And people will also choose to eat potato chips, not exercise, smoke, and drink heavily. You can't protect people from themselves, and even if it was an ethical government job to do so, i.e. take away people's freedoms because the government says it knows better, like with marijuana (I am REALLY humoring you, if you can't tell), there is no practical argument either. How much do you think your high estimate of X% who get sick by their own incompetence (which of course goes down significantly when people realize that they shouldn't blindly trust everything in our markets -- that blind, oft-misguided trust is another side effect of the FDA/USDA) will be DWARFED by the percentage of people saved by life saving drugs that make it to market faster/would otherwise be blocked. Do you know how many people the FDA has sentenced to die directly by rejecting appeals from terminally ill patients to get access to experimental drugs/procedures? Not to mention the indirect damage of delaying medicinal progress...
You can't protect all people from themselves, but you can protect a lot of people from themselves.
If you look at smoking [1] in the US, smoking went from 42.4% in 1965 to 16.8% in 2014. Raising awareness, taxing cigarettes, outlawing advertising, warnings on packaging, these things work.
The same could be done with alcohol if society wanted. One of the reasons why it hasn't happened with alcohol is because alcohol is ingrained into our culture.
> by the percentage of people saved by life saving drugs that make it to market faster/would otherwise be blocked.
Do you have any estimates for this? Do you have estimates about how many people would die by allowing poorly-vetted drugs on the market?
> which of course goes down significantly when people realize that they shouldn't blindly trust everything in our markets
How would you suggest the average person go about evaluating a drug/treatment?
> sentenced to die directly by rejecting appeals from terminally ill patients to get access to experimental drugs/procedures
sentenced to die implies that experimental drugs/procedures would save them. Undoubtedly some could be saved, but I doubt it would be more than a small fraction.
Oddly, the people you're asking to implement this harm reduction plan are often making the same mistakes as those who would "benefit" from the regulations.
Government bureaucrats are not special or different from us regular folk. Why should we expect them to be?
All of your points are born of the flawed assumption that it is ethical to take away people's freedoms because you think you know better. Even if you DO know better and could PROVE it (which is never guaranteed in theory OR in practice -- see: FDA, USDA), I would never support coercive measures. It's about as moral and effective as outlawing suicide. The practical arguments are already lost. There were a lot of well-intentioned common folk and bureaucrats who think JUST LIKE YOU and tried something called Prohibition, and it didn't work. Same with the drug war.
True, there are always people who will do that. I try to eat very low-carb and it's helped my heath dramatically, but even I occasionally will have a burger or real pasta.
The issue is education. It's very difficult to tell what is healthy and what isn't. There is a lot of research coming out that shows us sugar and starches are very bad for us. The stress from those carbs can damage our arteries and is what allows cholesterol to build.
The industry has a vested interest in people not knowing/believing in that. Sugar and HF Corn Syrup is a massive industry. Soda companies have been losing money as people finally move away and now we start to see the tides change.
Regardless, we need good education about what is and isn't health. Otherwise people struggle with weight and just get frustrated and resolve themselves to eat unhealthy because nothing seems to help reduce their weight or cravings.
I agree, and the FDA and USDA basically have a monopoly on providing that education in the current system. They aren't doing so well. Scaling back as the original commenter suggested would still offer government-stamped peace of mind for some products, but for those that aren't approved/are still pending, there will be room for private reviewing organizations to step in, probably providing consumers with more diverse opinions.
Over-regulation prevents what we call in the software world "rapid iteration". It may take more time for the dust to settle, but eventually the best solutions naturally rise to the top by this method.
how many lives were lost due to over-regulation of fats instead of sugar? i stand by my belief that experimentation with 1000 different diets will prove the subset that works over time.
