> The blame is 100% on the individuals making their own health decisions.

If you put a pile of junk food on the floor, your pet will eat it until they make themselves sick.

We are smarter than many animals and have more discipline. But we are still animals and do not have unlimited executive function. The people who architect the environment of incentives that surround us bear some amount of responsibility for the behavior those incentives create.

Denying that is denying that we are living beings subject to all of the same limitations as any other mortal animal. We are not spherical rational actors in a vacuum.

Just eyeballing a map, the countries that pop out as both having Starbucks and not having an obesity problem are China and India. Other than that, it looks like most of the countries that have Starbucks have obesity rates over, like, 20%, which seems pretty bad.

This isn’t to say Starbucks is causing obesity, of course. Most likely they are showing up together as the economy develops.

I do think it is worth noting that obesity is a pretty widespread problem, not uniquely American or anything like that.

Yeah but progressive ideals are a much harder sell if people have to take responsibility for their actions. "Others should pay for my mobility scooter because others keeps feeding me junk food" and all that.

Then again, free will is an illusion, so...

I bonked in the middle of a 100km ride on a rail trail through farmer's fields. I thought I'd had enough food, since the same amount was sufficient for the initial trip out a few days earlier, but it wasn't. It was the return journey of my first big bike trip, and it was absolute hell after I bonked. I'd ride for twenty minutes, then lie on the ground for ten. When I was laying on the ground I'd be searching the vegetation for anything that looked vaguely edible.

Crazy how a glucose drop can sneak up and humble you so quickly!

There's a lot of area on the spectrum between where we are today and "sugary beverages are all banned".

For example, Starbucks could limit the sizes it sells and advertises—you'd still be able to have as much sugar as you would like by buying multiple drinks, but it would raise the activation energy needed to do that. Making the healthier choice the path of least resistance works wonders.

You really can't discern between a healthy portion of sugar and an unhealthy portion of sugar? I can assure you it should be way less than what they are serving. Especially since society will bare these costs in a variety of unexpected ways, Starbucks needs to be compelled into doing so. They broke the societal compact, they have to be punished.

By that logic, should Starbucks also sell life-saving insulin and epi pens?

I'm guessing that you meant this in a semi-humorous and hyperbolic way rather than a mean way, but it would probably be good to review the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. A comment like this wouldn't need too much to come across as friendly rather than aggressive.

GLP-1s disprove this to an extent. Personal responsibility is based on a fallacy, it’s just brain chemistry.

So give everyone GLP-1s to cast the shadow of personality responsibility (reduction in adverse reward center operations, broadly speaking) through better brain chemistry. Existence is hard, we can twiddle the wetware to make it less hard.

Read my comment more carefully.

If a company put a giant a giant bollard in the middle of the interstate and someone hit it, are you saying that the company bears zero responsibility for that?

Having briefly experienced weight loss drugs - and the bliss of that constant “EAT!” voice in your head just going quiet - I’m pretty convinced most humans have a genuine genetic predisposition to overeating.

And when you zoom out to the population level, the “we’re all autonomous individuals” argument gets a lot shakier. Like yeah, at the individual level you have agency, you make choices, fine. But at scale? We are absolutely at the mercy of whoever has figured out how to tickle our monkey brains in just the right way to get us buying their fattening food.