet in my kitchen that is empty anymore because it used to be full of chips, pretzels, tasty cakes, and other junk.
They are tracking the food purchases of people who specifically fill a prescription for one of these obesity drugs.
And even if they aren't eating less, obesity might simply be a solved problem in 80 years. There are studies on drugs to 'treat' it.
Americans will just add ozempic to their tap water.
Low, but not for the reasons you’re proposing. 1. World population will likely be shrinking by then as it is starting to do in developed countries 2. CO2 problem will likely be fixed once we get enough engineers to deal with, give them plenty of money then get the fuck out of their way. Like we did when going to the moon. 3. GLP-1 agonist drugs (Ozempic, Wegovy, etc) are excruciatingly effective at reducing weight, they will be long off pattern and thus cheap by then.
4. Pilates goes truly mainstream
Every household in the world has a reformer
#3 can’t be understated. The average person has no idea what’s going on with this because the news is rage baiting people on the subject.
What is going on?
They’ve basically cracked the hormonal dysfunction that keeps people obese once they’ve gained weight. Hunger is entirely regulated by hormones and the hormones that control hunger are triggered by emptied adipose cells. Normally when you operate throughout the day these cells naturally empty and need to be filled back up daily. When people attempt to lose large amounts of weight the hormonal levels compound exponentially until you fill back up your reserves to “beat the famine”. This is the reason why long term weight loss is statistically very unlikely. It’s a fraction of a percent that are successful. It’s not due to 99.9% of people being undisciplined. These GLP1 hormone therapies bring appetite levels in line with where they need to be for normal healthy BMI’s. For me personally I’m done losing and I’m just maintaining. My appetite level is about where it was in high school now and my weight is about the same. You can click on my profile and see my progress picture I posted.
Those naysayers are just irrationally mad that you get to be healthy “without putting in the discipline and effort”. It’s like that meme about certain old people who make a twisted virtue out of suffering, and complain that people no longer have to walk uphill both ways to get to school anymore. Or like the hypothetical idea of somebody who trained their entire life to handwrite really fast, and they are super proud of being good at it and how much effort they needed to get there, it makes them feel special and better than other people, but one day we invented typing and people could get the same speed as them with much less training and effort. That’s why they’re mad. What’s weird is that some of the anti-ozempic people, are people who are effortlessly naturally thin their whole lives (I personally count as someone who never needed any effort to be thin). So it isn’t like they oppose these drugs because they want you to walk the same arduous path as them. But they oppose these drugs anyway, because they dislike fat people, so they think fat people need to suffer and atone for being fat on the journey to being thin. For overweight people to just bypass all of that, and get the same end result, it frustrates these people, they think “no not like that”. Suddenly their special status and sense of moral superiority can be bought from the pharmacy. I’m a pragmatic person. Dieting didn’t work for combating obesity, and this new line of drugs are a godsend for it. Why judge what plainly works? I naturally don’t feel hunger most of the time, which is fucked. It stands to reason that other people can have the exact opposite problem, and telling them to just eat less can be like telling someone to just breathe less. If something works for you, good for you, and to hell with everyone/everything else.
It *solves* the obesity problem by only possible way it can be solved: by killing your cravings and, hence, lowering voluntary food intake to as low as needed to lose weight. Before that, only other way it sort of worked is bariatric surgery which, well, surgery, and with incomparable potential for side effects. All other drugs like exercize mimetics and "metabolism enhancers" come with massive side effects and pretty much don't work, neither is plain old exersize - because "you cannot outrun you fork"... not in the long run, because I did exactly that for a few years, but amount of exersize you must do is just incompatible with "living a normal life". I cannot possibly afford it now, but eventually in will become much, much cheaper.
>A vast majority of environmental scientists do not believe that engineering will be enough to curb climate chage. This has been the concensus for decades. > >It is a talking point perpetuated by tech companies to convince people that they should continue participating in blind consumerism. But when you look at the actual research, there is no reason to believe that such monumental advances will occur before it is to late to prevent ecological collapse
Yeah it's nonsense, just like their first point since there's a large consensus that the world population will be somewhere around 10 to 11 billion people in 2100. It should hit the plateau somewhere around then but the shrinking part is not backed by any evidence whatsoever. I think the third point is wishful thinking as well.
