Here's Jane Brody's January 20 NY Times piece, "The Widening of America." It covers the topic pretty well, but doesn't mention that today representatives of the federal government are in Switzerland, attempting to sabotage a study of the relationships between human health and obesity and to encourage both physical activity and a reduction in the consumption of salt, sugar, and fat. The government's position is in deference to the political power to the sugar, fast food, and snack food industries and their lobbyists.
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Last fall, I was thrilled to find a pair of size 0 cotton stretch slacks that fit perfectly. Now, I have never been a 0, not since puberty anyway. I am, at best, a size 4, which is two sizes smaller than what I wore at the same weight in the 1970's. What has happened? Size inflation, that's what.
Women — and men — who have packed on the pounds want to be able to wear the same sizes they wore in their trimmer days years ago. So the fashion industry accommodated, with today's size 4 fitting like former size 8, 8 like 12, 12 like 16 and so forth.
Men's slacks once labeled "regular" are now "slim cut," and for those who cannot squeeze into those, there are easy fit, loose fit and baggy fit. Greg Critser, in his illuminating book "Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World" (Mariner Books paperback, $13), points out, "The new cuts were in reality simply bigger sizes, without the bigger numbers."
New Yorkers complain that the subway cars, many of them made in Japan, can seat one-third fewer people than they were meant to. Why? Because the typical seated American covers a lot more bench than a Japanese commuter. In response to a complaint from an oversize customer, the president of the Olive Garden restaurant chain ordered bigger chairs, lest the biggest eaters decide to dine elsewhere.
Americans live in a land of abundance where supersizing can be a necessity if you want to stay in business, be it movie theater popcorn, fast food, soft drinks or automobiles. A McDonald's meal that once had 540 calories now packs in 1,550. The items are the same, but the portions have tripled. And studies have shown that even if people are satisfied with less, they will eat more if portions are larger.
Even dieters, it seems, want to eat as much as they can without having to pay a caloric price for their indulgence. How else can anyone explain the enormous popularity of Atkins-like diets that promise weight loss without deprivation as long as the dieter sticks to a low-carbohydrate regimen — as many cheeseburgers as wanted, but without buns or ketchup; bacon and sausage with the cheese omelet but no toast; and gobs of fatty dressing on the salad but no croutons.
People do lose weight on these diets. How? Because they eat less than they did before (as one lapsed Atkins dieter remarked, "What's a burger without a bun?"). Because they cannot indulge in 400-calorie bagels, 600-calorie muffins, Krispy Kreme doughnuts, Haagen-Dazs ice cream, pies, cakes, cookies or even rice, pasta, bread or potatoes. Nor can they grab a candy bar or down a sugary soda when the snack bug bites.
A healthy body does not waste calories. If you eat them, they count, and if you eat more calories than you use, you gain weight, not lose it, no matter what the contents of the diet.
Children at Risk
With each consecutive survey, the number of overweight Americans increases. More than 60 percent of adults and 20 percent of children are now overweight or obese. When will it end? Not soon, if dietary habits and sedentary trends continue.
In a national study of 6,212 children and adolescents published in the current issue of the journal Pediatrics, researchers at the Agriculture Department and the Harvard Medical School found that on a typical day 30.3 percent of the people surveyed reported eating fast food. The people who ate fast food that day consumed 187 more calories, 9 more grams of fat, 26 more grams of added sugars, 228 more grams of sugar-sweetened drinks and less fiber, milk, fruits and nonstarchy vegetables than youngsters who did not eat fast food that day.
Not only did the fast-food eaters consume more calories, but they also ate fewer health-sustaining nutrients.
As Mr. Critser points out, schools from kindergarten through college are complicit in the galloping epidemic of obesity. Overburdened and underfinanced school systems throughout the country have invited fast-food purveyors and soft-drink vending machines to their premises, often with monetary or equipment kickbacks from the producers.
The push to raise academic scores has squeezed out many physical education programs and athletic activities, not to mention art and music. After school outdoor activities have yielded to computers, video games and television, the modern-day baby sitters. A result is increasing numbers of youngsters who are eating more and moving less — and putting on fat cells that will be with them for life.
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I am often asked why the food industry produces so many products that can undermine health. The answer is simple. Because people buy them. Any food item that does not sell soon disappears from the marketplace. The industry supplies what consumers demand. If more people eating fast food choose salads over fries, the salad choices in those establishments will increase.
If parents unite and demand a change in school lunch offerings or if more children take lunch from home, childhood nutrition will improve. Parents must remind school authorities that a sound mind has to reside in a sound body; children's physical development should not be sacrificed to academic scores.
After-School Answers
With both parents working outside the home, children are often confined indoors after school for safety reasons. How about getting together with a number of parents to form an after-school group supervised by a jointly hired attendant who will keep the kids moving, indoors or out? Communities might also unite to press for construction of safe activity centers, exercise tracks, hiking and biking trails and community pools.
Many revisions may also be needed in the home. Cupboards, refrigerators and freezers stocked with high-calorie treats do no one any favors.
My sons grew up without sodas, cookies, candy, cake or chips as household staples, and to this day rarely consume them. Better to save such purchases for special occasions and buy only enough to suit those occasions. If necessary, divvy up leftovers among the guests or donate them to a local shelter or feeding station for the homeless.
If ice cream is a household necessity, choose a store brand "light" ice cream or, better yet, frozen yogurt, which has less fat and about half the calories of the high-fat ice creams. Check the nutrition label before buying and note that the calorie count applies to a half-cup serving, not a soup bowl full.
Start putting pressure on the big food companies and fast food chains. Write to corporate headquarters about nutrition concerns and, if possible, offer suggestions for alternative products and urge a reduction in portion sizes. You might also voice your support for a tax on snack items and a ban on television advertising on children's programs for nutritionally questionable foods, for example, those that exceed a certain fat or sugar ratio to healthful nutrients.
The recent suits by obese youngsters against McDonald's may sound laughable, because no one forced the youngsters to eat that fattening fare. But the negative publicity that the suits attract to the company's high-calorie offerings may help others stop eating them before they, too, balloon into obesity. Look what citizens' suits against tobacco companies have wrought.
An end result may be legislation that requires food companies to advertise healthy eating plans. Currently, Mr. Critser points out, "the soft drink industry alone spends upward of $600 million annually to promote its trash, compared with the National Cancer Institute's paltry $1 million budget for promoting fruit and vegetable consumption."
__________________
"It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in an argument." William Gibbs McAdoo. US Vice-President under Woodrow Wilson.
Originally posted by gardener: The recent suits by obese youngsters against McDonald's may sound laughable, because no one forced the youngsters to eat that fattening fare. But the negative publicity that the suits attract to the company's high-calorie offerings may help others stop eating them before they, too, balloon into obesity. Look what citizens' suits against tobacco companies have wrought.
An end result may be legislation that requires food companies to advertise healthy eating plans. Currently, Mr. Critser points out, "the soft drink industry alone spends upward of $600 million annually to promote its trash, compared with the National Cancer Institute's paltry $1 million budget for promoting fruit and vegetable consumption."
This is crazy... the corporate entities cash in on selling and promoting products that cause health problems and then the lawyers cash in on suing the corporations for selling and promoting those products... while the medical and pharmaceutical industries cash in on treating those same health problems. In the middle are the over-weight Americans happily feeding their faces while sitting on their sedentary butts. Why would anyone want to mess with a set up that feeds our economy so well???
Late in 2001, I wrote Walter Willet - author of Eat, Drink and Be Healthy and chair of the Dept of Nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health - specifically about the FDA dragging its feet on labeling of the trans-fats. His response was:
"The FDA should have anounced the food labeling by now, but I am told that some elements of the food industy have blocked it on technicalities. It may take law suits to create action, so I would encourage any lawyer who wants to take this on."
I also brought up the topic of salt content of processe foods. His response was:
"Yes, the salt in processed food is mainly a matter of taste, and the industry has created the expectation of highly salty foods. I fully agree with your taste assessment; somehow we need to have an industry-wide committment to lower the amounts added to foods. This is unlikely to happen without strong government leadership, and I don't see this on the horizon."
I would say that education seems to be the only solution because there's too much at stake financially for things to change much otherwise. However, since I work on a college campus, I doubt that even this will be effective because I see kids smoking all the time despite all we know about the harmful health effects of tobacco, despite the extensive legal actions against the tobacco industry and despite the high taxation on the product.
The commodification of our health & future (or lack of) so that a few can buy a damn Hummer.
It doesn't get any uglier
__________________
Working "hard," or the perception of working hard, doesn't really mean anything. Sweating, vomiting, and breathing hard could be a good workout or a tropical disease kicking in.-Dan John
I would say that education seems to be the only solution because there's too much at stake financially for things to change much otherwise.
Well, Quercus, with Walter Willett you're on a good road to understanding of both good nutrition and the powerful forces standing over against it.
