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It’s
the most natural thing in the world for the human body to get fat.
Survival
favors it — in times of plenty, store it up as fat so you won’t
lose muscle, get weak, and then die when times are lean.
In
fact, what human survival favors is variety. Some people stay
lean no matter what, so they need less food just to keep their body
mass going.
Some
people stay rotund, teardrop-shaped, despite any amount of exercise,
because their bodies like to have plenty of insulation. Also,
they float.
Some
people can fluctuate, depending on the season and the amount of
food and exercise. Their bodies adapt to whatever is happening
in the outside environment.
But
we live in times of plenty. Our bodies respond to the smells
and the sight of food, especially food that provides quick jolts
of sugar. It’s the same core impulse that makes monkeys go
for whatever fruit is in season, gorging on it before it all gets
overripe, falls from the tree, and rots.
Eat
eat eat. It’s built into our bodies and it’s devilishly hard
to control.
Feel
stress? Some people fast (a good adaptation, because they
need to be light and lean to run away), but some people eat (uh-oh,
times are hard, better stock up on food while we’ve still got it).
Sometimes
one strategy will give an advantage, sometimes the other; it doesn't
matter as long as the species has an improved chance of survival.
But
fashion cares, and punishes people for having unfashionable bodies.
Well,
that’s the way fashions work, and those who are slaves to the Look
are its constant victims.
Moral Weakness
The
worst thing about being overweight, though, is the widespread assumption
that it’s your own fault, that there’s some awful moral weakness
in you if you are a person of unusual size.
But
this is absurd. Most overweight people resemble their parents
or grandparents — heredity is obviously at work. I’ve known
large people who eat almost nothing and are hungry all the time,
but they don’t lose weight, because their bodies, for one reason
or another, are determined to pack it on.
Yet
they are condemned, ridiculed, treated hideously — often by medical
professionals to whom they have come for help. You think fat
people don’t know how they’re despised? You think they don’t
want to be different?
It’s
especially galling because the people mocking them are often of
that tribe that doesn’t gain weight no matter what they eat.
In other words, it’s easy for them to stay thin because their bodies
burn up whatever they eat. People like that should keep their
thin little mouths shut when fat people are being discussed, because
they have no idea what it’s like to be heavy, or what it takes to
lose the weight, when it can be lost at all.
Plus
it’s hard for large people to buy clothes these days — especially
since European sizing has suddenly come into fashion, so that “XL”
now means “medium.” Leaving a huge gap between the tiny clothes
in the departments stores and the oversized clothes in the big-and-tall
stores.
So
there’s plenty of incentive right now — either to lose enough weight
to fit into the toy clothes at the Gap or gain enough weight to
fill out those big 2X shirts at Casual Male. And what with
the way thin people treat fat people, you can count on it: Most
fat people would like to be thin just so people would treat them
decently.
What
really irritates me, however, is when science becomes the tool of
fashion and a rationale for condemning fat people even more because
they impose some kind of “burden” on our health care system.
Is Being Overweight Really Bad for Our Health?
First, let’s get one thing straight. The fashionable definition
of “overweight” is “doesn’t look absolutely lean when naked.”
That should have nothing to do with the scientific definition, however
— or the medical one.
We’ve
heard that overweight kills more than 300,000 Americans a year.
We’ve been warned that as we get fatter, we’ll have an epidemic
of adult-onset diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.
But
what if overweight is a result of adult-onset diabetes, or a co-result
of the same underlying cause as diabetes?
And
do we know whether that estimate of an “epidemic” of heart disease
and cancer takes into account the medical advances we have already
made in the treatment of both conditions?
For
that matter, do we know where that figure of “300,000" comes
from?
In
other words, is there any actual science going on here?
Because
whenever I hear people making estimates — like how many CDs and
DVDs are being pirated, or how many back alley abortions used to
go unreported, or any other fundamentally unknowable things, I have
long since learned to leap to the conclusion that is most likely
to be right: That someone made the numbers up just to get attention.
