2742: Vice

[Mark Sandiego]

So many great arguments: lifestyle choices versus government oversight and social judgements. I just wanted to chime in regarding health and nutrition. I'm particularly confused by Chemda's comment about baked potatoes which I believe are a great and often recommended food so long as you don't top them with lots of salts or saturated fats. Perhaps that's what she meant or perhaps she is just considering the calorie count. The bigger picture here is that diet's should be personalized. We have different genetics and lifestyles. Kidney and heart patients have to be particularly careful as do diabetics obviously.

This leads me to smoking. Smoking affects every organ. It is incredibly destructive over time, but again based on genetics, some will quickly develop cancers or other diseases while others can go on smoking for decades without significant symptoms. For an interesting historical perspective on the rise of smokers in the US and the role of the government, check this out:

https://www.ochsner.org/health-resou...hsners-legacy/

[Scorpion]

Originally Posted by Mermaid

You have to take into account that southern cuisine is heavy because it was created in a time when farming and other [laborious] jobs were the norm. ...

The North didn't have robots. To say the South was more labor intensive than the North has not factual or logical sense to it. Not like they purposefully fried chicken to add calories they didn't know what a calorie was. Not that your all wrong or anything, but the premises that the South was somehow working harder and needed higher calorie food doesn't make sense to me. They did grow crops like cotton that needed much more labor to be profitable. But they were not paying for much of the labor prior to the civil war so that made sense at the time. Because they were not paying for labor they did not get into industrialization as much as the North but those jobs at the time certainly were not light labor.