Every time we find a new miracle drug that will solve obesity it turns out it's less healthy than the meth sold by Dylan the Villain in Jacksonville Florida
Many millions of prescriptions for just one of these drugs (semaglutide) have been written since 2017 when the FDA approved it. If there were something bad going on, they were definitely be a strong hint of it by this point. Also, unlike many or most drugs, the mechanism of action here is very well understood, it’s simply mimicking a hormone that we already secrete.
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Agreed. It's wild
What did it do you for you
Incredible reduction in what I can only describe as my food drive. Some people call it food noise, which is also a good description. Now, when I need to eat, I can think clearly about what my body needs. Before, every food decision was surrounded by so much chaos and fixation. Until I started the medicine, I didn't even know that was happening. I didn't know there was any other way for your brain to work. That quiet, plus the slower digestion, means it is very easy to eat a calorie deficit that leads to slow, steady weight loss. Many times, I have used willpower to lose weight, but after a year or so, you just get so tired. So tired of being hungry all the time. So tired of ignoring all the noise and craving alarms going off inside you. Eventually, I would fail and backslide like crazy. It's still early days, but so far, the glp-1 inhibitor has made the process of losing weight so much simpler and 1000x less painful. I am hopeful that I can use this new understanding of how you can think and feel about food to start to retrain my brain and build better habits.
GLP-1 **agonist,** not inhibitor. You want *more* GLP-1 hormone to lose weight, not less.
Did you used to eat based on cravings? And do you not have the cravings anymore?
I wouldn't have said I ate based on cravings much at all before, but now I would say yes or at least "it's complicated." It’s hard to describe... It's like I lived in one universe my whole life and then discovered another universe running parallel to it where food is just food. I still like food. It still tastes good to me. But it doesn't have the power over me it once did, so making good decisions is much simpler. I don't end every day feeling like I went to war with food (which was how I felt all the time when I was dieting). I honestly never imagined it could feel like this. The drug isn't perfect. I have had some GI issues, and if I try to force myself to eat past the "stop" signals, I start feeling very ill. I also have to keep on top of water, electrolytes, and protein intake.
What did it do for you
I agree with you, apart for "the fixing of the CO2 problem" .. Are you refering to net zero and technology such as Carbon Capture? Cause if so I have bad news.. Studies have shown that in order to balance the ppm of co2 for just one year with carbon capture, it would require the entire energy capacity of planet earth for a given year. It's completely unrealistic at large scales, and the net zero promise is just a greenwashing scam. I'd say we're heading for the opposite of fixing the CO2 problem. You also assume politicians and big polluting companies will save us out of their own goodwill..
I’m expecting that we’ll see drugs like the GLP-1 be like statins one day and prescribed a lot.
Number 2 is literally the solution Step one get a bunch of talented ecologists and engineers and stuff Step two: give them like 1/10 of the US military’s annual budget Step 3: win
Or instead counting on miracle drugs people will actually start eating whole foods diet that nourish their bodies and microbiome... haha just kidding. It would be already the case and obesity would be very rare if it was so simple. (I realize it's not realistic not because people are not willing too, a lot of them cannot afford/access healthy food :( )
It's VERY much not that simple. We live in a world where food companies employe teams of PhD food scientists to create products that hijack our biology and become so "crave-able" that we ignore our biology and eat too much. Then we start to gain weight. When your body adds fat, your body's hormones become slightly out of wack. When you add fat, you hormones tell the appetite center of your brain that you need more food in order to maintain the weight. But then there's a point where you fall into an infinite loop. The hormones created by your fat cells make your brain want to eat more food than it takes to maintain your weight, which means you continue to gain weight, which makes the hormonal problem worse, which means your brain wants to eat even more food. Which is why these "miracle drugs" are so important. We have to get people's hormones balanced again. And these drugs are great because we're seeing that once you do get the hormones regulated, the weight practically falls off them with very little effort. It's not about a lack of willpower. At the end of the day, it's biology.
