I still disagree. Simplicity and convenience is what people not only want, but demand. And this extends beyond weight loss solutions to our modern world of ever-converging technologies creating ever-complex systems under the guise of efficiency. Multiple cultures have supported these values since the times of snake-oil salesmen, which did not exactly vanish with history, as we so often forget. Look at products like Optavia, Xenedrine, etc.

It keeps happening because the market wills it to, but not without good reason. It is perfectly rational to want something to be easy, especially now as our modern lives are inundated with a tremendous amount of stressors and tasks we must constantly attend to. So yes, we wish for convenience, but it is not the solution we always need.

> Simplicity and convenience is what people not only want, but demand.

Hmm, that is not my experience generally. People will take insanely ineffective routes if that is what the system pushes them toward, without taking much offense.

For example, on the topic of health/weight loss: Weight Watchers or yoga classes are huge industries while also being insanely elaborate and expensive ways of eating better and moving your body.

I agree with you that, for example, drugs are currently not a solution to these problems. But what I propose is: they are going to be. And they had better be because there is no other effective solution poised to work at a societal scale. We just can’t help ourselves. “Just eat the salad and walk every day” simply did not do the trick. We tried. While it works on a mechanistic level, of course, it does not work in practice. Blaming people for their inability to fight their nature is just inhumane and not how we usually progress: we fix reality for ourselves.

While it is not impossible to design a society that is healthier (see: Japan), it’s at such odds with our current culture, and societal change is slow. We should certainly get to work on this decades-long project, but we should also treat this like any other health issue that costs billions of life-years and find a more effective intervention.