Personally we may have something in common so to you I apologize but in the grand scheme of things, we are F'd sooner or later.
That's very big of you. But if you think that a proper dietary regimen requires torturous endurance, starvation and one meal a day, then you have taken the wrong fork in the road.
Yeah, I gotta back you up on this in a big way. 'Starvation' diets only work in the short run. In the long run it just slows down the bodies metabolism (logical if you think it through), and you'll end up putting all that weight back on (plus some). More recent diet theory tries to counter that tendency by 'cheating' once a week or so and loading up on calories. This keeps the metabolism cranking while losing calories the rest of the week.
I'm not so sure about the "cheating" part, especially spending a whole day doing it. A healthy dietary regimen should not leave a person hungry and thereby inclined to cheat, and the best way to keep the metabolism rolling is to engage in regular exercise of one form or another. Also, as for that guy eating only once a day, in addition to the invariable slowdown in his metabolism from only having a single meal, he will almost certainly experience muscle atrophy. That atrophy will further slow down his metabolism, and he will embark on a negative spiral. No wonder he finds it to be such a challenge. He's basically washing his car with a dirty rag.
It is difficult to change long established patterns of behavior in adults. Taxing these products will raise revenues but have only minimal effect on consumption until the taxes are raised to very high levels. A better place to start is with nutritional education in grade schools at the kindergarten stage on up. Get the junk food vendors out of schools and replace with healthy alternatives. Launch a national ad campaign aimed at young kids and adolescents, as was done for smoking. Make it be kool to eat healthy. This, in the long run, will do more than taxation, because habits begun in childhood usually last into adulthood. If you wanted a three-pronged approach then I would suggest, in addition to early childhood education and a ad campaign, taxing food manufacturers based on trans and saturated fat content and the sugar content of their products. This is likely to bring a change in products available. If products loaded with sugar are not available in the first place, they won't be consumed. I would suggest that taxing at the manufacturing level will be more effective than taxing at the consumer level, because getting the junk of the shelves should be the ultimate goal.
Agree. Better education and taxation can complement each other. As i mentioned i have a particular interest in education. I actually think that including metrics like BMI during basic education years up to high school should be part of the system. An additional performance variable during the educational process. These metrics, unlike weight/clothing size are actually a reflection of a lifestyle rather than the result of temporary diets/eating disorders. A great byproduct of such initiative is that it requires the involvement of the parents (reaching adult population that it wouldn't otherwise) and extend the benefits of the education beyond the primary recipient (student in this case). If kids go through a balanced lifestyle (some excercise, balanced eating habits, etc) during their young years there is a higher chance they'll stick to such habits once out of high school. Again, it doesn't have to be BMI specifically, any metric that reflects balanced lifestyle would do. Obviously every "effort" done in education so far hasn't reached home as apparently there is more and more education in the matter and yet more and more population are joining the obesity ranks. A big issue here is that it is a PREVENTIVE measure, that have relative minimal costs compare to the REACTIVE nature of our system (if it ain't broken don't fix it line of thinking) that is obviously unsustainable long term. Some food for thought (no pun intended): It took us 40-50 years, many deaths, and billions in financial resources, to conclude that alcohol and cigarrettes are direct causes for terrible diseases, so we don't allow our children to consume said products until adulthood. Just like alcohol and cigarrettes (both known substances to be detrimental to human health) are not available to children underage, then what's so different to doing something similar for those particular fats/sugars that have been scientifically proved to cause health damage (diabetes, heart related diseases, etc)?