It means fewer Twinkies for everyone else.

Thank God! Because Twinkies really, truly, ming. They're one of those terrifying foods that clearly contain no actual food at all, and will still be here along with the cockroaches when everything else on the planet is dust.

...sorry, tangent. But I agree with Tep about the fact that setting up the whole moral paradigm of virtue/sin pertaining to cookies etc is spectacularly unhelpful.

Because Twinkies really, truly, ming.

Yet again, Fay and I are one. Which means I am HOTT.

I want some Sinful Cookies right now.

But I should have beer and pizza first.

The filling in Twinkies is peculiarly unfoodlike.

I had pizza for dinner -- it was sauceless, but with mozzarella cheese (or whatever blend is on pizzas), chopped tomatoes, kalamata olives, mushrooms (ick), feta cheese, and enough cloves of roasted garlic to kill a warehouse full of vampires.

It was SO good.

Because Twinkies really, truly, ming.

Is that a verb?

I've never had a twinkie, and I am really not tempted. That pizza sounds heavenly. Mmmmm garlic.

Mmmmm garlic.

Oh god. There was probably 2 full heads of garlic on it. SO good.

Also, I fail to see how "unhealthy" behaviors that impact only the individual engaging in them affect society.

Actually, people that get sick do have an impact on society beyond what their health insurance covers. And parents that smoke at home affect their own children. And parents that die of strokes, wind up having children surviving on Social Security benefits. And so on. Consider the effect that Suzi's longtime sick coworker has had on her life, and that company. It's not like Suzi blames her or is resentful, but you can't say it's happening in a vacuum.

So I'm saying the sick people who have no impact on society are a tiny portion of wealthy, well insured people who can afford private nurses.

And parents that smoke at home affect their own children.

I already noted that smoking is an activity that DOES affect more than just the person who does it, unlike someone's decision to eat a Twinkie.

And parents that die of strokes, wind up having children surviving on Social Security benefits. And so on. Consider the effect that Suzi's longtime sick coworker has had on her life, and that company. It's not like Suzi blames her or is resentful, but you can't say it's happening in a vacuum.

How many disease states have an absolute causative action (or pattern of actions) that can be pointed to in order to say "Yes, he ate Twinkies his entire life, and now the Accounting Department of MegaCorp is suffering because of his absences from work due to his Twinkie-induced illness"?

Put another way, how many disease states can you point to and definitively say that if the person had done Healthy Action X, he wouldn't have developed the disease? Lung cancer and smoking, I absolutely agree. But what else?

What else is out there where you can say for sure that if the person had engaged in these vaunted virtuous healthy actions, they wouldn't have developed the disease and thus been a burden on society? With very few exceptions (lung cancer being one, HIV/AIDS being another), it's very hard to tell what factors caused a disease state. Because genetics plays an enormous role. And there's no virtue in being lucky enough to have been born to parents with no familial history of chronic disease.