The last couple of weeks have been a real education for me, as you can see by several posts on food, on our government's heavy handed attempt to suppress or defang a report on obesity at this week's World Health Organization in Geneva--and, just now, another post on the synthetic hormone rBST in milk.
Since it's been colder than a witch's tit in NJ for over a week and I haven't wanted to go outside, and since I'm retired and need to find things to do to keep out of trouble. I've used Google as a kind of magic carpet to strange lands.
Know the enemy, right? And I'm coming around to the idea that among my enemies are the lobbyists in Washington, basically whores of the guys who pay them. These guys (and gals) pervert the political process...or maybe "subvert" is the better word. So I have used my computer to see what's going on with The Grocery Manufacturers Association. The Sugar Association. Many others. I've read their press releases and their testimony before Congress and other legislative bodies. I've noticed that as soon as Connecticut or any other state considers a bill to limit or prohibit the selling of soft drinks in public schools, the letters and press releases and petitions ("to preserve our freedom of choice") start flying. Usually some people, presumably just plain old concerned citizens, start writing letters to local papers protesting what the "food police" or "food Nazis" are trying to do. Or if the issue is fast food, their letters (and sometimes posts on internet bulletin boards) start lambasting those who don't have enough personal responsibilty to "just say no" to that third cheeseburger.
I've found some strange and bizarre organizations and websites. One is the Center for Consumer Freedom. Sounds good, right? Well, it's a front for all manner of chicanery. It's against anything that might stand in the way of big business's desire to keep all of us as poor, dumb, compliant citizens. Look this Center up on the Internet, but hold your nose when you find it.
And then there are the organizations and experts that sound good on paper but are actually shills. Take, for example, Dr. Elizabeth Whelen, president of the American Council on Science and Health. It's another front group. See my post on rBST and milk. Shortly I will post a letter to Starbucks about this hormone, from Whelan and five other heads of groups with plausible sounding names and hidden agendas.
Cheers.
__________________
"It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in an argument." William Gibbs McAdoo. US Vice-President under Woodrow Wilson.
The following letter to Orin Smith, President and CEO of StarbucksCorporation, from a number of front groups is a good example of the the way these outfits operate. Here they're bringing pressure on a corporation, but they write the same kind of letter to legislators and governmental administrators. I'm posting it here instead of in the milk thread because it seems to fit better here.
...........
Dear Mr. Smith:
We are writing to express concern about your recent announcement
that Starbucks' would begin to serve milk products only from cows
not treated with bovine growth hormone. Your action is unfounded,
and harms consumers and the environment.
In 1994, former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop called upon food
retailers to act responsibly in the face of extreme fringe group
attacks on the safety of milk from cows supplemented with
protein-based growth hormones.
Dr. Koop noted responsible companies could "play an important
role by assuring consumers of the safety of the milk supply, by
providing the facts on bovine growth hormone to interested
customers, or by referring them to credible health and nutrition
authorities." Dr. Koop added, "It is necessary to condemn these
attacks on the safety of milk for what they are: baseless,
manipulative and completely irresponsible." A copy of Dr. Koop's
statement is attached.
Starbucks should step up to the plate as a responsible corporate
citizen and meet Dr. Koop's challenge. Consumers deserve choice and
accurate information.
Starbucks' recently responded to the extreme activists' pressure
by noting that you "hope to be able to offer all of our milk
products rBST-free." This suggests you may not continue to offer
the same safe and affordable conventionally produced milk that you
have always provided. We hope this is not true. Please let us know
if it is your intention to provide only certified organic dairy
products, or if you intend to provide both certified organic
alternatives, and the safe and more affordable conventional milk
that you currently provide.
Please do not contribute to the vast misinformation campaigns
being spread by the extreme activists. Milk from cows supplemented
with protein-based growth hormones, which naturally occur in all
cows, is the same safe, nutritious milk. In addition, dairy
producers who use these supplements are maintaining their economic
viability, helping maintain stable, affordable milk for consumers
and protecting the environment.
Unfortunately, increasing your purchase of organic milk will
increase, not decrease environmental burdens.
Dairy producers who use these supplements produce as much as 15
percent more milk with the same number of cows. That translates to
using less water, land and fuel. These producers help reduce waste
streams and soil loss. They do this while maintaining their
economic viability and supporting stable, affordable milk prices
for consumers.
In the U.S. alone, use of these supplements could reduce water
irrigation by 700,000 gallons, save 1.7 million acres of land used
for feed and grain, save 240,000 gallons of fuel, reduce nearly one
million metric tons of manure and reduce 5.3 million tons of soil
loss per year.
Your responsible support for this safe product helps protect
consumers, the environment and family farmers.
Thank you for your consideration and prompt response.
Sincerely,
Steven J. Milloy, Citizens for the Integrity of Science
Elizabeth M. Whelan, American Council on Science and Health
Alex Avery, Center for Global Food Issues
Gregory Conko, Competitive Enterprise Institute
Fran Smith, Consumer Alert
John Carlisle, National Center for Public Policy Analysis
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cc: Dennis Stefanacci, Senior Vice President for Corporate
Social Responsibility
Howard Schultz, Chairman of the Board
__________________
"It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in an argument." William Gibbs McAdoo. US Vice-President under Woodrow Wilson.
Originally posted by gardener: ...with Walter Willett you're on a good road to understanding of both good nutrition and the powerful forces standing over against it.
Although Dr. Willet's book is now a couple of years old, I still recommend it as one of the best, IMHO, authoritative sources of information on health and nutrition. In his position, he has the opportunity to review the crème de la crème (no pun intended) of the research that's out there in this field and he uses this information to support his statements in the book. I particularly liked his revised food pyramind. [img]tongue.gif[/img]
sorry for the long post but I thought this was pretty interesting. Here's the LINK.
I'll lobby once again for a HEALTH section since, to me, this thread is not a(n) FAQ.
The big fat con story
Size really doesn't matter. You can be just as healthy if you're fat as you can if you're slender. And don't let the obesity 'experts' persuade you otherwise, argues Paul Campos
Saturday April 24, 2004
The Guardian
Buy The Obesity Myth at Amazon.co.uk
In January 2003, as America prepared to go to war with Iraq, the US surgeon general, Richard Carmona, warned the nation that it faced a far more dangerous threat than Saddam Hussein's supposed weapons of mass destruction. Rather than focusing on the danger posed by nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, Carmona told his audience, "Let's look at a threat that is very real, and already here: obesity."
Carmona is merely the latest in a series of surgeon generals who have treated America's expanding waistline as the nation's leading public health problem. In doing so, they have merely reflected the language of much of the medical establishment, which for decades has treated "overweight" and "obesity" as major health risks.
Fat is on trial, but until now the defence has been mostly absent from the court of public opinion. At bottom, the case against fat rests on the claim that the thinner you are, the longer you will live. Fat Kills, and the prescription is clear: Get Thin.
The doctors and public health officials prosecuting the war on fat would have us believe that who is or isn't fat is a scientific question that can be answered by consulting something as crude as a body mass index chart (the BMI is a simple mathematical formula that puts people of different heights and weights on a single integrated scale). This, like so many other claims at the heart of the case against fat, is false. "Fat" is a cultural construct. According to the public health establishment's current BMI definitions, Brad Pitt, Michael Jordan and Mel Gibson are all "overweight", while Russell Crowe, George Clooney and baseball star Sammy Sosa are all "obese". According to America's fat police, if your BMI is over 25, then you are "overweight",full stop. Note also the radical difference between how our culture defines "fashionable" thinness for men and women. If Jennifer Aniston had the same BMI as her husband Brad Pitt, she would weigh approximately 55lb (nearly four stone) more than she does.
According to the latest BMI figures, 64.5% of American adults are either "overweight" (meaning they have a BMI of between 25 and 29.9) or "obese" (defined as a BMI of 30 or higher). Studies have found an association between even mild amounts of "overweight" and a significantly increased risk of premature death. For example, a highly publicised study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1995 found that women of average height who were as little as 12lb overweight had a 60% increased risk of mortality. A 1999 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association estimated that overweight lead to around 300,000 premature deaths per year in America alone.
Meanwhile, the proportion of the population that maintains a dangerously high weight continues to climb: obesity in America has increased by more than 50% over the course of the past decade. If the authors of these studies are correct, America is facing a health crisis that, in the words of one anti-fat warrior, will make Aids look "like a bad case of the flu".
The Centres for Disease Control warn that overweight and obesity put persons at increased risk for congestive heart failure, coronary heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, obstructive sleep apnoea and other respiratory problems, and some cancers. The case against fat thus seems clear: having a BMI of 25 (this is a weight of 10 and a half stone for a woman of average height, and 12 and a half stone for a man of average height) or higher has been proven by medical science to cause a myriad of deadly conditions. The question then becomes, what can we do about this epidemic that is putting in jeopardy the lives of the more than 135 million adult Americans who are currently overweight?
The solution to this crisis seems obvious: Americans should find a way to weigh less. A recent article by Harvard Medical School researchers was more specific: "Adults should try to maintain a body mass index between 18.5 and 21.9 to minimise their risk of disease" (for an average-height woman, this would mean maintaining a weight between seven and a half and nine stone).
