And another big shot with Stephen. NIH director Francis Collins is on, re: this:
In May 2012, an HBO Documentary Films series on obesity, “The Weight of the Nation,” premieres. The four-part series—Consequences, Choices, Children in Crisis, and Challenges—highlights several NIH research advances and addresses the factors contributing to the country’s obesity problem. The films are the centerpiece to a public awareness campaign, which also includes a three-part HBO Family series for kids, 12 short films, a website and social media, and a nationwide community-based outreach effort using free film discussion guides and other tools...
There's also a book, and assorted other stuff (including, eventually, the films themselves) at theweightofthenation.hbo.com. Plus lots of articles online, many entirely predictable.
The first I saw was at Jezebel:
weighty matters
By Lindy West
May 9, 2012 5:40 PM
Being Mean to Fat People Is Pointless: A Good Old-Fashioned Plea for Civility
"Obesity will crush the United States into oblivion." That's the final line of the trailer for HBO's upcoming fatpocalypse documentary Weight of the Nation (which, as far as I can tell, was directed by Roland Emmerich and ends with Will Smith blowing up the fat-people mothership with a nuclear warhead). That's right, you guys. The fat people are coming. To crush the entire nation. Into oblivioooooooooon. This is why we can't have nice nations...
...Here's my point. People, right now, are actively campaigning against kindness, and treating it like a legitimate and productive political stance. But that's insane. Even if shaming and hurting people was the "solution" to the obesity "problem"—which it isn't—it still wouldn't be worth it to me. Because humanity is more important. Maybe being kind to fat people (and, really, I mean all people) isn't a perfect system—maybe you're going to be uncomfortable on a plane once in a while, and it's possible that some fat weirdo somewhere is going to, uh, game the system and get hella free open-heart surgeries ON UNCLE SAM'S DIME (or whatever stupid con you think we're running in the name of cake). But, being a compassionate human being, I can absorb that margin of error and I am proud to do so.
Whether or not you believe that fat people actually cost our nation money, the real problem with this whole shame industrial complex is that it doesn't fucking work. Not only does it hurt people, it's embarrassingly ineffective—a cruel hobby, not a political act. Everyone on earth who is concerned about this issue—whether you're a person who thinks that fatness is irrelevant, or someone who's bullied because of your body, or a concerned citizen who genuinely wants to improve the health of the nation—should be on the same side here. Be fucking nice.
Campaign for better P.E. programs and healthier school lunches. Work to overhaul our country's horrific food-production system. Seek logical solutions for how to cope with a physically larger populace. Because believe me, Americans aren't going to miraculously start getting smaller once you yell at us enough. Shame is stagnation. It won't fix anything. Bullying is not activism. Hurting is not helping. Cut it out.
A (quick, shallow) survey of what Google turned up starts off less exasperating than I expected, though. Even if some are responses to the conference, not the documentaries. Some headlines:
Report: Lack of Willpower Not a Factor in Obesity Epidemic
Obesity fight must shift from personal blame-U.S. panel
Obesity epidemic stems from environment, panel says (links to a video)
Recess, New Menus Key to US Obesity Crisis, Report Finds
IOM Highlights Federal Policy Changes That Could Help Slow Obesity Crisis (although: "Rather than push ideas that the food industry has opposed, the panelists offer multiple suggestions to work at the same time like implementing a soda tax and changing zoning laws to encourage walking and biking.")
The medical establishment is ill-suited to deal with America's obesity epidemic (LTE)
Then I started reading the documentary reviews. Here's SFGate:
We've all seen the TV news reports on obesity in the United States, fresh statistics from the latest study, read with professional detachment, while images of pudgy bodies cross the screen, their faces blurred or heads just out of the camera frame. It's been going on for years, as much a staple of TV news as the weather report.
Unlike the weather, though, there is a lot Americans can do about weight problems, and every minute we delay is not only critical but both deadly and expensive - expensive as in billions of dollars taken from the pockets of taxpayers and businesses. Obesity is an epidemic and perhaps America's biggest health problem.
That's the message pounded home with singular effectiveness in HBO's four-part, multidisciplinary documentary "The Weight of the Nation." Produced by Sheila Nevins and John Hoffman, "Weight" pulls no punches, spares neither the multibillion-dollar food and advertising industries nor public officials for not only failing to fix the problem but actually making it worse, and essentially writes a prescription for the nation's health and economic future that we ignore to our peril...
