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Yakubian Ape's avatar

There is a lot to comment on here, a lot of great, thought-provoking content, but rather than try to over strain myself on a Monday morning, I wanted to say that people are absolutely getting uglier. I feel like a concreted snob saying that - I'm of strictly slightly above average looks myself (or so I'm told) and far from a paragon of health - but over the past two or three years I've been putting in a lot of effort to clean up my diet and get my act together health-wise because it seemed like the moment I turned 25, my body started falling apart, piece by piece. Point is, once I learned about all the poison you mentioned early in the article, I felt as if I'd had the glasses from "They Live" stapled from my head, and it's not just that I feel physically repulsed on the rare occasion circumstances force me to eat processed foods, but the people around me look... different. I had a friend who's a good three decades older than me say, "I remember when fat people were just fat." And I realized that I did too. Fat people aren't fat anymore. Like, I can remember when the fat people in my life (e.g. my father, before he shed a good hundred excess pounds) were big, but they were proportional. These days I feel like I see more and more what a friend deemed "eggs on legs" - these people are huge, bloated, swollen like ticks around the middle, their skin stretched taut rather than soft and pliant, with bloated faces, eyes forced into a squint, but their arms and legs are skinny and spindly. They're clearly malnourished and riddled with varicose veins and ugly, wine-dark splotches of bruising, but only on the extremities. But the excess flab on their bodies looks saggy and wrong. The best way I can put it is that they look like melting wax. To be perfectly frank, I see the same thing in the thirty pounds of excess weight I've been working to burn. It doesn't feel like I feel like it should, if that makes sense.

Worse still, so many of them are dim and inattentive. They toddle around on unsteady legs, dressed in pajamas, eyes bleary and dull and wheezing as they trawl the middle aisles of the grocery stores, almost wholly aware of their own surroundings. I notice this is more pronounced in driving, where any time I see an accident, or am nearly involved in one myself, it's usually someone quite large who's simply not paying attention.

I don't say this to be rude, though I know it very much is. Having put on an embarrassing amount of excess weight from working a sedentary job, I know that even though I've shed most of it, I'm still hurling boulders in a glass house. I have some degree of compassion for these people, ultimately. But what I see out there, more and more, is really beginning to concern me, because I believe that these people are quite literally eating themselves stupid, grazing like cattle more and more until they're quite literally bipedal livestock. Most people reading this probably are aware that saturated fats aren't just bad for your heart, and everything else, but especially your brain. The brain is sixty percent fat. If the only fats you introduce to your brain are saturated fats... well, you can extrapolate the rest. Needless to say, in my opinion, it's like building the frame of a house with brittle, plastic timber. I read more and more about "brain fog" and such stuff and can't help but think the fact that these people are building their brains from literal poison might have something to do with it. And, since I've typed way more than I thought, I'll just end with this - the heart of what truly concerns me about the issue isn't that these people are eating themselves to death. What worries me is that - metaphorically speaking - they're basically being transmogrified and domesticated into swine, and as they grow ever sicker, ever more feeble, ever more unable to care for themselves, they'll be clamoring for the farmer to feed them more slop. It's not just that we'll all have to bear this cost as a society; I fear that, since most of us in these spheres very much wish to limit the power of this metaphorical farmer - and you know what I'm referring to - do you really think the howling, wailing mobs of starving swine who rely on the farmer for everything will tolerate that? Regardless of their diminished, withered, and wizened states, they'll still be able to vote. And they'll be demanding the farmers use force to ensure their endless glut of slop never ceases or slows.

I know this only addressed one small point you made and spun it off into a tangent, but it really caught my attention since it's something that's been on my mind more and more, as of late.

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INTJ Architect's avatar

Trans-rich, that's a good one.

We've been buying some of our food from a local farmer network for maybe 15 years now. Spouse was once on the board. It has always struggled to survive. It's been the same group of people who buy from them ever since it started. Every once in a while whenever I pick up the food I ask how things are, if the group of people buying has grown. The last time I asked was about a year or year and half ago, when there were sporadic shortages going around, and I figured surely they had picked up some new customers. Nothing.

The vast majority of people just don't give a shit.

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