How are Americans supposed to achieve these goals? Public health authorities assure us that the best path to healthy weight loss is a combination of caloric restriction - aka dieting - and exercise. Unfortunately, this classic prescription has an extremely high failure rate: the vast majority of dieters end up regaining all of the weight they lose, and many end up weighing more than they did prior to their attempts to lose weight. Given this record of failure, it's not surprising that the pharmaceutical industry has spent billions of dollars attempting to develop safe and effective weight-loss drugs. And for those whom neither dieting nor diet drugs can seem to help, weight-loss surgery is becoming an increasingly popular, if dangerous, option.
This, then, is the case against fat: America, we are told, is on the verge of eating itself to death. The core belief of those prosecuting this case is that the BMI tables testify to a strong, predictable relationship between increasing weight and increasing mortality. That, after all, is what most people assume when they read that medical and public health authorities have determined a BMI of 25 or above is hazardous to a person's health. This belief, however, is not supported by the available evidence.
A 1996 project undertaken by scientists at the National Centre for Health Statistics and Cornell University analysed the data from dozens of previous studies, involving a total of more than 600,000 subjects with up to a 30-year follow-up. Among non-smoking white men, the lowest mortality rate was found among those with a BMI between 23 and 29, which means that a large majority of the men who lived longest were "overweight" according to government guidelines. The mortality rate for white men in the supposedly ideal range of 19 to 21 was the same as that for those in the 29 to 31 range (most of whom would be defined now as "obese"). In regard to non-smoking white women, the study's conclusions were even more striking: the BMI range correlating with the lowest mortality rate was extremely broad, from around 18 to 32, meaning a woman of average height could weigh anywhere within an 80-pound range without seeing any statistically significant change in her risk of premature death.
In almost all large-scale epidemiological studies, little or no correlation between weight and health can be found for a large majority of the population - and indeed what correlation does exist suggests that it is more dangerous to be just a few pounds "underweight" than dozens of pounds "overweight". So, let us look at the most cited studies for the proposition that "overweight" is a deadly epidemic in America today. Anyone who bothers to examine the evidence in the case against fat with a critical eye will be struck by the radical disconnect between the data in these studies and the conclusions their authors reach.
Annual Deaths Attributable To Obesity In The United States, which appeared in the Journal Of The American Medical Association (Jama) in 1999, is the source for the endlessly repeated statistic that overweight causes around 300,000 extra deaths in the US every year. (This "fact" has been cited in the major media more than 1,700 times in the past two years alone.) Look at these figures more closely. As Glenn Gaesser, a professor at the University of Virginia points out, studies have consistently failed to find any correlation between increasing BMI and higher mortality in people 65 and over, and 78% of the approximately 2.3 million annual deaths in the US occur among people who are at least 65. Thus, 78% of all deaths lack even the beginning of a statistical link with BMI. "That leaves 500,000 annual deaths in persons under 65 that might be related to BMI," Gaesser told me. "These include deaths from every possible cause: motor vehicle and other accidents, homicides, suicides, cigarettes, alcohol, microbial agents, toxic agents, drug abuse, etc, etc. To think that 60% [ie, 300,000] of these deaths are due to body fat is absolutely preposterous."
Overweight, Obesity And Mortality From Cancer, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in April 2003, was the subject of front-page stories in many of the nation's leading newspapers. For example, a Los Angeles Times article reported that the study provided "the first definitive account of the relationship between obesity and cancer". The article went on to quote the study's authors to the effect that perhaps as many as 90,000 deaths a year from cancer could be avoided if all adults maintained a BMI below 25 throughout their lives. The disjunction between this study's actual data and the alarmist headlines its authors helped generate is especially remarkable.
Among supposedly "ideal weight" individuals (BMI 18.5 to 24.9), the study observed a mortality rate from cancer of 4.5 deaths for every 1,000 subjects. Among "overweight" individuals (BMI 25 to 29.9 - a category that currently includes about twice as many adult Americans as the "ideal weight" cohort), the cancer mortality rate was 4.4 deaths for every 1,000 subjects. In other words, "overweight" people actually had a lower overall cancer mortality rate than "ideal weight" individuals.
Most Americans, and indeed most doctors, simply assume that the heavier you are, the more likely it is you will suffer from coronary artery disease - hence the various clichés about "artery-clogging" fast food and the like. Yet several studies have specifically investigated the question of whether a high percentage of body fat correlates with the incidence of coronary artery disease. Answer: no, it does not. Even massively obese men and women do not appear to be more prone to vascular disease than average.
It is true that increasing weight is associated with high blood pressure and certain types of heart disease. But even here there is considerable evidence that this correlation is not necessarily a product of being fat, but rather of losing and then regaining weight. Obese patients who have been put on very low-calorie diets subsequently display much higher rates of congestive heart failure than equally fat people who did not attempt to lose weight in the first place. The biggest evidentiary problem for those who insist there is a strong causal link between increasing weight and heart disease is that deaths from heart disease have been plunging at precisely the same time that obesity rates have been skyrocketing.
Indictments in the case against fat invariably focus on diabetes, because Type 2 diabetes is much more common among heavier-than-average people. It has become routine to claim that America is about to be overwhelmed by a diabetes epidemic, that for the first time Type 2 diabetes is being seen among children, etc, and that the solution to this crisis is to make fat people thin. Actually, the definition of diabetes has changed (from a fasting blood sugar of 140 to a blood sugar of 126) and many more people have been diagnosed as suffering from the disease. Several recent studies indicate that the key to avoiding Type 2 diabetes is not to try to lose weight (indeed, there is much evidence that dieters are far more prone to the disease than average), but rather to make lifestyle changes in regard to activity levels and dietary content that greatly reduce the risk of contracting the disease, whether or not such changes lead to any weight loss.
Over the past three decades, according to Gaesser's survey of the literature, between 35 and 40 medical studies have found increasing body mass to be associated with a lower incidence of various cancers. Other diseases and syndromes that various medical studies indicate are less common among heavier people include emphysema, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, hip fracture, vertebral fracture, tuberculosis, anaemia, peptic ulcer and chronic bronchitis, among others. Indeed, how many people are aware that heavier women have much lower rates of osteoporosis, which is a very common and serious condition among older women? Consider the potential implications for public health of the fact that hip fractures are two and a half times less likely to occur among heavier women. Hip fracture is a leading cause of both death and permanent disability among older women (in Great Britain, more women die from osteoporosis-related hip fracture than from breast, cervical and uterine cancer combined).
If we were to employ the logic of the anti-fat warriors, does this mean that we should be encouraged to gain weight so as to protect ourselves from, among other things, cancer, osteoporosis and most of the major pulmonary diseases?
There are some groups of heavier individuals -usually those with BMI figures in the mid-30s and above - who do suffer from worse health than those of "ideal-weight". Yet this does not of itself prove that such people's problems are caused by their excess weight. There are many other factors that disproportionately affect the heaviest people in our society, and that also correlate with poor health: most notably a sedentary lifestyle, poor diet, dieting-induced weight fluctuation, diet drug use, poverty, access to and discrimination in health care, and social discrimination generally. None of these factors was taken into account in Annual Deaths Attributable To Obesity In The United States, the Jama study responsible for the "fact" that fat kills 300,000 Americans a year.
The case against fat proceeds on the assumption that if a fat person becomes thin, that person will acquire the health characteristics of people who were thin in the first place. Although this assumption may seem like simple common sense, it is, like many commonsensical assumptions, quite dubious. If a person who is physiologically inclined to be fat loses weight, this does not transform that person into someone who is physiologically inclined to be thin. To understand the implications of this distinction, consider that bald men die sooner, on average, than hirsute men, probably because bald men have higher levels of testosterone, which appear to lower life expectancy. Given this, surely no one would conclude that giving a bald man hair implants would improve his prospects for long life.
No one has ever successfully conducted a study into the effects of long-term weight loss, and for a very simple reason: no one knows how to turn fat people into thin people.
This statement is in one sense shocking, despite the fact that there are few better established empirical propositions in the entire field of medicine. How can this be? After all, as those who prosecute the case against fat never cease to remind us, everyone knows how to lose weight: eat less and exercise more. In theory, this regimen should make people thin. In practice, it does not.
More Americans than ever are dieting, percentages tripled over the course of the last generation. And the result? Americans weigh on average 15lb more than they did 20 years ago. Tens of millions of Americans are trying - more or less constantly - to lose 20 or 30lb (25lb tends to be the average figure cited in surveys of dieters). If you ask them why, most will tell you that they are doing so for the sake of their health, often on the advice of their doctors. Yet Gaesser notes that more than two dozen studies have found that weight loss of this magnitude (and indeed of even as little as 10lb) leads to an increased risk of premature death, sometimes by an order of several hundred percent.
