We've tried and failed to get people to "eat right" and exercise for the last century or so. We've put a stunning amount of effort into that option, and failed.
My dream career was urban planning. We used to design walkable cities and now we design a world that is car centric.
Designing exercise into our daily lives used to be part of the urban planning profession. Paris was redone to put a stop to health issues in overcrowded slums.
Nutritional value of produce has gone down for decades while we strip mine our soils and try to make up for it with chemical fertilizers.
I don't think the obesity epidemic is going to be solved with lecturing people like they aren't trying hard enough to starve themselves while we build "fuck you, pedestrian" environments all over the country.
And now we act like if you don't drive, you're not really allowed to have a full life.
It negatively impacts kids, seniors, handicapped people and those who could potentially afford housing if they only needed to pay rent but can't afford both rent and a car.
1. there are plenty of obese people in rural areas where they have all the walkable space they might desire
2. do you even know how little energy humans need to walk? a single candy bar is enough for a three hour hike
3. pick a random chinese/japanese city, find a youtube video with visible crowds, and count the number of morbidly obese people you see. it would take you a while to find a single mobility scooter tier flesh golem, if you can find one at all
"lecturing people like they aren't trying hard enough to starve themselves" is the only solution for the obesity crisis, because the only reason for the obesity crisis is vast abundance of cheap, artificially tasty empty calories. 300+++ lbs blobs of fat virtually did not exist before Standard American Diet
>1. there are plenty of obese people in rural areas where they have all the walkable space they might desire
No, they don't. Have you ever spent any significant time in rural American places? There's no place to walk at all, because:
1. everything is too far away for walking to actually be useful for going places,
2. there's no sidewalks even if you don't mind walking 2 hours to the nearest Walmart, and
3. there's no wild places to walk either, contrary to popular belief, because all the land is privately owned and "trespassing" is not allowed (and can get you shot).
Rural Americans can only walk places if:
1. they have a lot of land around their house, which granted is more affordable than in more urban places, or
2. they get in their vehicle and drive to a state or national park someplace and use the hiking trails there.
It's so weird how many people think rural America is some bucolic place that resembles the Shire of the hobbits, when in fact it's a car-bound hellscape even worse than the worst American car-centric city. It's not like the UK, where you have an absolute right to roam across rural lands.
