> I've yet to see real evidence that on a population scale,
I mean visit Japan if you want to see a large nation manage its populations weight, but the entire reasoning is completely backwards. Statistics doesn't have a will of its own or causal powers, it's a description of aggregate behavior. Change the behavior and you get some new statistics. 100 years ago you didn't have a single statistic showing that obesity was an issue. What evidence do you need that making people move more and eat less will make them lose weight, there's no law of nature operating against you.
The obvious reason to even think like this is indicative of the problem, that in a lot of places we're so unused to simply enforcing sane cultural norms and incentivizing healthy behaviors and discourage crappy ones that people think it breaks some kind of ironclad law.
> What evidence do you need that making people move more and eat less will make them lose weight, there's no law of nature operating against you.
IDK, any evidence? We've been telling people to move more and eat less for literally decades and it doesn't work to make them lose weight on a broad population level.
I mean visit Japan if you want to see a large nation manage its populations weight, but the entire reasoning is completely backwards. Statistics doesn't have a will of its own or causal powers, it's a description of aggregate behavior. Change the behavior and you get some new statistics. 100 years ago you didn't have a single statistic showing that obesity was an issue. What evidence do you need that making people move more and eat less will make them lose weight, there's no law of nature operating against you.
The obvious reason to even think like this is indicative of the problem, that in a lot of places we're so unused to simply enforcing sane cultural norms and incentivizing healthy behaviors and discourage crappy ones that people think it breaks some kind of ironclad law.