Over the past 20 years, scientists have gathered a wealth of evidence indicating that cardiovascular and metabolic fitness, and the activity levels that promote such fitness, are far more important predictors of both overall health and mortality risk than weight. Yet none of the studies most often cited for the proposition that fat kills makes any serious attempt to control for these variables.
The most extensive work of this sort has been carried out by Steven Blair and his colleagues at Dallas's Cooper Institute, involving more than 70,000 people. What they have discovered is that, quite simply, when researchers take into account the activity levels and resulting fitness of the people being studied, body mass appears to have no relevance to health whatsoever. In Blair's studies, obese people who engage in at least moderate levels of physical activity have around one half the mortality rate of sedentary people who maintain supposedly ideal weight levels.
Similarly, a 1999 Cooper Institute study involving 22,000 men found the highest death rate among sedentary men with waist measurements under 34 inches, while the lowest death rate was found among fit men with waist measurements of 40 inches or more. A 1995 Blair study found that improved fitness (ie, going from "unfit" to "fit"), with the latter requiring a level of exercise equivalent to going for a brisk half-hour walk four or five times per week, reduced subsequent mortality rates by 50%. As Blair himself puts it, Americans have "a misdirected obsession with weight and weight loss. The focus is all wrong. It's fitness that is the key."
Why are Americans so afraid of the generally small health risks associated with above-average weight, while remaining comparatively indifferent to the much larger health risks associated with being a man, or poor, or black, or unusually thin?
Consider this: from the perspective of a profit-maximising medical and pharmaceutical industry, the ideal disease would be one that never killed those who suffered from it, that could not be treated effectively, and that doctors and their patients would nevertheless insist on treating anyway. Luckily for it, the American health care industry has discovered (or rather invented) just such a disease. It is called "obesity". Basically, obesity research in America is funded by the diet and drug industry - that is, the economic actors who have the most to gain from the conclusion that being fat is a disease that requires aggressive treatment. Many researchers have direct financial relationships with the companies whose products they are evaluating.
Government grant money is scarce, and the process for securing it extremely competitive. "When you apply for a grant," one prominent obesity researcher told me, "you have to make a strong case for funding by explaining the significance of the research." The researcher then asked me which of the following scenarios was most likely to produce a successful application:
1 "Though it is difficult to establish the independent contribution of obesity to morbidity and mortality, and it appears that lifestyle factors - such as poor diet and lack of physical activity - pose far greater health risks, we nevertheless request funding to study obesity as a matter of scientific curiosity, and also to assess whether it might be more prudent to get fat people fit rather than to get them thin."
Or: 2 "Obesity kills at least 300,000 Americans every year, and mathematical models of the obesity epidemic predict that within 50 years every man, woman and child in America will be overweight or obese."
In West Africa today, beauty pageants feature contestants who would be considered markedly "obese" in the US; many of the young women who represent the pinnacle of female beauty in these cultures weigh more than 14 stone. In this regard, contemporary West Africa is quite similar to the US in the 1890s, when the 14-stone actress Lillian Russell was considered the undisputed beauty of her time. Historically speaking, far more cultures have mirrored contemporary West Africa and America in the latter half of the 19th century than have resembled the US today, where an almost unprecedented ideal of thinness reigns supreme.
This is a culture whose need to control the world and the people in it is so intense that it has been driven to the preposterous conclusion that millions of unique individuals should all weigh within 10lb of an imaginary ideal weight. In fact, as we have seen, there is no valid medical reason why two women of the same height cannot weigh seven and 14 stone respectively, while both maintain optimum cardiovascular and metabolic fitness, and excellent overall health. However, there are enormously powerful cultural, political and economic forces that ensure we do our best to make sure one of these women will remain miserable about her "disease".
If one were forced to come up with a six-word explanation for the otherwise inexplicable ferocity of America's war on fat, it would be this: Americans think being fat is disgusting. Fifty years ago, America was full of people that the social elites could look upon with something approaching open disgust: blacks in particular, of course, but also other ethnic minorities, the poor, women, Jews, homosexuals, and so on. Nowadays, a new target is required.
As The Handbook Of Obesity Studies notes, "In heterogeneous and affluent societies such as the United States, there is a strong inverse correlation of social class and obesity, particularly for females." In other words, on average, poor people in America are fat and rich people are thin. The disgust the thin upper classes feel for the fat lower classes has nothing to do with mortality statistics and everything to do with feelings of moral superiority. Precisely because Americans are so repressed about class issues, the disgust the (relatively) poor engender in the (relatively) rich must be projected on to some other distinguishing characteristic.
In 1853, an upper-class Englishman could be quite unselfconscious about the fact that the mere sight of the urban proletariat disgusted him. In 2003, any upper-class white American liberal would be horrified to imagine that the sight of, say, a lower-class Mexican-American woman going into a Wal-Mart might somehow elicit feelings of disgust in his otherwise properly sensitised soul. But the sight of a fat woman - make that an "obese" - better yet a "morbidly [sic] obese" woman going into Wal-Mart... ah, that is something else again.
The single most noxious line of argument in the literature about obesity is that black and Hispanic girls and women need to be "sensitised" to the "fact" that they have inappropriately positive feelings about their bodies. Readers may suspectthis is a bad joke: I wish it were. One University of Arizona study found that, while only 10% of the white teenage girls surveyed were happy with their bodies, 70% of the black teenage girls were happy with theirs (the black girls weighed more, on average, than the white girls).
When asked to define "beauty", the white girls described their feminine ideal as a woman 5ft 7in tall, weighing between seven and seven and a half stone (ie, someone thinner than the average model). By contrast, the black girls described a woman whose body included such features as visible hips and functional thighs.
Obesity researchers and diet companies are doing their best to change this unacceptable situation. In recent years, diet companies have targeted much of their advertising specifically toward upwardly mobile black and Hispanic women. As for obesity researchers, a recent article noted that black girls have better body images and lower rates of eating disorders than white girls, and also noted that they weighed more.
"These findings," the authors concluded, "should be used in the development of culturally sensitive public health intervention programmes to help reduce the high rates of obesity within the black community and encourage black youth to achieve a healthy and reasonable [sic] body size." Here again, we see how crucial the health justification remains to all aspects of the war on fat.
How would a proposal for "culturally sensitive public health intervention programmes" sound if it were translated (accurately) as a proposal to make black and Hispanic girls as neurotic about their weight as white girls tend to be, because these groups represent the best opportunity for expanding the market for the useless, expensive and dangerous products of the weight loss industry?
Thinness has a metaphorical significance in America today. Americans - and especially American elites - value thinness for precisely the same reason someone suffering from anorexia nervosa does: because not eating means not giving in to desire. Strangely, what the American elites consider most desirable is a body whose appearance signals a triumph of the will over desire itself. Thus, bodily virtue is not so much indicated by thinness per se, but rather by an achieved thinness. Ultimately the war on fat is both a cause and a consequence of the transformation of the Protestant work ethic into the American diet ethic.
The obesity myth thrives in contemporary America because America is an eating-disordered culture. Moreover, the prime symptoms of this situation - our increasing rates of "overweight", bulimia and anorexia - are also symptoms of, and have become metaphors for, a broader set of cultural anxieties.
Americans worry, with good reason, that we have become too big for our own good: that we consume too much, too quickly; that our cars, our houses, and our shopping malls are too large; that our imperial ambitions to make the world safe for democracy and McDonald's are too grand. Under these circumstances, obsessing about the 10lb of "extra" weight that the average American adult has gained over the past 15 years has become a convenient way of avoiding a more direct engagement with any number of issues regarding America's excesses.
For upper-class Americans in particular, it's easier to deal with anxiety about excessive consumption by obsessing about weight, rather than by actually confronting far more serious threats to our social and political health. We may drive environmentally insane SUVs that dump untold tonnes of hydrocarbons into the atmosphere; we may consume a vastly disproportionate share of the world's diminishing natural resources; we may support a foreign policy that consists of throwing America's military weight around without regard to objections from our allies - but at least we don't eat that extra cookie when it's offered to us
· This is an edited extract from The Obesity Myth: Why America's Obsession With Weight Is Hazardous To Your Health, by Paul Cosmos, to be published next month in the US by Gotham Books.
Paul Campos is a law professor at the University of Colorado. I’ve read some of his columns with interest, but I’m not sure I’m in his camp on obesity (the words “junk science” sometimes are bothersome) or on smoking. Check the links above.
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"It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in an argument." William Gibbs McAdoo. US Vice-President under Woodrow Wilson.
quote: "There are many other factors that disproportionately affect the heaviest people in our society, and that also correlate with poor health: most notably a sedentary lifestyle, poor diet, dieting-induced weight fluctuation, diet drug use, poverty, access to and discrimination in health care, and social discrimination generally."
My unscientific opinion is that the health problem has more to do with being sedentary and eating too much of the wrong types of foods. I think an "active" person who happens to be 10-20 lbs overweight can be quite healthy, even if they don't look great in a speedo or bikini.