The
June Scientific American has a fascinating article that doesn’t
purport to have the answers on obesity, but reports on the fact
that some serious critics are very suspicious of the “facts” that
are being used to justify public policy — and to induce panic-buying
of weight-loss products and services.
For
the details, I urge you to read the article — or, better yet, the
books that the article cites.
But
for now, let’s look at this quotation from the article “Obesity:
An Overblown Epidemic?” by W. Wayt Gibbs: “What is really going
on, asserts [J. Eric] Oliver, a political scientist at the University
of Chicago, is that ‘a relatively small group of scientists and
doctors, many directly funded by the weight-loss industry, have
created an arbitrary and unscientific definition of overweight and
obesity.’”
If
you define “overweight” in such a way that Brad Pitt is considered
to have too high a Body Mass Index, and George Clooney is classed
as obese, then you are not on planet Earth any more. But,
assert some critics, that is exactly what has happened to us.
Americans
probably are getting fatter, on average, than we used to be.
But,
on average, that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re getting dangerously
fat.
In
fact, the measures we take to try to lose weight may in fact be
more dangerous.
Take,
for instance, the fact that most people who lose dramatic amounts
of weight usually gain it back plus ten pounds. They might
have been better off to stay where they were. (Though it may
also be that they were already going to gain those extra ten pounds,
and the weight-loss merely postponed it.) Wildly fluctuating
body fat amounts can make it harder for your heart.
At
the same time, we have preventive treatments that can help prevent
heart attacks even in overweight people.
But
these assumptions still assume that being fat is a cause of death.
What if it’s not (except in the obvious case of critically overweight
people — the kind who can’t get out of their houses without taking
down a wall).
How Good Are the Stats?
A recent analysis of the so-called “fat epidemic” examined three
“large, nationally representative surveys.” Instead of just
reporting the raw numbers of overweight people who died, they first
subtracted the effects of smoking, alcohol, age, race, and sex.
What was left was a “statistically insignificant” difference in
the death rates of overweight people.
In
fact, some interpret the results as indicating that adults in the
“overweight category have a lower risk of premature death than do
those of so-called healthy weight.”
If
this is true, then the national weight gain is not endangering health,
it’s improving it.
And
this makes far more sense than the supposed dangers of weight gain.
Our bodies are designed to gain reasonable amounts of weight in
order to get us through hard times — because any early humans who
did not were far more likely not to make it to the end of a drought
— or even a hard winter.
When
you look at the gloomy prediction that obesity will chop two to
five years off the lifespan of overweight individuals, you find
out that the study this was based on made some very iffy assumptions,
relied on old data, did not look at potential deaths from underweight,
and ignored the possibility of future advances in medicine.
Even
with all those iffy assumptions and omissions, the study only showed
a death rate increase of four to nine months. The “two to
five years” warning is a wild guess based on what might happen in
future decades. In other words, it’s a made-up number.
And
you could look at the same stats, change the assumptions in perfectly
reasonable ways, and reach the conclusion that the increase in deaths
due to obesity will be zero.
Moreover,
there are serious indications that extra body fat is significant
in improving the survival rate of the elderly — perhaps because
it increases their body reserves.
If All This Is True ...
So
what do we do? Stop dieting, tuck up to the table, and eat
that Haagen Dazs?
Of
course not. There is still the risk of becoming morbidly obese.
There’s also the matter of buying clothes — or of mobility.
Because
one thing that still makes a huge difference in our health and comfort
is exercise. Walking vigorously for half an hour, five days
a week still confers enormous benefits — even if you remain somewhat
overweight. But if you weigh so much that walking becomes
uncomfortable, then it’s harder to get that aerobic exercise.
It
makes sense to keep weight gain to a reasonable level. But
we don’t have to struggle, to treat our bodies mercilessly, in order
to achieve weight levels that are not natural for our body type.
What
we need is to live in a more compassionate, tolerant society — instead
of one that abuses and condemns people for having bodies that look
exactly like their parents’ bodies. It would make as much
sense as ridiculing the children of short people for being short,
or the descendants of bald people for being bald.
