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Is Obesity the New Moral Panic?
Windbit
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Alright, most of you know that I am skeptical of the claims that the obesity "epidemic" is a grave health concern. But I don't want to argue about conflicting studies and tenuous correlations. I want to talk about the social stigma that is being increasingly directed towards the overweight.
In the past people discriminated against each other based on race or religion. Now that those things have become politically incorrect, I believe that society's apparent need to alienate some group has turned to overweight and obese individuals. In fact, it's rather obvious.
I'm sure many of you have heard of the obese father who was denied the option to adopt a child. He was denied because his apparent inability to take care of himself meant that he couldn't possibly take care of child, despite the fact that he is a licensed foster care parent and has already taken care of several other children. There are also those who want to remove overweight children from their parents.
A group called the President's Cancer Panel are lobbying to treat overweight individuals the same as smokers. They argue that the only way to stem the tide of obesity is to stigmatize overweight and obese people the same way smokers have been. They are promoting intolerance to people whose actions do not harm those around them. Never mind that stress has also been linked to many of the health problems that being overweight supposedly causes. Stigmatizing fat people isn't going to help them at all: not only do they stress out about their weight and how they look, but now they're going to have to suffer from thin people degrading them even more than they already do?
Speaking of social stigma, several schools are implementing programs that demand health at any cost. In Arkansas children are being weighed for "weight report cards." Soda machines are being removed from schools (despite the amount of research that finds that fruit juices are more closely correlated to obesity than soda). And of course the dreaded fat calipers have already caused their fair share of embarrassment. Is the government's plan to embarrass these kids to the point that they'll do anything to be thin? Maybe so: eating disorders are on the rise, and younger and younger children are learning to hate their bodies.
Fat people are also much less likely to get adequate medical attention than thin individuals. Many medical "experts" simply dismiss an overweight person's health conditions as being caused by their weight and chastise them with threats like "If you don't lose weight, you're going to die." They aren't as likely to look for other possible causes for an overweight individual's ailments. For example, take the Oklahoma woman who was repeatedly told by doctors to lose weight, but was eventually found to have a 93-pound ovarian cyst. How many other deaths contributed to obesity were actually caused by negligence?
Many fat people are becoming so desperate to lose weight that they'll resort to life altering bariatric surgery, despite the fact that more people have died due to complications following the surgery than they have because of obesity. The number of deaths attributable to weight loss surgery has increased over 600% in recent years. The number of weight loss surgeries has increased dramatically, even with teenagers. Most disturbingly, a growing number of medical professionals are advocating that weight loss surgery be performed on children.
I'm sure we all remember how many times the media repeated the claim that 400,000 deaths a year were caused by obesity. How many of you remember hearing the revised estimate, 25,815, which is far less than the number of deaths caused by motor vehicle accidents? How many of you heard that even that revised death count didn't take other proven causes of mortality, such as socio-economic status and stress, into account?
The vast majority of you were probably completely unaware of those facts. Why? Because it isn't scary enough to grab ratings for the news. The media jumps at the chance to regurgitate scary statistics.
Is it possible that the obesity epidemic is just a big scare campaign? And if so, for what purpose? And even if it isn't, is being thin really as important a goal as most people believe it is?
In the past people discriminated against each other based on race or religion. Now that those things have become politically incorrect, I believe that society's apparent need to alienate some group has turned to overweight and obese individuals. In fact, it's rather obvious.
I'm sure many of you have heard of the obese father who was denied the option to adopt a child. He was denied because his apparent inability to take care of himself meant that he couldn't possibly take care of child, despite the fact that he is a licensed foster care parent and has already taken care of several other children. There are also those who want to remove overweight children from their parents.
A group called the President's Cancer Panel are lobbying to treat overweight individuals the same as smokers. They argue that the only way to stem the tide of obesity is to stigmatize overweight and obese people the same way smokers have been. They are promoting intolerance to people whose actions do not harm those around them. Never mind that stress has also been linked to many of the health problems that being overweight supposedly causes. Stigmatizing fat people isn't going to help them at all: not only do they stress out about their weight and how they look, but now they're going to have to suffer from thin people degrading them even more than they already do?
Speaking of social stigma, several schools are implementing programs that demand health at any cost. In Arkansas children are being weighed for "weight report cards." Soda machines are being removed from schools (despite the amount of research that finds that fruit juices are more closely correlated to obesity than soda). And of course the dreaded fat calipers have already caused their fair share of embarrassment. Is the government's plan to embarrass these kids to the point that they'll do anything to be thin? Maybe so: eating disorders are on the rise, and younger and younger children are learning to hate their bodies.
Fat people are also much less likely to get adequate medical attention than thin individuals. Many medical "experts" simply dismiss an overweight person's health conditions as being caused by their weight and chastise them with threats like "If you don't lose weight, you're going to die." They aren't as likely to look for other possible causes for an overweight individual's ailments. For example, take the Oklahoma woman who was repeatedly told by doctors to lose weight, but was eventually found to have a 93-pound ovarian cyst. How many other deaths contributed to obesity were actually caused by negligence?