The biggest problem I think is we're not teaching our children to be active. Instead we babysit with the tv and video games instead of encouraging them to go outside and play. Not to mention the convienience of junk food and quick fixes. And we are a nation of excess, we eat too much because we can.
When I was out of control as a child, my punishment was not to go sit in my room but to go run around the block to let off some steam. My sister makes my nephews go run around the house as fast as they can and sends them outside when they are too routy. They also take walks/ride bikes together and in the summer spend plenty of time at the pool. I think even if they go through a lazy stage later in life (teenage years?) this early emphasis on activity has to help them later in life.
As far as adults are concerned, I believe it has much to do with culture. I lived in France during college over 10 years ago, and they have quite a different perspective on eating and exercise. Of course they smoke alot and I don't think most of them specifically "exercised", unless they were involed in a sport, they were generally active. Actually walked places.
Just a few examples between their eating habits and ours:
They have baguettes (white bread) on the table, but did not eat it before the meal and basically had a few bites and used it to push salad/meat on the fork. Only time I saw them eat bread and butter was at breakfast or in sandwiches when that was the meal. We get rolls & bread at restaurants while waiting for our meal, fill up with butter and honey, and then proceed to eat our meal. When we in the US were in the "fat free" stage, they were telling me that bread makes you fat (I thought, how's that, there's no fat in bread).
They also have this concept of being "gourmande". I remember snacking on an ice cream bar at school and a student asking me if I was actually hungry or just a "gourmande", meaning am I just eating because I liked the fix or if I needed to satisfy hunger.
While pastries and deserts are in nearly every street corner, it was rare when eating a meal with a family that these were part of the dessert. Normally desert was a few pieces of cheese or fruit. Pastries were normally on special occasions. Not to mention portion sizes of the normal entrees...many times I left the table hungry when eating at the same levels as the others.
My last example is that I think the food in europe in general is fresher and less processed. They tend to shop for their meals daily rather than stocking up with processed foods that last years on the shelf. Bread and croissants (chocolate ones are my favorite) for breakfast every morning, but they would be stale the next day. The veggies are beautiful and tasty. And I believe the meat is less fatty (I about croaked when my french boyfriend added butter to ground beef when cooking it...but it was leaner and probably not overloaded with hormones). While they eat butter on their salami sandwiches, I was queried for putting butter AND sour cream on a potato. And they eat their french fries with mayonnaise. Even with all the rich foods, I think they eat overall less and use their feet more.
My 2cents thinks that these cultural differences have much to do with size & space. We are a very large country with lots of room, and we're expanding to fill up the space. We tend to have to commute to further places so we spend much more time in our cars instead of on our feet. We have room for 6 cars per family. We also have a more fast-paced society which also leads to the need for "convienience" food that is highly processed and full of preservatives and other hidden bad things.
Very similar to the renaissance & later paintings of chubby people...it was a sign of wealth & prosperity. The glories of excess...
"We tend to have to commute to further places so we spend much more time in our cars instead of on our feet. We have room for 6 cars per family. We also have a more fast-paced society which also leads to the need for "convienience" food that is highly processed and full of preservatives and other hidden bad things."
I am right with you here. I think this has a lot to do with it!!
What if collectively on this forum we did some work to lessen the issues of obesity in our country?
Perhaps each of us could write a small article and we could send all of this to the right people/places; government officials for instance.
It is so sad to see that only 1 million goes to advertising health, versus 600 million to advertising junk! Wow! No wonder people are eating bad foods. Once most people see or hear something enough, it becomes a norm for them, meaning that if one sees only junk food on TV being advertised, s/he will think this is the normality of an average person's diet.
Seriously, guys; let's do something together to at least start the change in legislatures and the negative eating habits of our neighbors’ nation-wide.
Anna
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You live in too much of a logical world!
If you just stepped out of it and forgot the worldy limits, ANYTHING & EVERYTHING would be possible... - anna kubit
Anybody ever see/hear of the mobile sidewalks? I heard about this on the show of "Ellen Degenerous" (may be mispelled). Haha! What happened? Is our society seriously so lazy that we cannot walk a few steps and only stand in a place while the side walk moves?
If anyone has more info. on this invention, let me know. In CT, I have not seen this! (I think at airports, yes)?
Anna
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You live in too much of a logical world!
If you just stepped out of it and forgot the worldy limits, ANYTHING & EVERYTHING would be possible... - anna kubit
Why would anyone want to mess with a set up that feeds our economy so well???[/QB]
Yes! Good point! Difficult to find an answer for this right away too. Well, the food industry would still cash out from selling health foods (usually I have noticed that healthy foods are more expensive than junk foodds; for instance fat free chicken is more expensive than the regular chicken). But then again, some people would continue to buy junk food because of the lower price; so nothing solved. IF all that was sold is health foods at a price equal to junk food or a lower price, this would be enough incentive for much of the society to switch their eating habits, I think.
But what about the lawyers? They would make money off of suing the current junk-food-producers.
And the doctors? Well, they would make less money if people are healthy, so perhaps some of the doctor industry would go out of business... So what? Big deal! Different industries/types of businesses go out of business all the time in this country: It's part of this society: Competition and improvements for the better, which drive some business down.
.....
Anna
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You live in too much of a logical world!
If you just stepped out of it and forgot the worldy limits, ANYTHING & EVERYTHING would be possible... - anna kubit
You guys can blame "corporate America" as much as you want, however the the only fault in this situation lies on the consumers. You have to remember that corporations like McDonalds are publicly owned and people (all kinds of people not just stock option fat-cats) rely on their growth and profits to feed into their retirement accounts, IRAs, 401 Ks, etc... The companies only loyalty should be to their stockholders, because being able to retire on time, provide your children college education and take care of yourself and your dependants in old age is more important than trying to help someone who won't make an effort on their own to be healthy. It's like people who criticize Hollywood for lack of originality, well if people didn't buy movies like "Air Bud" they wouldn't have made Air Bud 2-6. Movie production companies are driven by profit not creativity, just like fast food companies are driven by profit and not health concerns. This is how it should be, they are not and were never meant to be health advocacy groups, it isn't their job and I am not willing to give up my child's college savings for them to be. It is on the consumer to align the financial goals of the company and the health concerns of the public, if unhealthy foods sell best they will dominate the options given to the consumer the same is true if healthy foods sold best. Further, it should not be done through litigation but through educated consumerism, it is a matter of personal responsibility, period.
BicepBlaster? A troll here, methinks--and probably one who is thoroughly familiar with J-P Fitness and who probably posts here under another name, also a pseudonym. I mean, what is the probability that someone whould sign up now and almost immediately go bac k a year and join a thread from then as his first participation? Also, the style is pretty abrasuve for a newcomer. And this character dsoesn't really respond to the topic of the thread.But I’ll pretend that this is an honest post, as dubious as that may be.
First, it is an established fact that obesity in the US has increased dramatically in the past two decades. Go to a library that keeps bound copies of popular magazines and look at copies of Life or Look magazines prior to 1950. You'll hardly find a slightly pudgy person in sight in crowd scenes, much less someone who is morbidly obese. Back then, 300 pound women were fat ladies in carnival side shows. We paid to see them and we gawked because they were out of the ordinary. Today, well just go to Wal-Mart and look around. Or go to the grocery store and check out the fat guys and gals using a motorized cart. Or go as I’ve been doing to preteens girls softball games. The players may be mostly lithe and slim, but most of the mothers are tubs, and there are always a few chubby kids in the stands. Why has obesity increased? There are only two reasons. People are eating too much and not getting enough exercise, ingesting too much energy and expending too little.
But “too much energy in, too little energy out” explains how people become overweight or obese. A further question is why this imbalance takes place. The notion that people are exercising insufficient personal responsibility may be correct in part, if simple-minded, but there’s still a further question: if people are exercising less personal responsibility than they did in, say, 1949, why is this so? Has human nature changed in some way? My best answer is that yes, there has been an epidemic of obesity in the US over the past twenty years and multiple causes combined to bring this about
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You guys can blame "corporate America" as much as you want, however the the only fault in this situation lies on the consumers.
And yes, I will blame corporate America where I think iit bears some responsibility, and of course it would be to the great advantage of these corporations to be excused from any share of the blame. That’s why they hire lobbyists who set up fancy founding centers and foundations and why they put pressure on legislators to make laws that are in their interest, not the public interest. They may even convince some BicepBlaster to jump into a year-old, serious discussion of the causes of an obesity epidemic with a bunch of bullying dogmatic assertions with little foundation in fact. I don’t know whether Bluto the BicepBlaster believes what he’s saying. Maybe the food lobbyists have brainwashed him. (“Solitaire, anyone?”) Or maybe he’s a food lobbyist himself, a hired shill.
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You have to remember that corporations like McDonalds are publicly owned and people (all kinds of people not just stock option fat-cats) rely on their growth and profits to feed into their retirement accounts, IRAs, 401 Ks, etc..
