no subject

[firecat]

Superb takedown of the "obesity epidemic". Putting it here mainly so I can find it later.

"The epidemiology of overweight and obesity: public health crisis or moral panic?" by Paul Campos, Abigail Saguy, Paul Ernsberger, Eric Oliver and Glenn Gaesser

(Their answer: moral panic)

Excerpts:

While there has been significant weight gain among the heaviest individuals4 the vast majority of people in the ‘overweight’ and ‘obese’ categories are now at weight levels that are only slightly higher than those they or their predecessors were maintaining a generation ago. In other words we are seeing subtle shifts, rather than an alarming epidemic. Biologist Jeffery Friedman offers this analogy: ‘Imagine that the average IQ was 100 and that five percent of the population had an IQ of 140 and were considered to be geniuses. Now let's say that education improves and the average IQ increases to 107 and 10% of the population has an IQ of >140. You could present the data in two ways. You could say that average IQ is up seven points or you could say that because of improved education the number of geniuses has doubled. The whole obesity debate is equivalent to drawing conclusions about national education programmes by saying that the number of geniuses has doubled.’
...
Claim #4: Significant long-term weight loss is a practical goal, and will improve health.

At present, this claim is almost completely unsupported by the epidemiological literature. It is a remarkable fact that the central premise of the current war on fat—that turning obese and overweight people into so-called ‘normal weight’ individuals will improve their health—remains an untested hypothesis. One main reason the hypothesis remains untested is because there is no method available to produce the result that would have to be produced—significant long-term weight loss, in statistically significant cohorts—in order to test the claim.
...
Public opinion studies also show that negative attitudes towards the obese are highly correlated with negative attitudes towards minorities and the poor, such as the belief that all these groups are lazy and lack self-control and will power. This suggests that anxieties about racial integration and immigration may be an underlying cause of some of the concern over obesity.

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

Pow! That's an apple-pie-in-the-eye — or maybe banana cream?

It was a stereo year that made me a fat acceptance person: one really dear friend, who taught me HAES, and Paul Campos, who opened new neural pathways in my brain.

[firecat]

He does that to brains, doesn't he? (Too bad it doesn't work on more people's brains.)

[contrarywise]

That's awesome, thanks for sharing the link!

[notyourwendy]

Thanks for sharing that. I've had an awful taste in the back of my brain due to my mother's concern trolling over weight and that may have been just what I needed to wash it away.

[firecat]

I'm glad it helped with that, and sorry your mother did that to you.

[snippy]

I only wish I'd had this 5 years or so ago, when one of my favorite pastimes was jumping up and down at a couple of particular male SF/F authors who were convinced that being thin, strong, and intermittently fasting were what made you a good person, and if you hadn't handled those things first, no other kind of work (be it emotional or intellectual or relationship or creative or anything) justified thinking of yourself as a good adult person.

Edited to add: and now I am just tired of their baloney and refuse to bother trying to educate them.

[firecat]

You're right not to bother with them, and y'know, I think showing them the article probably wouldn't have helped. If you follow the links to articles that mention this article, a bunch of them are op-eds that disagree with the article by ignoring everything it says. Which IMHO is pretty much what those writers would have done if you'd pointed them at the article. Because if a big part of your identity is wrapped up in the idea that being thin makes you superior, you aren't going to let that go just because a few people in a science journal say your idea is wrong.

[johnpalmer]

Heh. I think I also remember hearing of a study where being "overweight" meant you had a lower chance of dying from all causes, so they juggled the numbers until they found *something* that meant being overweight was bad... rather than the appropriate scientific response of saying that the data suggests that we've picked the wrong target for what counts as "overweight".

[firecat]

That has happened, yeah. There have also been several studies that do show being "overweight" or slightly "obese" means you have a slightly lower risk of dying than people in the currently approved BMI range. (Most of them have involved Katherine Flegal. Quack "flegal obesity" for more.)

[auntysocial.livejournal.com]

I get mad every time I hear the phrase "epidemic of obesity." I want to ask those who use it when the Golden Age of Slenderness was. if people were so much thinner in 1959, for example, why doesn't anyone say we should go back to eating (and living) the way we did back then?

[firecat]

Right. And how about the part where back then the definition of obesity was different than it is now?

[hitchhiker.livejournal.com]

very well-done piece!