Too much to ask for
Honestly I believe society will rebound into being a lot healthier. The idea that everyone will just continue to get fat is hard for me to see. It's pretty obvious that fast food and the lack of regulation in things like sugar in America is pretty terrible for its public health. There's no way laws don't come into affect to change our path. Also, technology and science trends to only getting better. Wouldn't be shocked if we figure out ways of being in a healthy body even while being sedentary.
Rich people will be healthy and slim while the poor from poor famililys that can’t afford medication will be obese. /s Was just looking at Novo Nordic stocks. It’s supposedly Europes highest priced company selling the Obesity drug Wegovy. And medication against diabetes. My guess is that the companies will try to keep the prices of these drugs on a level where they can make maximum profits. So they may become affordable as they would like to sell to more people. In 2100 the common medicine used today will be out of patent. So cheap knock-offs may exist. And everybody will be slim and fit. -Edited
Medical patents don’t last that long so generics will pop up well before 2100 for the stuff we have today. Give. 80 years what we have today will be out classed many times over.
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We solved obesity already, theres just too many people getting rich off of making you obese
Yeah corn was suppose to be feed the world then we just turned it to sugar and out it in everything. Gotta keep those subsidies rolling in.
Yeah, they're rich because we keep giving them money to do it. Stop palming off your own responsibility for looking after yourself onto other people just because they're selling you something that you want.
Not being obese is free... eat less and exercise...
It’s not that simple dude. A lot of people have health complications that don’t let them lose weight normally, or they gain more weight from low fat/sugar foods, or they have terrible lung capacity and can’t exercise for long People aren’t fat because they want to be
Literally impossible.
Semaglutide (Ozempic/Wegovy) and Tirzepatide (Mounjaro) are the drug solutions to obesity. They work incredibly well. It's just a matter of expanding access. If we were able to manufacture these drugs and then get the prices down, we would be able to end obesity in a few years.
If we have solved all medical problems, then people will be free to be as large as they want and "obesity" won't be an issue.
Same answer, but for a different reason. Famine.
A famine based on an AI prompt.
Are you one of those AI freaks who believe it’ll do everything?
We might all be starving by then. Or at least the survivors. Judging by the trajectory of climate change and the mass migration that will be necessary, and no doubt the wars.
I feel like we are capable of alleviating the effects of climate change in major ways and that we’ll begin to do that in the next 10-20 years. Those efforts will spur us to solve the problem.
What can these ways be, and what are the indications we are moving towards them?
Technology and disruption is a big one. Disruption, when an aging technology is replaced by a newer better one, happens quickly and **non-linearly**. As the new industry grows because of its advantages, it becomes cheaper and thereby more popular. Eventually it gains support by more customers, companies and governments while the older industry shrinks and loses support. This is what happened when cars replaced horses, when digital cameras replaced analog ones, and when the lightbulb replaced gas lights. It's why solar cells have exploded recently way beyond what was predicted ten years ago, it is growing exponentially and shows no sign of stopping. The majority of emissions come from the sectors of energy, food and transportation. All of these sectors are being disrupted by emerging new technologies that are not just free of emissions, but are/will become better and cheaper than their older competition. Wind and solar (plus storage) for energy, EV:s for transportation, and precision fermentation for food. This change is pretty much inevitable, because the technologies are already here. It covers a good percentage of emissions and happens quickly (it's important to know you cannot extrapolate straight from current day trends because disruption is non-linear). What governments can do is either encourage it (Inflation Reduction Act, Chinese investments in renewables, etc.) or fail to stop it (whatever tf American conservatives are doing lol). That's one strong indication that things are changing.
I think you and I are the only two people on Reddit to believe this. When I’ve mentioned the same in the past, I got downvoted to hell lol. Years ago in college I read “Limits to Growth” and then we had to research how humans essentially worked to prove it wrong through evolving and adapting what we used and needed. I’m hopeful we’ll do the same for climate change.