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Thanks for the patronizing explanation of high finance, but I don’t need it. I am retired, and for thirty-five years before I retired I took steps to make certain I would not have to rely on the Social Security checks that are now about 17% of my joint assets. I have an active account with a good broker. I own certain individual equities that I like--QCOM, AAPL, EBAY, Adobe Systems, plus various municipal bonds, CDs, REITs, and so stors can have social consciences, after all. Warren Buffet does. Big Business does better when someone is keeping a wary eye on it on. Right now I’m only taking interest from these account, amounting to another 17% of joint annual income. The remaining 64% comes entirely from investments in a pension system. I imagine that there might be some mutual funds with holdings in McDonald’s, Sara Lee, Unilever, and so on, and perhaps in Big Pharma. I do know that none of my money goes to tobacco or to energy companies or weapons manufacturers. But basically I don’t need some idiotic, simplistic piffle about the virtues of capitalism. I bought QCOM very early, lots of it, and I sold 75% just before it peaked. At the outset I picked a good account and financial planner, and found a broker who doesn’t keep churning my portfolios
And I don’t see any reason why owning part of corporate America means I’m a bought guy and should just shut up and enjoy the guilty profits I also see no reason to follow this defective reasoning: you own stock in AAPL. AAPL is big business, especially with its iPODl McDonalds is also big business. Therefore you should shut up about corporate America. NOT!
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the companies only loyalty should be to their stockholders.
Basura, shortsighted crap. What about loyalty to employees? What about concern for the well-being of the communities companies inhabit? What about following laws that govern clean air and water.
And furthermore, your precious big corporations haven’t exactly been loyal to stockholders at all, in cases like Enron. I took a $5000 beating on Worldcom and another on Global Crossing. Crooks!
Now we get to BidetBuster’s reason why companies’ sole loyalty is to stockholders
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because being able to retire on time, provide your children college education and take care of yourself and your dependents in old age is more important than trying to help someone who won't make an effort on their own to be healthy.
These are what stockholders may want as individuals. The corporations don’[t care about your personal goals, And when you say you’re not going to help someone who won;t help himself, you’re just expressing your total indifference to others outside your tidy little circle
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It's like people who criticize Hollywood for lack of originality, well if people didn't buy movies like "Air Bud" they wouldn't have made Air Bud 2-6. Movie production companies are driven by profit not creativity, just like fast food companies are driven by profit and not health concerns
No, “it’s NOT like” Hollywood at all. The analogy doesn’t hold. A bad movie that caters to the public taste for crap isn’t like food that will weaken or destroy your health. Even Scott MCClellan couldn’t get away with that one.
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Further, it should not be done through litigation but through educated consumerism, it is a matter of personal responsibility, period.
Personal responsibility-the mantra of the Center for Consumer Freedom--which got started to help Phillip Morris spread the notion that smoking was our divine right, A sleaze ball outfit!
The desire of corporate America to escape litigation is understandable but craven. Bush has paid off some of his johns with tort reform. The PR folks spread stories about how ridiculous that lawsuit over too hot coffee at McDonalds was--but when you look into it, the company really was at fault and grievously so.
So, everybody, forget BicepBlubber. He’s a troll through and through.
The causes of the widening of America are many and various, but here are a few.
1. Increase in portion size and calorie count in chain restaurants.
2. Overuse of high fructose corn syrup in products where it has no function, like catsup.
3, In our schools, as Brody pointed out,“Overburdened and under financed school systems throughout the country have invited fast-food purveyors and soft-drink vending machines to their premises, often with monetary or equipment kickbacks from the producers. The push to raise academic scores has squeezed out many physical education programs and athletic activities.”
4. Parental shopping habits translate into their offspring’s lifetime eating habits. (Snoop in your fellow customers’ carts!)
5. Ads directed at children.
6. At present, deliberate government suppression of information, as in Tommy Thompson’s effort last year to meddle with recommendations in a WHO report on obesity that were considered unfriendly by the sugar and grocery manufacturers’s powerful, Republican-oriented lobbies.
7. Campaigns of public disinformation by outfits like the Center for Consumer Freedom, Citizens for the Integrity of Science, American Council on Science and Health,Center for Global Food Issues,
Competitive Enterprise Institute,Consumer Alert, National Center for Public Policy Analysis
8. Suburban real estate development patterns with no sidewalks and with no public transportation that must be walked to to reach. Over 5 decades of public planning to discourage transportation other than by private car.
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"It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in an argument." William Gibbs McAdoo. US Vice-President under Woodrow Wilson.
Gardener, I think most of your eight points could be condensed into one:
There's more food available to us than anyone needs.
Some people have a genetic propensity to add weight, or a genetic glitch that prevents them from overeating, even when they're already "full."
We know that some degree of obesity has always existed in the human species, since some of the earliest cave paintings depict fat people. (I learned that from Dr. Williams himself!)
Studies of identical twins have shown that genetics may account for 80 percent of body weight and (if memory serves) 75 percent of body-fat percentage.
So people who're genetically susceptible to weight gain, or to overfeeding behaviors, are almost inevitably going to put on the pounds when there are so many calorically dense foods to be had.
Getting junk food out of schools is probably the best step we can take. Restoring PE classes is also important, even if it would probably have less impact.
I say that because the kids who've already gotten too fat from the junk food probably won't do much in these classes.
When you're around kids who're playing sports, it's amazing to see how many more steps the skinny kids will take. Tell a skinny kid and a fat kid to line up across the field, and the skinny kid will run past the line, pretend to stumble and fall, then jump up and sprint back. And if his friends don't laugh, he'll keep running back and forth until they do.
Meanwhile, the fat kid will take exactly the number of steps needed to stand in the designated spot, and not take another one until someone tells him to.
All that said, I don't think genetic propensities and an overfilled food supply are the end of hope.
The person with a genetic tendency to get addicted to cigarettes or become an alcoholic doesn't have to smoke the first cigarette or take the first drink.
If your parents are both fat, you should stay away from doughnuts and Big Gulps, even if some of your skinny friends can have those things and not gain an ounce.
Looking at it on a personal level, my father had a serious problem with gambling, so I don't gamble. I just returned from a three-day conference in Las Vegas, and I didn't place a bet. You don't have to quit what you never started.
I think PE should be back. It may not help those who are already fat, but think of it as an investment in those that aren't yet fat.
School food and PE can work hand in hand.
Related note: I heard that the author of The South Beach Diet is funding a school study in Florida to show that kids WILL eat healthy foods if they are available (and crap isn't). They are not on a South Beach diet, just one of healthy, unprocessed foods. I hope it works out and rolls out to other schools.
In England, Jamie Oliver is trying to persuade the govt. to clean up school foods, too. He's got a program on how to encourage your kid's school to clean up it's act.
I wonder if there are any programs like that here in the US. I would love to help with something like that for my kids' school.
Okay, maybe I came off a little harsh for a first post. Gardener I think you missed the point of my post. I am just saying that fast food companies have bigger responsibilities that to babysit people who don't make educated decisions about their eating habits. I never said obesity wasn't because of people eating too much and eating unhealthy, of course it is. However that is again a personal choice. Gardener, you might be able to afford a good brokerage however many people don't have that advantage and have to invest in mutual funds through their employers and therefor have a very limited number of options. The "socially conscious" funds don't shy away from McDonalds so an individual would have to pick each and every stock in his portfolio to ensure that his money wouldn't end up supporting the golden arches. I don't understand your Apple comparison, Apple is in a different industry and they are driven by profit just like McDonalds, although their industry doesn’t have anything to do with health they can still make morally questionable decisions, how do you think I felt when I figured out all my 400 i-tunes songs wouldn't work on anything but Apple hardware? The Hollywood analogy was simply to show that industries move to where the profits are with little regard for what "is best" for the consuming public. I agree 100% about the school foods, and I think gym memberships should be tax detectable to encourage people to exercise. Gardener, were not arguing about what physiologically makes people fat, I'm simply saying that the reason has to do with people not taking personal responsibility (which includes a parents responsibility to their children). Every side of this issue has it's lobbyist in Washington so just as you call me a "corporate shill" I could throw names at you. Remember last month when the CDC released (admittedly mistaken) obesity numbers and blamed them on the "availability of fast food" placing the fault on the companies for existing not on the people for eating it? Like always it's easier for politicians to blame peoples shortcomings on larger more complex institutions (Corporate America, Society, the Media) than to admit that individuals (maybe even voters!) have shortcomings. To me, and many people like me, my investment in my children college education savings (which might or might not be in McD, but someones is!) are more important than McDonald's pandering to those who cannot control themselves in the face of temptation. There are enough options for people to eat healthy and if more people chose those options we would all enjoy a much greater variety of healthy foods because of new products coming into the market, now wouldn't that be super? Lou gives a great example of personal responsibility, he knew he might be predisposed to a gambling problem and he avoided it, if he can avoid placing a bet in Vegas where the temptation is in your face 24/7, right downstairs all day all night, your buddies are doing it and the possible excuses are endless ("Who knows when I'll be back in Vegas", "It would be good for team spirit to go with the rest of the gang.", etc..) than people should be able to ignore the new McGriddle ads and make their own productive decisions. Good job Lou, that's the same reason I've never had a cigarette, it's not easy to resist temptations but everyone can do it.
ps. Your right my kid loved Air Bud, which is why it hurt so much to see that lovable mutt fall from grace in the sequels, "Air Bud 5: World Pup", sigh...
