Gluttony and sloth are still roundly believed to be the causes of obesity by the general populace and by far too many public health officials. This is a sickly rewarding belief for the non-obese in that obesity becomes a moral failing that one has avoided. The science of the matter to date does not justify this belief, but that's not stopping conventional wisdom. The consequences of the "moral failing" school are themselves immoral, ranging from casual incivility to outright dehumanizing hostility towards the obese. Case in point: a Guardian review of a tv show on obesity generated the following bits from comments:
Too many fat idiots.
....
They should be kicked out onto the street and left to die.
....
Yet she 'couldn't understand why she was so fat'. It's because you keep stuffing food in your face you stupid cow! Hopefully social services will step in and take the kid into care before she deep fries it and eats it.
These are trivial examples but the sentiment is out there.
11 comments:
I think I know what you are saying about overall causes of societal obesity, pyker. But do you mean to imply that there is little or no individual responsibility for a person's obesity? I know from much personal experience that if I allow myself to overeat ("gluttony") and I am not active enough ("sloth") that I put on weight quite rapidly. Could you clarify a little more and/or point me toward other things you've written or read about this?
I recommend starting with the video linked at the end of my post on Gary Taubes.
Let's defer talk of "responsibility" for now (not forget about it forever, just defer it a bit). Definitely one's choices can have a big impact. (I'd suggest you'd find it impossible to gain much weight if you went to an all-meat diet, say, no matter how much you attempted to overeat.) Consider the possibility that overeating and inactivity are symptoms of obesity and not causes of it. Anyway, give the Taubes lecture a look.
That Taubes lecture is by far the most intelligent, most convincing thing I have ever seen related to nutrition in my life.
Thanks...
Excellent. Glad you liked it. I get the impression that after years spent covering physics, Taubes was appalled by the lack of rigor surrounding health & nutrition.
on all the health agency charts I have ever seen, I am classified as "obese". Of course, the charts don't have a 3 standard deviation (6ft tall with a 50 chest but a 38 waist doesnt figure into the population) consideration, but that doesn't matter to life insurers, primary care physicians, dietitians, or others who believe the charts and statistics.
Agreed on the Taubes lecture. It does make alot of sense.
I just bought Taubes' book - Good Calories, Bad Calories. It was actually on the buy-2-get-3rd-free table. I guess that is good and bad, huh?
I wonder how vegetarians are supposed to do the low-carb thing. Must be very difficult. My daughter is an 80% vegetarian (80% because occasionally a teenager's cravings for protein overcome the disdain of eating animals), and I try to minimize meat to some extent on "moral" grounds more than (false?)health reasons.
Also what about artificial sweeteners? Do these trick the body into doing unhealthy things? I consume quite a bit and have wondered if that is a good idea or not.
Matt,
I used to inhale more than 6 cans of diet soda a day, and sprinkled nutrasweet on everything. Then, after 40, I started to head down the metabolism disorders my parents had already fully embarked upon. I've now cut out artificial sweeteners entirely.
There was a 10,000 person study that came out last year, that looked at people over 10 years, who consumed mass quantities of artificial sweeteners, just as I had been doing. It stated firmly that IF those people developed diabetes or other metabolic syndromes, that the sweeteners aggravated their symptoms and deepened their health issues. In the subjects who did not develop metabolic disorders, the sweeteners had little to no effect.
So, if you have a family history (propensity) of type II diabetes, and you consume conehead like quantities, you're more likely to have more significant symptoms. If you have no family history of it, and you are lucky, then inhaling copious amounts of yummy sweeteners probably wont hurt you.
RE: vegetarian low-carb. Well, vegan might be hard, but vegetarian shouldn't be so bad: eggs are great! eggs, butter, cheese, full-fat dairy (cream, yogurt). Avoid "low fat" anything. Olive oil, coconut oil ("cold pressed", not refined), coconut cream. Nuts & seeds. Colored veg. Avocados. Berries. All good stuff.
and mushrooms!
I will probably write more about sweeteners at some point. I think they are evil. Really addictive, though. I agree with Joe -- best to go off them cold turkey. And from what I've seen, they don't actually stop the craving for sweets, they just perpetuate it. As to the role of sweeteners on, say, the liver, I don't know.
mushrooms - in slavic cultures, they are a food group unto themselves. Caution though, so so so many mushrooms are coming from China now. I WILL NOT eat Chinese mushrooms that have been exported. I have eaten Chinese mushrooms IN China, but when I have a choice outside the country, I go with local or Indonesian in a pinch.
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