An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And yet we still sell cigarettes. And though WHO proved processed meats cause cancer the deli counter line is still very long. There are things that you can teach people to prevent doing, don't stick a knife in the electric socket, and then there are the things that take a monumental effort to change.
Prevention education is important, but I wonder if the meat counter will be restricted to 18 and over to purchase and come with a warning from the surgeon general.
I'm being unusually sarcastic, but I've had this conversation several times in my own head and I can't figure out a solution.
Leaded gasoline was poising the nation, but no one stopped driving. Only when the government forced the corporations to change did the lead poising stop.
You can't make someone change, you can't force an individual to change but if you never allow it to enter their world then it has been prevented right?
The obvious solution is to change incentives. The solution that will actually work, but will bring endless accusations of cruelty and heartlessness and Godwin's law, is simple:
Bring back shaming. Encourage fat shaming. Encourage alcohol shaming. We still encourage smoke-shaming, and it has resulted in a reduction in smoking. We need to stop being so afraid and sensitive to shame. It is a natural human tendency to police behaviors with negative externalities via shame.
Pass all the laws you want, but social shame is far more effective.
Shaming would only make things worse. From my experience alcoholics and over-eaters do not respond well to negative social stimuli. i.e. they will eat and drink more.
This reminds me of a Black Mirror episode where at some point in the future, fat shaming was brought to such an extreme, that everybody's job was just to pedal stationary bikes. And if you slacked, you got fat, and if you got fat, you got fired, and then you had to wear a bright yellow uniform and appear on fat shaming reality tv shows and clean up everybody's trash.
Many cancers are in fact overfunded relative to their societal impact. Moreover too much money is spent on chasing cures rather than prevention:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3411479/ http://www.slate.com/blogs/quora/2013/02/07/where_do_the_mil...