Many fat people are becoming so desperate to lose weight that they'll resort to life altering bariatric surgery, despite the fact that more people have died due to complications following the surgery than they have because of obesity. The number of deaths attributable to weight loss surgery has increased over 600% in recent years. The number of weight loss surgeries has increased dramatically, even with teenagers. Most disturbingly, a growing number of medical professionals are advocating that weight loss surgery be performed on children.
I'm sure we all remember how many times the media repeated the claim that 400,000 deaths a year were caused by obesity. How many of you remember hearing the revised estimate, 25,815, which is far less than the number of deaths caused by motor vehicle accidents? How many of you heard that even that revised death count didn't take other proven causes of mortality, such as socio-economic status and stress, into account?
The vast majority of you were probably completely unaware of those facts. Why? Because it isn't scary enough to grab ratings for the news. The media jumps at the chance to regurgitate scary statistics.
Is it possible that the obesity epidemic is just a big scare campaign? And if so, for what purpose? And even if it isn't, is being thin really as important a goal as most people believe it is?
Windbit on
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How do you parse contributing factors here? Being a whale and having a heart attack may not be a logical syllogism, but pretty much every medical professional on earth would regard this as a strong contributing factor.
And yes, surprise surprise, in America we regard self-destructive tendencies and failing to maximize ones' potential as moral failings. We chide those who drop out of school; we chide smokers; we chide the fat - both because it's unhealthy and because it makes them unattractive; we chide the poor - because certainly if they'd just worked harder they'd be rich.
But much like smoking, there seems to be little argument that the quality of life goes up for people who are overweight/obese when they work on losing that weight through healthy means.
I don't advocate extremes like surgery for children or rampant eating disorders, but as a society we would benefit from people taking better care of themselves.
Centers For Disease Control And Prevention: Overweight and Obesity Homepage and CDC's Most Recent Estimate of Obesity Related Deaths
Right now, the CDC estimates that 112,000 deaths are associated with obesity each year.
To echo Eddy's thoughts, I think there are much better and healthier ways to encourage morbidly obese and overweight people to live a healthier lifestyle than by having society ostracizing them for being overweight. Shunning them will only lead to more problems without dealing with the reason why they are overweight, and could lead to a cycle of abuse.
the thing is, being fat is almost always due to the choices that a person makes, not some genetic factor. that's why there's a social stigma attached to it.
edit:
and being thin isn't an important goal, but being healthy and having an appropriate body weight is. 98% of the time being fat isn't appropriate to someone's natural body weight.
Overweight children, I think, is almost certainly a sign of something not being right with the parenting.
Except Subway, because seriously, that is good shit.
There's still restaurants(sort of maybe kind of better), and grocery store food. I don't think eating healthy is convenient anywhere.
This is the one paragraph that jumped out at me because it's ridiculous. Where is your evidence that more have died because of surgery than obesity? Over what period of time are you talking about? What do you count as a "death by obesity"? Both heart attacks and diabetes were brought up as health problems that aren't necessarily related to obesity, but most cases due involve a person who is overweight.
If the number of deaths due to weight loss surgery has increased by 600% over "recent years". You're not proving anything, other than more people are having these surgeries. Not that they are becoming more dangerous.
In short, I guess my question is: Are you just making shit up?
Tell that to my brother who has poor metabolism and gains weight extremely easily, to the point where if he slips once on any diet, like, one or two cookies, he literally will gain a few pounds from that alone.
You keep using that word. I don't think you know what it means.
Are you referring to morbidly obese 3 year olds?
Because really, as a parent there's only so much you can do to control a child's exercise and diet. My parents did their best to make me excericse and get healthy, but that only happened when I decided something needed to be done.
My hatred for effortless skinnies will never end.
I was just countering Loren's point on any overweight children being a result of bad parenting by pointing out that in sometimes these things aren't easy to control. My entire family has this problem(poor metabolism and gaining weight extremely easily) a lot, I'm one of the few who seems to have avoided catching it.
All that means is that you have to work harder. Everyone gets stuck with bad genetics of some kind, you just have to deal. I'm not refering to you or your family here, but genetical slow metabolism and other genetic factors that can lead to obesity are a lot more rare than you think. Once you get overweight your metabolism slows down so many people who are overweight think they have a slow metabolism, when it's really their fault and if they started losing weight, it would normalize again.
OK, while I won't dispute that there are people with slower metabolisms, you seriously cannot gain more weight "from" a serving of food then the food weighs.
What I really hate about this issue is this: The majority of americans seem to put the same amount of effort into planning diet and fitness: None or very little (very little being a person who orders . . . diet coke with a burger and maybe works out a couple times a week).
Now if the same effort makes one of them skinny and one of them fat, the fat person IS treated as lazier and dumber by society.
