Two great diaries today by
OrangeClouds 115 and
Dawn G touch on the frustration and anguish surrounding obesity in America.
But could there be just a touch of hysteria in the media about people who are overweight?
Here's some food for thought:
First off let me say loud and clear, I am
not arguing that there are no health problems from being overweight and inactive. But as a skeptic and a contrarian, I like to take a closer look at things that become the "conventional wisdom". It's interesting what you can find when you look deeper.
First thing I found interesting is that Americans are living longer than ever, with declines in death rates from most major causes -- including heart disease and cancer.
I am one of those who heard obesity can kill ya'. It causes heart disease, cancer, diabetes, hypertension, asthma -
Turns out obesity has not been found to be the primary cause of any of those diseases. In fact, a huge UCLA study finds that the whole obesity "epidemic" is probably overblown.
Recent research has found no appreciable difference in mortality rates among fat Americans with a BMI less than 35. Only 6 percent of the American population falls into that category. Many more medical issues pose a greater threat to more Americans, most notably malnutrition and smoking.
"Media coverage of obesity overtook reporting on hunger and malnutrition in 2002 despite the fact that the World Health Organization deemed hunger to be the leading cause of world death," UCLA sociologist Abigail C. Saguy said. "Similarly, cigarette smoking continues to be the leading cause of 'preventable death' despite the increasing shift of focus from smoking to obesity."
Turns out, studies have shown that people who are heavy and fit are far healthier than people who are thin and never exercise. For women, being fat poses a lesser risk of heart disease than being unfit, according to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA 2004;292:1179-87). An accompanying editorial in JAMA says "physicians, researchers, and policymakers should spend ... more time focusing on how to get sedentary individuals to become active."
The real issue, evidently, is fitness not fatness.
Researchers from the Cooper Institute in Dallas and the University of Houston have shown that lean men had increased longevity only if they were physically fit. Plus, obese men who were fit were less likely to die from cardiovascular disease than thin men who were unfit. (Lee, D.D., Blair, S.N., & Jackson, A.S. (1999). Cardiorespiratory fitness, body composition, and all-cause and cardiovascular disease mortality in men. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 69, 373-380)
What about the health statistics? What about the CDC's claim that obesity will kill more people than smoking?
Well, turns out the CDC says they exaggerated the number considerably:
"A widely quoted federal study that concluded obesity is poised to overtake tobacco as the leading cause of preventable death inflated the impact of obesity on the annual death toll by tens of thousands due to statistical errors. The figure -- popularly reported as 400,000 annual deaths due to obesity -- was deeply flawed.
According to the Wall Street Journal, a CDC document "concluded that the mathematical errors may have inflated the study's death toll by about 80,000 fatalities, or 20% of the total deaths."
In addition, health statistics often touted when talking about the obesity "epidemic", are produced by groups like the International Obesity Task Force and the American Obesity Association, which are largely funded by pharmaceutical and weight loss companies. The AOA's main sponsors are Weight Watchers International, Jenny Craig, and Knoll Pharmaceutical Company, which manufactures the weight loss drug Meridia.
Quackery:
Last year, Americans spent an estimated $33 billion a year trying to lose weight.
Much of that money is wasted and particularly dangerous for kids. Indeed, a government review found that two out of three American dieters regained all the weight they had lost within a year, and 97 percent had gained it all back within five years. A study in the October 2003 issue of the journal, Pediatrics, showed that frequent dieting among children ages 9 to 14 was not only ineffective, but appeared to result in weight gain in the long term.
Sometimes, tho, it's also just about money (according to a lobbyist for food, beverage and restaurant businesses) or getting the government to pay for controversial treatments. Getting the government to classify obesity as a disease opens the door for the government - the taxpayer - to pay for all kinds of treatments -- some questionable -- for obesity. Everything from weight loss programs like Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig, to treatments that themselves have real risks, like diet pills or bariatric surgery.
Moral Panic:
Well, if being overweight is not really the real problem, why are the media and the government so worked up about it?
As Paul Campos suggests in his book "The Diet Myth", we are in the midst of one of our routine moral panics in the U.S. Sometimes we burn witches; sometimes we hunt communists in the state department, sometimes its satanic ritual abuse in day cares, sometimes its reefer madness.
We can understand why the pharmaceutical and weight loss companies would push the "weight loss at all cost!" message. But could the anxiety over obesity really be about our guilt and fear about our own society's "over consumption" ...
"A lot of upper class Americans in particular have anxiety about over-consumption in this society generally. I think this well warranted. But the way that over-consumption is dealt with is not by focusing on forms of over-consumption that are basically socially, politically or environmentally significant, such as having houses and cars and shopping malls and suburbs and etcetera that are all too big, but by focusing instead on trivial forms of so-called over-consumptions, which is the increasing weight of the American populace. It really hasn't increased very much, actually. It has only increased by 8 pounds over the course of the last decade. In my view, it is much more significant to focus on the fact that the average American automobile weighs several hundreds pounds more than it did a decade ago than the average American adult weighs 8 pounds more. "
So what the heck now?
Well, one step is to change the current thinking to being more healthy, instead of being less heavy.
In an article published in the Harvard Health Policy Review, Dr. Glenn Gaesser suggests we move to a non-weight centered "Health at Every Size" view...
"Despite increasing prevalence of dieting, Americans are heavier than ever. Not only do traditional calorie-restrictive weight-loss approaches frequently fail, dieting may actually contribute to obesity. Because many of the health problems associated with body fat are the same as those linked to physical inactivity and poor diet, the health risks of overweight and obesity per se have been exaggerated. Most weight-related health conditions can be treated effectively by increasing physical activity and improving quality of diet, independent of weight loss.'
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If you've gotten this far, thanks for reading.
There are probably lots of reasons why the media is pushing the idea of an obesity epidemic right now. These are just a few. I didn't even mention what the media's War on Fat is telling society about the value of women, particularly minority women.
I'm left to wonder, what might the media and the government be trying to keep us from noticing about us and our role in the world by feeding a neurotic obsession with food and its deprivation?