Short break from the health stuff
Okay fine it isn’t really a break. I saw this awesome comic on xkcd:
xkcd is definitely my favorite webcomic. I am entertained by, approximately, 80% of the strips and I probably let out a real laugh at like 30-40% of them. Really good stuff.
I thought this one really rang true to the health stuff also. You see all sorts of labels which are totally irrelevant. I bought a thing of oregano the other day and it says “All Natural” all over it. In terms of meaningfulness, I rank “all natural” just behind a stripper telling me that I look cute.
All of this gave me an idea for helping to improve nutrition and health. What if the FDA put in rules saying that products had to list the three WORST things about it? They could pretty easily come up with a ranking system to determine, approximately, what is worse. For instance, obviously the presence of something is almost always worse than the lack of something. So the presence of a certain chemical is worse than the lack of a certain vitamin. While I don’t know how you’d rank things like trans fats, saturated fats, sodium, processed grains, etc, I have to believe that some combination of substance and % of content could be established in a rough formula.
Then you put a three-item list on every product. Instead of simply seeing “Vitamin C” all over orange juice people would also be able to look and see the bad list of 30g of sugar per serving, among other things. At the very least, marketers would be less in control over the system and people would have some help making their choices.
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Comments
If 33% of the US had a gambling problem and it was totally out of control and it was going to cost everyone multiple trillion dollars due to bad decisions, then yes, I guess I would say they should.
The problem is one of relatively complexity and knowledge in the population as a whole.
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So, by the same logic, poker sites should have a warning saying ’statistically you are 95% likely to lose money playing poker’ ?