Oh,
wait. We do that, too.
We Are So Easily Fooled
One
of the lessons of this is that we should not be so trusting.
All kinds of “scientific” claims get trumpeted in the media without
any examination. After all, the reporters usually have degrees
in journalism, not in science. So they trust their sources
in a way that they would never dream of trusting, say, a White House
position paper.
It’s
not that anybody is trying to lie to us. They might actually
believe there’s a great danger, and their biased interpretations
and assumptions are unconsciously made.
Instead
of thinking of it as a vast conspiracy, we can think of it as the
result of misplaced enthusiasm. Researchers who are examining
the health effects of obesity are not going to go into the situation
thinking, “I bet obesity is harmless, let’s prove it.” Instead,
they’ll have — in the back of their minds — the assumption, “I bet
obesity is even more dangerous than people think.”
Then,
as they make decisions, they’ll lean in the direction they think
of as “better safe than sorry” — because they’ve assumed that losing
weight is “safer” for people.
But
if it’s not safer, then their bias is actually not in the direction
of “better safe.” They simply don’t realize how the design
of their research is skewing the results.
And the Critics Do It Too
If
you want an example of the same kind of assumption that leads you
to possibly-false conclusions, look at the statements in Gibbs’s
article about the possible motives of those who have cried out the
alarm about the “fat epidemic.”
Gibbs
(and some of the critics he cites) thinks it’s significant that
many or most of the studies that supposedly support the claims about
a “fat epidemic” were funded in part by the weight-loss industry.
Aha,
one thinks. So they have a motive! It’s about making
money from people who want to lose weight!
But
that’s absurd — pure conspiracy theory. If a researcher goes
into these studies with the goal of saving people’s lives, but needs
funding in order to conduct the research, what in the world would
be wrong with his accepting funding from Weight Watchers or Nutri-Slim?
He’s not doing it to get rich, he’s doing it to get answers.
The fact that they all expect the same answers doesn’t mean that
they’re plotting together to get rich, only that they share the
same assumptions.
What,
do you think they would expect McDonald’s or Haagen Dazs to fund
their research?
It’s
very, very bad reporting to make assumptions about motive — to leap
to the conclusion that people are overtly dishonest when there is
not a shred of evidence that they have deliberately falsified or
suppressed contrary results (the way the tobacco industry’s researchers
did).
That,
too, is irresponsible journalism, and Gibbs should be ashamed of
himself. In the midst of debunking possibly-false research
results, he should not himself be guilty of claiming the existence
of a conspiracy for which there is no rational evidence.
If
we adopted that standard of evidence about motive, we’d throw out
all environmental research funded by the Sierra Club or other environmentalist
foundations. In fact, we should throw out research funded
by the EPA, since everybody who works at the EPA got into the field
in the first place because they’re committed environmentalists.
It’s
all a conspiracy!
Nonsense.
It’s all human nature, and nothing more.
There
was no reason to point a finger of blame at anyone. It was
only appropriate to correct a possible error and call for more research
to determine the truth of the matter.
I’m Still Trying
I’m
still trying to lose weight that I’ve gained over the past several
years. But no longer will it be because I fear that it’s killing
me. I want to lose the weight so I can wear off-the-rack clothes
again; so my face looks better (to me; other people have to look
at it no matter how much I weigh); so I am more flexible; so that
when I walk and run, I’m not putting so much stress on my knees
and back.
These
are perfectly reasonable goals. And whether I actually lose
the weight or not, I’m going to keep on exercising regularly because
it’s good for me and I feel better when I do it.
What
I won’t do is take seriously any of these alarmists who predict
shocking increases of this and that. Whenever it’s an estimate
or a prediction based on “if present trends continue,” you can count
on it — they might be right, but they certainly aren’t being scientists
when they make such guesses.
You
don’t have to deform your life in order to follow their well-meaning
but misleading plan.
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© 2006 Meridian
Magazine. All Rights Reserved.
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