a controversial perspective on obesity

[jrtom]

http://www.obesitymyth.com/excerpt.html

http://www.bigfatblog.com/columnists/archives/001240.php

Hmm. I should probably read more about this.

A thought that has occurred to me in this context: as long as we have death, there will always be a leading cause of it. (This is true of any phenomenon, of course.) This is kind of obvious when you put it that way, but what this means is that it's not entirely obvious that something being "the leading cause of death"--which obesity-exacerbated health issues might even be--should mean that we all have to drop everything and do all that we can to reduce that risk.

I do get the feeling that the author might be confusing a couple of things here. It may indeed be the case that the mortality rate among overweight people and thin people is the same for a given level of exercise. This doesn't necessarily mean that being overweight can't make some health issues worse, or give you a greater risk of acquiring others.

Comments

Re: yeah... so...

[tildequinn.livejournal.com]

it's not better than scurvy, they both kill you. i mean, you can argue one is a more pleasant death than they other, but at that level you've really lost me. :)

i do agree that our society focuses too much on fat, not enough on health, but i think it's wrong to conflate society's focus and the findings of medical study. doctors will often point out thin != healthy, and the programs commonly recommended include exercise. weight loss alone is merely a stop gap measure to get to where exercise is comfortable and safe- the goal is always exercise. a lot of getting to a target weight from a health perspective is about making physical activity easier, or seeing encouraging tangible results that its working.

i like bmi, but i don't like how it's used. the range is quite large on what constitutes optimum weight, but all it tells you is a weight factor- people treat it like health. % body fat, how you feel at your target heart rate, blood pressure, cholesterol, and many etcs... health is a lot of things.

Re: yeah... so...

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

I agree with everything you said (although I think I have more reservations about BMI than you do). However, my understanding is that this guy was saying that there are a number of organizations, many of them associated with weight-loss programs, that have done a pretty good job of molding society to focus on fat rather than health, and on losing weight as an end in itself rather than a means to an end. In fact, I believe he was claiming that the medical studies themselves were being set aside, or distorted, in an effort to further the "weight-loss-as-end" agenda.

Like I said, I think that he may be leaving some things out to strengthen his point (although I haven't read his book so I shouldn't judge it by my memories of the excerpt) and I don't approve of that, or of the ad hominem attacks. But I think he makes some good points (unless I was simply reading into the essay what I wanted to see).