To the N.Y. Times:
Ms Rosenberg states diabetes “can be prevented most of the time by eating right and exercising. This was not a mystery; lack of knowledge wasn’t the obstacle. The obstacle was getting people to actually make these changes.”
If knowledge isn’t the obstacle, then the problem lies with the will (or lack of it). So the question then becomes how do we get Americans to stop being lazy, apathetic slobs?
That does present a conundrum, because by definition apathetic people are not animated by passions or goals. As Edward Gibbon would say, once people become “enervated” that’s the end of the game. Sorry America. To paraphrase Ausonius, “She fattens and dies.”
Rosenberg's article goes to list a numbing array of interventions and campaigns aimed at getting people to actually make positive life style changes. These studies and plans seem to me to be beside the point. The usual grant-in-progress bandaids which avoid fundamentals.
The top-down solution is to generate an economy that does not push junk food at people and which allows for dinner at mid-day (like most civilized places) instead of two hours before bedtime.
The top-down solution is to generate a culture which does not inculcate the passive “ingestion” of infotainment and advertisements thus cultivating a couch-potato posture and potato mind mental state.
Lastly, traffic and transportation systems have to be radically revised so as to severely restrict the automobile and force people to walk, skate and bicycle.
Simply put, we have to generate social norms which are antithetical to mental and physical laziness and remove those economic norms which are incompatible with walking and relaxing at the right times in the right way. But these norms cannot be divorced from the economic fundamentals of which they are but the social manifestation. To illustrate: you can't get people to "eat right" and at the same time protect and promote a billion dollar industry based on shoving junk into people's mouths.
Once the structural and economic causes of the problem are understood,it can also be seen that there will never be a real solution. The U.S. is what it has become. Better luck, next cycle.