We also have very stressful work lives in america, and some people respond to this by eating junk on the go and some people respond by not eating enough - resulting in two unhealthy people, one ignored by society and one actually praised for being thin.
Then there are people who are naturally heavier that respond by either giving up totally and getting obese or by harming themselves with lifestyles of privation based around unneeded weightloss.
edit: Yoda there is no need to say things like "genetical" geeze man
I host a podcast about movies.
My brothers will never gain weight, neither will my boyfriend, despite their atrocious diets. I probably had a similar diet and amount of exercise to my brothers growing up, so how did I get overweight?
So I'm pretty aware of the passive things obese people face. Very few people mistake me for a 'lazy fatty' but I just don't really feel I worked for the build I have, and so I don't assume fat people did work (or anti-work, as the case may be) to get theirs.
bad parenting. You should have been taken away and fed leaner, less sugary, less gay foods. Then you would have come out a pleasing and unremarkable normal.
I host a podcast about movies.
I didn't say it was impossible, I just said it was more rare than people think. The question becomes, how did your brothers not become obese? Perhaps they got the dominant genes and you got the recessive genes, you just got unlucky. But it doesn't change the fact that you might have to work a little bit harder to stay at your optimal body weight. Saying it's not your fault doesn't help.
At any rate, if your brothers continue eating like shit, they will get fat. Their metabolism will begin to slow down in their late 20's early 30s. Then you can all be jolly together.
I just can't find enough evidence to support the impossibility of a healthy life style.
Precisely. What makes this an ambiguous issue is that exactly: Not everyone with a good build works for it. So they assume, "Hey I think a plate full of grilled ham and cheeses and a couple mountain dews is a pretty good snack so . . .gosh look at that guy, he's fat, he must eat radically more than me."
I host a podcast about movies.
Yoda knows whats up.
I'm not sure if you meant to make it sound like our stigmatization of things like obesity and smoking is comparable to our stigmatization of being poor, but if you did, that's pretty dumb.
Also, I'm skeptical that we're stigmatizing obesity more now than we used to. Being a big fat ass is increasingly trying to be sold to us as a valid lifestyle choice, and the whole "big is beautiful" meme seems to be well-established. Don't dis on me because I way 300 pounds, that just means there's more of me to love, men like a woman with some meat on her bones, don'tcha know, etc.
Seriously, if you're a big fat-ass - and I don't mean 20 pounds overweight, I mean 100 - I think it's sort of healthy for society to view you with a little disdain. Because there's about a 99% chance that you could fix that problem if you cared to, and your decision to be huge not only results in increased social costs for the rest of us, it contributes to the social acceptance of a horrifically unhealthy lifestyle that's likely going to shave a good 10-20 years off your life. We want that to be seen as a bad thing. We want social reinforcement of healthy, non-destructive living.
Seriously, though (unfortunately, that WAS serious as well), Obesity ISN'T at all good, AND you have people who try to defend their obesity as some kind of lifestyle choice. It's one thing to have vices and recognize them, but it's another entirely when you deny thatthere is a problem.
I completely agree.
wow so basically there's a 99% chance all those fatties are just lazy? There's no other contributing factors or underlying issues, they just don't really WANT to stop being the people everybody talks about and laughs at? All because it's so acceptable to be fat now, in a culture that is probably more superficial and image conscious then any in history?
Gee, how could a fat person read that and get the idea some MORAL PANIC was being directed at them?
Also, what about the people inbetween your 20 and 100 pound marks? Are they lazy tubs that could change if they want to? And why are people who are 20 pounds or less exempt? Why shouldn't they be held to the standard of being shamed until they look as good as possible?
I host a podcast about movies.
The problem with it being relative, is that because more and more people are pushing 50, 100, pounds overweight, that guy that's only 20 ducks under the radar. However, if you put him in a room of people with "appropriate" BMIs, of course he's going to stand out.
People just like to find reasons or excuses that help them justify being "right." So if I'm overweight and I say it makes me happy, then it's ok, right?
I was trying to find this link that was sent around work a few months ago. It showed an example of what the "typical" family consumes per week of various countries. The only green item the American family had in front of them was a bottle of Mountain Dew (I may be wrong on the specifics, but seriously, they were really lacking in fruits and vegetables). There were a good 6 meals of fast food in front of them. Pizzas, McDonalds, Burger King -seriously, did they ever cook for themselves? I understand taking it with a grain of salt because studies like that can be easily manipulated, but even still. There's a reason this country is so overweight and it's nothing more than a cop out to blame genetics.
Again, if your doctor tells you to watch your cholesterol, you should probably watch your fucking cholesterol levels. Same thing with being overweight or smoking or being an alcoholic etc.
It is "A OKAY" to have a huge meal and over eat once in awhile, but if you take it to excess then you have a problem. Same thing with drinking alcohol, its just easier to spot the Obese person then it is to spot an alcoholic.
MWO: Adamski