How did we get this way? Beginning in the late 20th century, we moved to a food industry based on what Dr. Kelly Brownell of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity calls "a cheap-food model." The cheapest food is also the least healthy. The category not only includes all kinds of packaged, processed foods, but, of course, fast food offerings, which have become the plaque-building lifeblood of the American diet.
The most tragic victims of the nation's weight epidemic are kids, who are, as Brownell puts it, "besieged" by advertising from an industry that wants them to eat more. He labels food marketing to children as "powerful, pernicious and predatory."
Some 40 to 50 percent of food eaten by kids is consumed at school, and school cafeterias, which have to be financially self-sufficient, push unhealthy, packaged food at kids...
Should you think things couldn't be all that bad, consider that today's adults may make up the first generation in U.S. history whose children will have an average life expectancy lower than their own.
"Weight of the Nation" is filled with provocative and sometimes scary information. But the biggest take-away in the series is that the nation's weight crisis can be reversed. So, for that matter, can an individual's weight crisis.
The commercial diet industry won't be any happier about the HBO series than the food industry. In the second part of the series, "Choices," Susan Yager, author of "The Hundred Year Diet," says bluntly: "The diet industry has no reason to solve the problem. Solving the problem puts them out of business."..
...Mindful eating is one way to address, well, several elephants in the room, including the fact that the food industry is heavily subsidized to produce foods that aren't all that healthy for you. What that means is that those foods - wheat, sugar, soy and corn - are not only very abundant but also that their cost in the checkout line is artificially low, while fruits and vegetables, which are not directly subsidized and make up only about 3 percent of the planted cropland in the United States, are more expensive.
In other words, the American taxpayer is shelling out billions of dollars to support the production of food whose ready availability and low price will end up costing us billions more in added health care expense in the future...
Hmm. Nothing really new there, though the focus on gov't & industry is welcome.
The LATimes review is a bit less booster-ist:
...The program, produced in conjunction with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s “Weight of the Nation” conference in Washington, D.C., balances on a knife's edge between determined hope and realistic discouragement...Yet the segments painstakingly document how hard the body fights weight loss and how ubiquitously our social and economic systems sabotage our best efforts to shed pounds.
For that to change, biomedical researchers must find ways to disrupt our bodies’ desperate hold on fat and break the link between excess fat and ailments like diabetes and heart disease; restaurant giants and food manufacturers must curb their drive to hawk products that entice our brains’ pleasure centers and promote overeating; health insurance companies must quit their long-standing practice of paying doctors only to treat obesity-related diseases and make it their business to prevent obesity in the first place; and Americans must band together, pull themselves and their neighbors off the couch to exercise, and agitate for policies and communities designed to fight fat and promote health...
Here's this:
New anti-obesity effort is launched -- but is its approach effective?
By Susan Perry | 05/08/12 | MinnPost.com
...Obviously, something needs to be done about the obesity epidemic. But what? That’s the billion-dollar question. The new campaign is centered on the eat-fewer-calories-and-exercise-more concept that’s been touted for decades as the answer to maintaining a healthy weight. Not everyone is convinced of this approach, though. A growing number of scientists and other experts believe that not only is the calorie-balance concept ineffective, it may be contributing to the obesity epidemic.
One of the most visible critics of the “energy balance” approach is science writer Gary Taubes. He’s written on this topic extensively over the past decade, including in two heavily researched books, “Good Calories, Bad Calories” and “Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It.” On Monday, he wrote yet again on the topic for Newsweek magazine. Although the new anti-obesity campaign is needed, he says, it is doomed to fail.
“The problem is, the solutions this multi-level campaign promotes are the same ones that have been used to fight obesity for a century — and they just haven’t worked,” Taubes writes.
“The conventional wisdom these days — promoted by government, obesity researchers, physicians, and probably your personal trainer as well — is that we get fat because we have too much to eat and not enough reasons to be physically active,” he adds. “But then why were the PC- and Big Mac-deprived Depression-era kids fat? How can we blame the obesity epidemic on gluttony and sloth if we easily find epidemics of obesity throughout the past century in populations that barely had food to survive and had to work hard to earn it?..
That article by Taubes is worth reading. A bit:
...How can we blame the obesity epidemic on gluttony and sloth if we easily find epidemics of obesity throughout the past century in populations that barely had food to survive and had to work hard to earn it?
