Quote: (01-30-2012 01:13 AM)kosko Wrote:
Quote: (01-29-2012 08:52 PM)Wizard Wrote:
The fat plague is horrifying, but one should not completely forget the advance of technology. How soon before there are actual pills (no infomercial crap) that can pretty much render obesity obsolete? The sad truth is there is a bigger market for something like that then there is for say curing cancer.
How exactly would something like that impact the game?
It will never happen. A magic pill that "cures" obesity would drop you dead in the amount of time you drop the weight - there is only so much medicine can do. The flip side of this is medical advances do become available it will be priced out of the normal womens budget.
I am not a biologist, but I disagree. The reason they can't cure the common cold is that the viruses keep changing; there is an active opponent that you can't predict.
However, in the area of obesity, really good real-time brain scans that tell what parts of the brain exactly do what when people eat-- different people like fatties, athletes, etc, have only recently been developed. And the mechanisms that control hunger probably don't change at the design level-- they do adapt to keep you eating in a number of failed dieting conditions however. But it's not a moving genetic target like fighting viruses.
There are already some proven weight loss drugs, the anti-depressant wellbutrin works, but it takes a long time to get things past the FDA because they don't want people dying like flies.
Several companies (Arena Pharma) recently tried to have pretty effective drugs approved but the FDA was too concerned with side effects which could be bad considering you are messing with basic body functions.
But look at the flip side. I'm on blood pressure meds because I'm 30 lbs overweight, they have some bad side effects and being fat is really bad for you. ( No lectures please, I've been to the gym 2/3 previous days)
Who would have thought they could invent Viagra? That stuff works really well.
There will be some drugs in the next few years, but you can be sure that shit will be EXPENSIVE. And someone who simply doesn't absorb calories very much STILL looks nowhere near as good as someone who exercises.