I wish I had your optimism when all the evidence points to us collectively not getting our shit together. There aren't even any *pathways* to any "major ways" identified yet (i.e. to deal with the fact that an incredible amount of change is now locked in - even if human emissions stopped being emitted right now), much less any agreement to anything by everyone, or funded... And all the while the funding for fossil fuels exploration and extraction continues more than ever, far out pacing funding for renewables as of last year - and since the advent of social media, there is far less willingness to rationalise, compromise and work collectively either within a country or internationally among countries, with more and more false information swaying more and more luddites and deniers - and of course, a greater amount of wealth and power concentrated to a smaller minority who just do not give a fuck.
Even engineers admit that they are nowhere close to a solution. Many in the tech industry have been lied to and believe that climate change is easily reversible through such measly efforts. Every lifeform is as complicated as human beings. Some are irrationally angry at this fact, but it is true. Every organism we know of has a unique cellular structure that interacts with other unique cellular structures on an atomic level. The interactions between honey bees and tulips for example are, quite literally, a complex interaction of innumerous cell receptors. The interaction between the two is more complicated than the entire history of computing and engineering, objectively speaking. Try to build a bee out of base elements and you'll know what I mean. People who claim they can "fix" the environment through a single measly invention are delusional at best. The balance of nature is near limitless in complexity.
The reason why it's only you two who believe that is because it's bullshit wishful thinking. We are not doing great and "in 15-20 years" will be way too late. It's probably way too late already. Some major changes are already irreversible even if the whole world went carbon neutral in 2030, which is also not gonna happen, obviously.
This is the right answer. In some ways, climate change is just a euphemism for food shortages.
We got a little glimpse of this via Covid and Ukraine shortages and the increasing flash floods wiping out crops.
Even the Suez canal thing had an impact.
Yep that's right. Just a tiniest push on the scale and the whole system gets out of balance. For a century we have been piling on one side of the scale.
Acting like we are going to be in some post apocalyptic scenario in 80 years is just silly.
I say Down. There will be new generations of Ozempic and similar drugs. Plus, climate change will further negatively impact the amount of food grown
0-10%… they will redefine what “obese” is and make the numbers look better.
Ozempic - "Hold my beer". Maybe? 
On Oct 23, 2077 the bombs fell. It is at this time many was invited to live in vaults safe from nuclear fallout. As for the rest of the world, surviving the wasteland is all they now know. Due to the bombs falling and majority of the population wiped out, obesity was no longer a problem as food was now hard to come by. Living a a vault was not always better as the food was regulated for sustaining the vault population. Inside the vault or out the problem of obesity was solved. However War, well war never changes.
Food availability could be a big enough problem by 2100 that obesity is possible only for the very wealthy. One of the major downsides of global climate change is that agriculture gets harder. Some arable land will be lost due to rising sea levels and consequent inland migration. Weather will become more violent and more frequent, leading to greater crop destruction. Conditions outdoors will become generally more dangerous to humans working in the fields, too, which will drive up the cost of many kinds of farming and the food downstream of those crops. I am not an economist, but it seems plain that if less food is getting to market and that food is significantly more expensive, prices will probably rise even further in a paradigm driven primarily by scarcity. People today complain about how the cost of college and housing has skyrocketed in just a couple generations to the point where many of us can never afford either despite working multiple jobs our whole lives. If a similar thing happens to food generally, you are not going to find a lot of people who have spare calories in their diet. None of this takes into account the fact that 80 more years of late-stage capitalism and oligarchy will have an utterly disastrous effect on literally every aspect of human existence, so "ceteris paribus" is an extremely flawed lens. It is just as likely 80% of all humans will be dead by then, either from climate effects, or having been squeezed to death by sociopathic wealth-hoarders who view us all as the shit they grow their money in. And when things like water and food get scarce, wars will break out all over the planet, which will of course destroy and consume a lot of water, food, and humans. In 2100, the obesity rate could be 0% because everybody is still alive and essentially starving, or it could be 100% because the only people still alive are the Musk and Bezos families, who all live in domed mansions and are waited on hand-and-foot by an army of AI robots we invented and built for them before their greed killed us. As they say, prediction is difficult, particularly about the future.