These seem like obvious questions to ask, but you won’t get the answers from the anti-obesity establishment, which this month has come together to unfold a major anti-fat effort, including The Weight of the Nation, which begins airing May 14 and “a nationwide community-based outreach campaign.” The project was created by a coalition among HBO and three key public-health institutions: the nonprofit Institute of Medicine, and two federal agencies, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. Indeed, it is unprecedented to have the IOM, CDC, and NIH all supporting a single television documentary, says producer John Hoffmann. The idea is to “sound the alarm” and motivate the nation to act.
At its heart is a simple “energy balance” idea: we get fat because we consume too many calories and expend too few. If we could just control our impulses—or at least control our environment, thereby removing temptation—and push ourselves to exercise, we’d be fine. This logic is everywhere you look in the official guidelines, commentary, and advice. “The same amount of energy IN and energy OUT over time = weight stays the same,” the NIH website counsels Americans, while the CDC site tells us, “Overweight and obesity result from an energy imbalance.”
The problem is, the solutions this multi-level campaign promotes are the same ones that have been used to fight obesity for a century—and they just haven’t worked...
There is an alternative theory, one that has also been around for decades but that the establishment has largely ignored. This theory implicates specific foods—refined sugars and grains—because of their effect on the hormone insulin, which regulates fat accumulation. If this hormonal-defect hypothesis is true, not all calories are created equal, as the conventional wisdom holds. And if it is true, the problem is not only controlling our impulses, but also changing the entire American food economy and rewriting our beliefs about what constitutes a healthy diet.
Oddly, this nutrient-hormone-fat interaction is not particularly controversial. You can find it in medical textbooks as the explanation for why our fat cells get fat. But the anti-obesity establishment doesn’t take the next step: that fat fat cells lead to fat humans. In their eyes, yes, insulin regulates how much fat gets trapped in your fat cells, and the kinds of carbohydrates we eat today pretty much drive up your insulin levels. But, they conclude, while individual cells get fat that way, the reason an entire human gets fat has nothing to do with it. We’re just eating too much.
I’ve been arguing otherwise. And one reason I like this hormonal hypothesis of obesity is that it explains the fat kids in Depression-era New York...
Here's a good one (shorter, too):
42% Of Adults Will Be Obese By 2030, But Not Because They’re Stupid Or Lazy
Pretty much everyone agrees that obesity in America is problematic, multi-faceted, expensive, and difficult to combat. But exactly how big is the problem? According to a new report in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine, by the year 2030, 42% of U.S. adults will be clinically obese, based on their BMI (which is an admittedly flawed, 200-year-old method of measurement, but it’s also, somehow, all we’ve got). Which is a lot. That’s a lot of obese people. But this forecast, based on current obesity statistics, doesn’t reveal that Americans are dumb and lazy–it also indicates that more education and outreach is necessary, and that we’re still not at the root of the problem...
Took forever for each of the five pages this article was posted on at technorati to load, but it wasn't a waste:
End Obesity in America? Not Likely Any Time Soon!
Author: Carole Ditosti
Published: May 10, 2012 at 3:59 pm
Beginning with the launch of the HBO program The Weight of the Nation which airs May 14th the anti-obeser institutions are coming out in full force. In upcoming weeks they are establishing a "nationwide community-based outreach campaign" against the fleshy rolls around your waist. Are you impressed that three influential public-health institutions, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health and the nonprofit Institute of Medicine have collaborated with HBO to create a documentary? According to producer John Hoffmann they've done this to "sound the alarm" and get the nation to act?
Act? How? Lose weight? Ha, ha, ha. Right. "FAT CHANCE," you say snarkily. Well, you might show a little appreciation that finally, there is a concerted, unprecedented effort by the federal government (CDC, NIH) to reign in the country's endemic obesity plague and the rapidly rising instances of childhood obesity and diabetes. We have to do something. Americans are now exporting their diet and the pandemic of fat is becoming a global phenomenon. The federal government and media have been forced by obese feeders to create a coalition to inform and persuade against the perniciousness of excessive weight gain. Hear the urgency underlying my tone?
Problem! There is a disconnect between this latest media and governmental development and what is occurring in the culture. As a cultural receptor, I've witnessed the "alarm sounding" for decades. The medical industrial complex since the 1950s through spokespersons like Dr. Spock recommended that mothers restrict their children's diets to prevent weight gain because it was unhealthful...