I see your point, BB. There is more to it though than just personal responsibility. Obesity is an epidemic now. Something is obviously not right. The cost of changing this is going to break the back of the taxpayers.
Here is one way to look at it, just for argument's sake. Why is gambling illegal in most states? Because the law knows not to leave human nature to its own resources. If evertyhing should be market driven then why not let gambling be legal nationwide? Because poor people would be the most victimized, but it might possibly bring out the worst in a majority of people, poor or not. Why shouldn't there be some regulation over the largest food providers, especially one that feeds so many lower income people?
I am not making this as a legitimate argument, but just playing the devil's advocate to your logic. I am not comfortable legislating individual's choices in a free market, but there is an epidemic, and the relationship is symbiotic, not just the fast food industry or not just consumers. It is really easy to throw around statements about parents being responsible for their children's diets and exercise, but the sad fact is that it is just hot air and doesn't solve anything. What is a productive solution that doesn't bankrupt the food industry but doesn't compound our obesity problem? Maybe we should request that a percentage of the fast food industry should go toward the nation's health care costs, which the taxpayers are going to have to pay for anyway when the majority of Americans are uninsurable due to their weight related illnesses.
Just thinking out loud. Let's hear some of your thoughts.
I totally agree that crappy foods need to get out of schools now! I am a high school teacher, and every morning I see kids purchasing a 20 oz. bottle of Mountain Dew and a cookie bigger than their heads. At 7:00 in the morning!!!! SOda is available all day for kids, except for lunch time, when they are incouraged to eat "healthy". This means a wide variety of fatty foods that are overly processed and stuffed with enough preservatives to survive a nuclear blast. I also forgot to mention that there is "juice" available as an alternative to the soda. I think that it maybe has about 10% actual juice in it.
Seriously, I witness students eating crap food all day. Soda companies provide the school with kick-backs to sell their sodas, and fund raising companies inundate the school with candy bars and cookie dough. Our students don't stand a chance.
BU
First, I apologize to BB for accusing him of trollship. I wrongly suspected he was someone I had known elsewhere, who constantly argued, often abusively, that personal responsibility is everything, period. To a certain extent, personal responsibility plays a key role. With the kind of fascination that makes it hard not to look for blood at the scene of an accident, I can't resist looking in the grocery shopping carts of 300 pound lady whales at ShopRight. Usually what's there is gruesome stuff.
I have a couple of reasons for this to be a personal issue with me. Five years ago, at 200+ pounds and as sedentary as possible this side of a wheelchair, I "got religion," joined a gym for the first time in my life. I still have a problem with putting on weight, and only now, at a fairly advanced age, have I learned the secret: don't worry so much about what I eat, so long as it's not frankenfood processed crap, but cut back on portion size. For three months this tactic has taken 3" off my waist and dropped body fat % to under 15. I may be back to 32" shorts by Labor Day--and since I've only changed portion size when I reach my goal there won't be this "okay, swell, the diet worked, now let's go out and eat half a pizza and some ice cream as a reward" mentality.
Another reason for a little sensitivity about what may lie behind "personal responsibility" is awareness that my own family may have helped contribute to serious health problems in America. My grandfarher, father, and a couple of uncles were commodity brokers, with a sizable firm in Dallas and Memphis. The mainstay of their business was hydrogenated and partically hydrogenated cottonseed and corn and other vegetable oils. These were primarily used to make margarine, for both household and food manufacturing purposes. In the 1940s and 1950s, the firm did a great deal of lobbying on behalf of margarine. They were successful in overturning legislation supported by the dairy industry that required margarine to be sold in 1-pound blocks instead of quarter pound sticks and to be white not yellow. (You had to add yellow dye back then). I never tasted butter until I was married! I don't think my family knew that trans fats were as bad as they are, but then perhaps my grandfather and my father wouldn't have died in their 60s (and suffered bad heart attacks in their early 50s) if they hadn't consumed so much margarine.
Also "personal responsibility" is the battle cry of the Center for Consumer Choice, an outfit that for profit is out to encourage unhealthy eating. It's supported by the soft drink and fast food industry. Elsewhere on Jean-Paul's forums I've posted serious criticism of this pr firm, which I consider to be whores spreading dietary rather than sexual disease. I'll add a couple of these posts to this thread. The link to the CCC website allows a chance to see the kind of disinformation it puts out.
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"It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in an argument." William Gibbs McAdoo. US Vice-President under Woodrow Wilson.
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Member # 204
posted June 14, 2005 01:30 PM *** ** ** ** * * ** **
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Last Sunday’s NY Times had an interesting piece on Rick Berman’s Center for Consumer Freedom.
nyt
Sounds like a great outfit, right? We’re all consumers, after all, and since we’re also Americans, we value freedom as one of the highest values. Berman’s got an interesting website at http://www.consumerfreedom.com/
If you ridicule the idea that the fast-food chains that have burgeoned in the US since the late 1950s and the huge increase in our consumption of processed foods have anything to do with the epidemic of obesity, well, you’re bound to love Berman’s way of putting bread on his table. As a matter of fact, as he tells it there is no epidemic of obesity, except that which is caused by laziness and the failure to exercise. It’s all a matter of personal responsibility, right? Nobody puts guns to our kids' heads to get them to go down and get supersized with fries and double cheeseburgers, right?
Maybe. But maybe not. As Deep Throat said in the movie about Watergate, “Follow the money.”
A critical look at Berman’s CCF and its sources of funding is http://www.sourcewatch.org/wiki.phtm...nsumer_Freedom
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June 12, 2005
Striking Back at the Food Police
By MELANIE WARNER
WHEN it comes to food fights, John Belushi's character in "Animal House" has nothing on Rick Berman. A prominent Washington lobbyist, Mr. Berman runs the Center for Consumer Freedom, a nonprofit advocacy group that is financed by the food and restaurant industries. Two months ago, after a report in a leading medical journal cast doubt on several assumptions about obesity, he pounced.
His group ran $600,000 worth of full-page ads in a half-dozen newspapers, gloating that the study showed that obesity was not an "epidemic" but rather a lot of hype. "Americans have been force-fed a steady diet of obesity myths by the 'food police,' trial lawyers, and even our own government," the ad said.
In recent years, Mr. Berman, who is not a scientist, has emerged as a powerful and controversial voice in the debate over the nation's eating habits. In some ways, he has become the face of the food industry as it tries to beat back regulations and discourage consumer lawsuits. Food and restaurant companies, he says, are being unfairly blamed for making Americans fat and unhealthy; he adds that people are smart enough to make their own well-informed choices.
Formed in 1995 with money from Philip Morris, now known as Altria, to fight bans on smoking in restaurants and bars, Consumer Freedom has gained attention for its provocative tactics. Last year, it ran television ads that featured the Soup Nazi of "Seinfeld" fame ordering overweight people to eat salad - a clear jab at what the group considers pushy nutritionists who are trying to suck the joy out of eating.
Mr. Berman has declared war on organizations like the Center for Science in the Public Interest, the food and nutrition activist group that is run by his nemesis, Michael Jacobson. If the food police had a commissioner, Mr. Berman would cast him in the role.
Along the way, Mr. Berman and his group have earned more than a few enemies. Critics say that Consumer Freedom seizes on statistical errors and other nuances to distract from the substance of the obesity debate. "They make a lot of noise, but nobody in academia takes their arguments seriously," said Dr. David Ludwig, director of the obesity program at Children's Hospital in Boston and an occasional target of Mr. Berman's group. "They stand for food industry freedom, not consumer freedom."
Amid the claims and counterclaims, Mr. Berman and his opponents duke it out, taking sides on major questions about obesity, including these: How did Americans become so fat? Who is to be blamed? And how should the problem be solved?
Much is at stake in the answers. In April, a study by researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sharply lowered the number of annual deaths attributable to obesity, to 112,000 from 400,000. But the report, published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, said nothing of other problems that can result from obesity. Scientists have linked the condition - defined as having a body mass index of more than 30 - to an increased risk of everything from diabetes and arthritis to hypertension and heart disease.
As a result, the C.D.C., the government's primary agency for health information, still calls obesity "a very, very important health problem" and "a serious epidemic."
According to the agency, rates of obesity have doubled in the last 25 years among adults and children, and tripled among teenagers. Some scientists and public health officials have suggested that this trend, if left unchecked, could bankrupt the already faltering health care system. A study last year by scientists at the Research Triangle Institute and the C.D.C. found that states' medical expenditures related to obesity were as much as $75 billion a year.
