Please note I am not advocating for raw milk, I think it is not a wise decision but I also don’t believe it to be poison.

Drinking it on the farm or close to when it’s very fresh isn’t super high risk. My family was in dairy and did it all of the time. Once it’s off the farm, all bets are off.

Its not a huge effort to at least try to add some source with such a claim, besides the comment does not even bring anything of value to the discussion.

Diet obviously needs to be limited in throughput. I wouldn't recommend surviving on 10 pounds of nutraloaf, either.

Some also work outdoors.

At least that is what I'd expect, but I'm trying to extrapolate what I know of European history (acoup) to Korea. Anyone have better expertise able to talk about the experience of the different groups?

From documentaries I've seen of Christian monks, there is no talk of personal benefits and emotions like a self-help book, instead it's spiritual motivations about being compelled to follow a path of devotion in service to their faith.

I get the impression that it's a hard life as such orders are dwindling and they report the deprivation of things they did since joining that we might find mundane like "going to buy music" (you can tell they joined pre '80s).

I recall reading the rules of a Buddhist monastery and it was basically a compendium of all the bad things monks have done, written down to make it ambiguous it's off-limits. It did not give the suggestion of fulfilled people. It had a lengthy chapter of all the things you can't put your penis in: people, children, animals, dead things, clay vessels, fabric dolls, trees, holes in the wall, holes in the ground etc. Feels like some desperate rules-lawyering had happened over the years.

There's also medications in there - hypertension can be controlled with drugs, no?

But, yes, I agree with your main point - obesity in the US is widespread and a massive influence on both longevity and health care costs.

Doctors can vary in whether or not (and for how long) they advocate trying a healthy diet and exercise before prescribing drugs. In the UK the system is incentivised to avoid drug prescriptions unless necessary, as it reduces the financial burden on the NHS - both for buying the drugs and for managing complications linked to obesity. In the US, pharma companies can offer money and perks to doctors who promote their products.

Comments that try to reduce population-scale differences to a single factor, like access to healthcare, are overly reductive. When it comes to obesity (not using being overweight, but truly past the obese threshold) you don’t need a doctor to inform you that it’s unhealthy.

The reductive claims about access to healthcare are also ignoring the fact that people in the US do actually use a lot of healthcare. The rate of GLP-1 use in America for weight loss is around 1 in 8 people, which is significantly higher than anywhere in Europe last time I checked. Obviously the higher obesity rate contributes to higher usage, but it demonstrates that many obese people in the United States are not lacking access to health care.

> , is this a matter of the health care system

And you say:

> I see this 'medical system' stuff

To me there is a big difference between a "health care system" and a "medical system".

One is only here to try and fix issues, while the other will invest in prevention campains and help direct the overall politics around having an healthy population.

To me the recent EPA decision around PFAs is a signal of a deficient "health care system".

So, we got to know some people in the community and learned some things that would be relevant to this. One big one is the Amish view on technology. With 1965 data, especially looking at farmers, you’ll see variations in pest control tech. Amish people are not against all technology but they evaluate it differently.

For the Amish, they look at a technology and ask whether it will pull them together or push them apart. Farm chemicals would increase yields, but dramatically reduce the number of people they could have working on fields. So many colonies avoided highly toxic chemicals like DDT that were released during or after WW2. And because there was some resistance to Amish people, they tend to congregate together and so you’ll have colonies bunched up in areas - some colonies avoided water table contamination through a freak of geology and cousins who shared a belief on technology.

So nutrition does play a role - food in Amish communities is very whole and very close to natural. As an example, my stepfather was quite affable and so we’d take doughnuts to the factory where we picked up RVs. Certain companies have so much sugar in their doughnuts that it felt like giving people drugs. Physical activity is a constant. And their community plays a massive role in life and life expectancy but this data is from 1965 and looks at farmers so chemical use is definitely part of these findings as well.

A lack of care for those who can't afford it is, though.

All it takes is a single, major non-routine event to learn that lesson.

The system is really broken for everyone and the incentives are really skewed away from healthcare.

It was the first time I realized that people are existentially truly on their own and despite its claims, “the system” truly isn’t there for them.

The Amish are very deliberate about what changes they incorporate into their communities. Each community also sets their own rules, so it's poor practice to generalize.

(For example, their attitudes towards electricity are quite complicated and I don't think I could do it justice in a quick post.)

racist, or just naive?