worldwide system to solve the obesity crisis? (most creative gets BA)?

lol we ant doin ur homework 4 yu

Taxing fast foods more, would just make the poor poorer. I'm sure that' isn't your goal. The dilemma is that if you take the fast food chains more, they'll pass that cost to the poor people who live off the cheap food.

Education is the only real long term solution. then hope it changes minds to care more about their own health. Until then, everyone really pays for it, in one way or another.

If people need assistance, give them jobs, so they can afford insurance, and start to care more about their own health, and the health of their children.

That said, I can afford to buy and steak and cook it, but today, I bought a McDonald's hamburger because it was so much easier, and took less time, and I wouldn't consider myself uneducated. Maybe just a little lazy. Not really :-).

Here's a crazy solution to a worldwide problem, make liposuction more affordable.

The real problem is that most people don't care much about themselves, and care less about others.

Hmmmm... I think the obesity thing is not the most major problem humanity faces - quite the reverse, in fact - but it is significant.

Obesity in my opinion (and it is just that; I've done pretty much zero research on the matter) is caused by a few factors: First, most obviously, the sheer availability of unhealthy food. It's everywhere, and it's delicious, and hard to resist. It's just so easy to go out and buy a huge stack of chocolate, or a pastry of some description... I recall the days when I'd go buy a packet of biscuits and scoff the lot by dinner time. Easy. Cheap. Delicious.

And I hinted there at another big reason for obesity: It's really easy to eat a huge stack of incredibly calorific food without thinking too much about it. We don't often think about what we consume in terms of its energy value, we think of it in terms of "oh god this is delicious" and "do I feel full or not?" This is fine if you're living on subsistence farming or hunting and gathering, but in the days of incredibly easy access to all kinds of scrummy, energy-dense treats, we need to think about this stuff more.

And hand in hand with that is the fact that we - a lot of us - have no idea *at all* what we should be putting into our bodies. It's why there are thousands of fad diets and why a lot of people say they can't get thin. Even though the science is pretty unambiguous, it's just not getting to people and just not sticking. I don't know about you, but from school all I remember about nutrition is something vague about a pie chart (pun unintentional). When I decided to become less of a lardy git I had to research dieting on the Internet, which can be a fraught experience as there's a hell of a lot of misinformation floating around (notably from people trying to push fad diets, I notice).

So what do we do about it? Well, the first and second points are more or less two sides of the same coin: Education. We really need to start teaching people better about what we're stuffing our bodies full of, as opposed to what we should be eating. This isn't a matter for debate, in my opinion. We have to hammer home ideas about calories, rough estimates of how many calories a foodstuff contains, and what constitutes a healthy diet (and indeed lifestyle) in which you're not overindulging on sugar, for instance. I'm not a food Nazi, by all means let them eat cake. But teach them why it should be a rarity instead of breakfast.

And then there's the food itself. I'm not sure what we can do about this in such a liberal society as the one in which we would like to continue living. We can't really ban chocolate, because there'd be riots (rightly - I'd join in!) and because it wouldn't work, we'd have, like, chocolate speakeasies. What we can do is encourage shops through financial incentives to stock fruits instead of/alongside the choccies next to the till. Perhaps regulate the manufacturers of processed foods a bit more to make sure that labelling is clear, on the front of the package, and standardised. Going back to education for a second, teaching people to read and understand these labels is also a must. We could also, possibly, regulate what the manufacturers put into a product, but I'm still thinking that one out and haven't decided if it's feasible or not.

I think that'd be a good start, at least. It's not about ostracising the obese, it's about educating everyone and making it clear what you're eating. With that in place, I think it'd be harder to be huge.

Restrict TV transmissions (except the news and BBC Parliament) to a couple of hours per day, and force ISPs to limit the hours of broadband internet access. Then we can all get off our backsides and do something to burn off the excess fat...

Extra tax on cheap junk food, making it more profitable to eat healthily. This also includes cheap loaves of bread, cheddar cheese and jam (amongst my personal main vices).

One might also consider the reforming or elimination of certain farm subsidies, but this might be more worthwhile in America than elsewhere, to stop the production of all the wrong things.

There is absolutely no way to solve it because it involves people's free will. You'll never stop people from being fat, lazy, and stupid

it is now the hour of play...