Because of my experience, I know that this current "alarm sounding" is disingenuous and unrealistic. And this wonderful "cutting edge" initiative? It is a whitewash of the "same old, same old," as Gary Taubes suggests in his Newsweek article. The anti-obesity campaign will fail in the long term. Indeed, I would go so far as to suggest after reading the basis of the campaign protocol which posits that 1)the overweight and obese need to exercise more to burn up more calories and 2)they need to eat less, obesity will continue to augment for the next two decades with its attendant side effects and diseases, and obesity will continue to rise globally.
Here is why I think this. The campaign does not approach nor excavate the roots of the problem: America's industrialized food supply, with its emphasis on processed and refined sugars and GM (genetically modified) grains, cereals, pastas, wheat and processed-chemicalized foods with additives, food colorings and preservatives. The scientific panel behind the initiative according to Taubes ignores the impact of refined sugars on the body and treats all calories the same.
Economics and the industrialized food supply (engendered by industrialized farms which support the food in fast food restaurants and chains) are closely tied with obesity. The anti-obesity campaign ignores this and sticks to the mantra: exercise more, a calorie is a calorie, eat less. (It is the same science with those coming out of lap band and other surgeries. They are told they can eat "anything." Is it any wonder that many lap banders can't lose past a certain amount of weight?) Misinformation, misdirection, mistake...
And this, at HuffPo (I know) has some good links:
Michele Simon
Public Health Lawyer
Why I Am Not Attending or Watching 'Weight of the Nation'
Posted: 05/10/2012 2:12 pm
The national hysteria over obesity has reached a crescendo this week, as the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention hosts the conference, "Weight of the Nation," in Washington, D.C. If you couldn't make it, no worries, more fear-mongering is on the way in a four-part mini-series on HBO to air next week. The show of the same name is produced in coordination with several federal government agencies. The trailer alone almost brought me to tears, seeing all the awful stereotypes of fat people.
As I wrote in my book, focusing on obesity is problematic for many reasons. One, it ensures the focus stays on the individual, instead of the food industry. What do you think when you see a fat person? That it's their fault, they just need to eat better and exercise more. Granted, my public health colleagues are trying to change this conversation to one of the "environment" (far too apolitical a word), but as long as we keep talking about obesity, the framing is all about individual behavior change.
Next, scientific evidence shows that fat people have enough problems dealing with discrimination, bullying, etc., and the last thing they need is more fear-mongering brought to you by the federal government and cable television...
Finally, obsessing over obesity is a great gift to the food industry because this is a problem food companies can supposedly help fix. They can market healthier foods! They can help fund playgrounds and exercise programs! Indeed, the big announcement coming out of the CDC event yesterday was how the first lady's Let's Move program has its newest corporate partner in the frozen vegetable company, Birds Eye, which is launching a marketing campaign to encourage kids to eat their veggies. Problem solved, thanks Birds Eye. Never mind all that junk food marketing to kids, which Let's Move ignores. (If you missed it, this recent excellent Reuters investigation explains the food industry politics at play.)
The only thing bringing me any sanity this week is reading Julie Guthman's excellent critique of the obesity wars, "Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism."..
One of the posts she links to is this:
the HAES files: Top 10 Reasons to Be Concerned About “The Weight of the Nation” Documentary
Over the last few days, I have been involved in preparing ASDAH’s “Debate the Weight” response to HBO’s documentary series, The Weight of the Nation (WOTN). As I write this, I still haven’t seen the series yet; it’s scheduled to air on May 14 and 15. Nevertheless, like many of you, I am already worried about it. Here are my top 10 reasons why. {Other than the last two, the order of the reasons should not be interpreted as a ranking of importance. They’re all important to me.}
10. The misguided focus on obesity...
9. The appeal to fear...
8. Disservice to thin people...
7. Unhealthy behaviors...
6. Wrong message to children...
5. Increase of weight stigma..
4. No recognition that our obsession with obesity is contributing to the rise in eating disorders...
3. Misuse of our tax dollars...
2. Misinformation abounds..
1½. What’s not being said. (OK, I couldn’t limit my list to 10, but who ever heard of a “top 11” list?)..
1. Escalation of the cultural war on obesity...
So, hmm. But then, I don't get HBO in any case -- and by the time the films show up online, I'll have forgotten all about them. So.
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