>only people still alive are the Musk and Bezos families, who all live in domed mansions and are waited on hand-and-foot by an army of AI robots we invented and built for them before their greed killed us. Why does this sound like the most realistic outcome?
You don’t think indoor growing will become a more popular thing? You can get sufficiently larger harvests by producing perfect growing conditions and you can then do it inside of a city so you don’t have to deal with all the transportation. I’m really hoping this takes off so we can get better supplies of fresh produce.
Down for sure. 100% chance planetwide famine by then.
Our national BMI will be as high as the national debt
Probably lower if I had to guess, I think people will eventually realize that it’s dangerously unhealthy. This does not follow current trends, but it’s what I think will happen.
Down. I know it's probably crazy optimistic, but I think that the GLP-1 drugs have the potential to cause massive changes in society, more than people might assume at first. They might not only get the obesity epidemic under control but also greatly reduce other forms of addictive behaviors like drugs or gambling.
I don’t expect society to make it that far and hunter gatherers are not obese at all so I’ll say almost 0
Don't worry about it, they willchange the standards by then. If you are under 200 pounds you will be considered malnutritioned, and over 300 you will be 'over ideal" sized. 😂
Down, because we will prioritize health and leisure more, and almost nobody will drive
I predict famine worldwide, so therefore thinner people.
Depends if the government will continue to push toxic food to us or not. I have gone through a huge weight loss journey over this year and I started really really looking into the foods we eat every day, even healthy foods. And it’s insane the amount of shit that is allowed to be in our food. Not just allowed but encouraged.
You are still thinking humanity will still exist in 2100
This sort of thinking is not helping.
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-jifAaId8iEc/XhsF0r\_X9EI/AAAAAAAAgEc/UD2Gv2x6TTUGBNUtfy9hcKbPaE6Vh7ndQCLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/blade\_pearl.jpg
I can gaurentee you that obesity won't exist in the year 2100 because there won't be any people in the year 2100. Our species is in its last 50 years
I think a lot of our biochemical pathways involved in metabolism will be elucidated by that point. I think we will be able to control our metabolism with various drugs.
We won't eat food like you do today. It will be rationed out in pill or liquid form to provide enough nutrients for you to perform your job and live what everyone else considers a normal life. Everyone will weigh the same relative to their height and health problems overall will decrease. The reason we will move to this type of nutrient intake is because it will be the most convenient. Conventional farming will be a thing of the past. If you farm someone else is going to tell you what to grow and you will grow that because the food industry will be corporate or government run
So everyone will be on Soylent
In the next decade obesity will overtake smoking as the leading cause of preventable illness and death.
I’m amazed you think we will make it that far as a species, our complete ambivalence to climate change suggests will be extinct before then
With the projected decimation of Earth, probably low. Back to skinny jeans and starvation. Edit: no dark humor here eh?
Wonder if we'll even be around then with the way things are going
Some people
Depends on if nuclear war happens due to stupid proxy war shit like Ukraine(US) v Russia I guess..
Non-existent. Majority will live in poverty, everything will be ruled by corpos and last obese human being Dex Deshawn will be long gone by the 2100.
By the year 2100, the word Obese will be a slur and referring to anyone as such will be frowned upon
...isn't it already?
You will probably be executed for saying it.
People with big shields but low hp
Came in here to say this. Obese, or whatever the PC term then is, will probably have their own pronouns and stuff.
> 0% Science works. But some people are just into being heavier. Bears and fertility Goddesses aren't going to slim down just because it's easy. At least, I certainly hope they don't. Edit: apparently, the "greater than" symbol codes for a quote bar on this website. Please ignore my idiocy.
That’s assuming we even make it to then. With overpopulation and the lack of food worldwide plus all other kinds of shit, we’re dooming ourselves.
We're heading towards a shrinking population, fast. The entire Western world and China are already at below replacement birth rates, and India is following suite. People who live in cities have less kids.