FOR the food industry, which has annual revenue of $500 billion, the implications of all this are potentially colossal. Many major food and restaurant companies derive a huge portion of their revenue from products - Cocoa Puffs, Doritos, Hot Pockets, you name it - that most nutritionists frown upon. Only a handful of small lawsuits have been filed against food companies so far concerning diet and obesity, but trial lawyers are circling and are starting to turn food into the new tobacco.
Part of Mr. Berman's job is to keep that from happening. To that end, he has taken aim at Center for Science in the Public Interest - which, like Consumer Freedom, is based in Washington - because it has done more than anyone else to say the food industry has had a major role in obesity.
Run for 30 years by Mr. Jacobson, a tenacious Ph.D. in microbiology, the Center for Science in the Public Interest has consistently shined a bright light on the nutritional ills of the standard American diet. Last year it raised $16 million, mostly from subscribers to its monthly newsletter.
To Mr. Jacobson, food companies have followed the profit motive, making bigger sizes to encourage people to spend more money, and engineering food that is full of sugar, fat and salt - and thus has an irresistible taste. As a result, he says, people have become fat.
To illustrate the point, he cites a study showing that many of the foods with the biggest increases in consumption in the last 20 years are among the most fattening and nutritionally unredeeming, such as salty snacks, pizza and soft drinks.
Mr. Berman, on the other hand, argues that potato chips and hamburger combo meals have very little to do with America's ballooning waistline. The real culprits, he says, are a lack of exercise and people's unwillingness to take personal responsibility for their own diets. He points to separate studies showing that over the last two decades, the rates of exercise among American adolescents have decreased considerably, while total caloric consumption has risen only slightly.
Not surprisingly, Mr. Jacobson cites government data that show just the opposite: that the average American consumed anywhere from 166 to 560 more calories a day in 2000 than in 1980.
Run from the well-appointed offices of Mr. Berman's lobbying firm, Berman & Company, the Center for Consumer Freedom employs 25 people. Mr. Berman, trained as a lawyer, built a career working on labor issues - he campaigned against the minimum-wage increase in 1997 and worked as a negotiator for Bethlehem Steel in union contract talks - before turning his attention to obesity.
In newspaper advertising, Consumer Freedom describes itself as a "nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting consumer choices and promoting common sense." But Mr. Berman readily acknowledges that he gets the bulk of his funds from food and restaurant companies, some of which are also clients of his lobbying firm.
Mr. Jacobson, who employs 60 people at his organization, says that because of the way Mr. Berman's group is financed, Consumer Freedom is little more than a thinly veiled front for the interests of the food industry. "The companies that are working with them want their critics debunked and trashed," Mr. Jacobson said recently from his Washington office. "They can secretly participate in that by funding Berman."
Mr. Berman responds that his primary goal is to create an "intellectually honest" debate. "I'm trying to make sure the statistics are not made to seem worse than they are and to educate the public about how some people are being selective in their data," he said last month over a healthy lunch of grilled salmon at a restaurant not far from his 12th-floor offices overlooking the White House.
MR. BERMAN has always declined to name the specific companies that support Consumer Freedom. He said in an interview that there were roughly 100 companies, including some that control very large brands, but that identifying them would serve no purpose.
"I don't want these companies getting targeted for something controversial that I'm saying," he said.
A watchdog group in Washington, the Center for Media and Democracy, has posted data about Consumer Freedom's financing on its Web site. According to documents they say were obtained from a former Consumer Freedom staff member, corporate contributors to the group as of 2002 included Coca-Cola, Wendy's and Tyson Foods, each of which gave $200,000. Cargill gave $100,000, according to the documents, and Outback Steakhouse gave $164,600.
Coca-Cola confirms that it is a sponsor of Consumer Freedom and calls the group valuable as "another voice in the debate." But a Coke spokeswoman, Kari Bjorhus, added that her company does "take the obesity issue very seriously."
The National Restaurant Association, which represents large chains like McDonald's and Wendy's as well as small, independent businesses, says that it is not a financial contributor to Consumer Freedom, but that the two organizations have similar goals. "We have regular communications with Consumer Freedom," said a spokeswoman, Sue Hensley. "They have an important voice in emphasizing personal responsibility."
Not all food companies, however, are aligned in support of Mr. Berman - a situation that highlights a philosophical divide in the industry. Some companies, like PepsiCo and Kraft Foods, say that they have explicitly declined to work with Consumer Freedom and that they do not agree with some of its arguments or its approach.
"Our focus is not to engage in all the debate over whose fault it is, but to continue to work on healthier product development," said Brock Leach, a senior vice president at PepsiCo who in 2002 was given the task of helping to develop more nutritious product offerings.
A spokesman for Kraft, Mark Berlind, says that the company does not contribute to Consumer Freedom because it doesn't think "finger-pointing" is the "right solution."
"We feel we have a responsibility to address consumers' concerns over obesity," he added, "so we're responding by reformulating many of our products, providing more product information, creating smaller sizes and adjusting our marketing practices."
To Mr. Berman, that is "appeasement" and will not work. "You can't accommodate these people," he said, referring to the Center for Science in the Public Interest. "They're not going away. If you create some healthier products, they'll go after all the unhealthy ones you still make."
So in turn, Consumer Freedom goes after that group, as one prong of its strategy. Another is to become an authority on health and obesity information. Consumer Freedom staff members post articles daily on its Web site and publish booklets with titles like "An Epidemic of Obesity Myths," dense with statistics and references to scientific studies.
The booklets and articles make for interesting reading, but many scientists question whether much of it really matters. For instance, Mr. Berman says that Arnold Schwarzenegger, Mel Gibson and Michael Jordan all have body mass indexes above 30 and thus are classified as "obese."
So, too, is Mr. Berman. At 6-foot-3 and 255 pounds, he has a body mass index of 31.87. Despite his "obesity," Mr. Berman says he is "perfectly healthy."
These are useful points, but Dr. Ludwig of Children's Hospital said that people like weightlifters and professional athletes who are technically overweight because of muscle constitute a very small percentage of the population.
And while it is certainly possible to have an index above 30 and still be healthy, that is not true for a majority of people who are obese. Dr. Glenn A. Gaesser, a professor of exercise physiology at the University of Virginia and a supporter of many of the efforts of Consumer Freedom, says that roughly 30 percent of obese people have none of the classic metabolic problems or other risk factors. The other 70 percent are indeed at risk for a host of troubling and costly obesity-related health problems, he says.
ONE scientist who objects to Consumer Freedom's statistical nit-picking is Katherine M. Flegal, a senior research scientist at the C.D.C.'s National Center for Health Statistics and an author of the study in The Journal of the American Medical Association that found fewer deaths linked to obesity. "I think people have overinterpreted a lot of what we said," Dr. Flegal said in a recent interview. "Just because you don't have a risk of excess death doesn't mean you're healthy."
And for Dr. Ludwig, the fact that the study's findings were less dire than previous studies does not shake his belief that there is a looming public health disaster. Dr. Flegal's study, for instance, did not directly address the sharp increase in childhood obesity. "Once obese children enter adulthood," Dr. Ludwig said, "then all of the previous relationships that have been observed may no longer apply because they'll be carrying those extra pounds for so many more years.
"In other words, with regard to the childhood obesity epidemic," he added, "we are still in the quiet before the storm."
Mr. Jacobson says that it is shortsighted for Consumer Freedom to make such a big deal over the number of obesity deaths. He contends that obesity is just one symptom of the prevalence of horrible diets, and that the same eating habits that cause people to gain weight may also deprive them of essential nutrients, antioxidants and fiber to help keep their bodies healthy and free from chronic disease. "It's all related," he said.
MR. BERMAN is undeterred by such criticism. In fact, he thrives on it. He calls Dr. Ludwig a "waistline scaremonger" and says that Mr. Jacobson has a "messiah complex."
Instead of easing up on its criticism of the C.D.C. for having to change the figure on obesity deaths, Consumer Freedom is turning up the dial. Using internal C.D.C. documents the agency posted on its Web site, the group recently completed a report that accuses the C.D.C. of deliberately inflating its statistics and covering up that it has done so. The C.D.C. said it did not want to comment on that report.
And the group is planning a new television commercial assailing the food police. The ad shows a hand yanking an ice cream cone away from a little boy and grabbing a beer away from a guy at a bar. "Do you ever feel like you're always being told what not to do?" the ad says. "Find out who's driving the food police at consumerfreedom.com."
To Mr. Berman, nothing less than the vitality of the food industry and the personal freedom of all Americans are at stake. "There are attempts to create ill-conceived regulations at the state level and there will certainly be rogue lawyers filing obesity lawsuits against companies," he said. "And if Michael Jacobson has his way there will be a tax on every food product that is not a vegetable. We can't let that happen."
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"It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in an argument." William Gibbs McAdoo. US Vice-President under Woodrow Wilson.
posted March 17, 2005 12:20 PM *** ** ** ** * * ** **
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The euphemistically-named Center for Consumer Freedom is a great example of pr spin trying to convince us that war is peace and slavery is freedom . Its tactics also seem of late to inspired our government to tell us that there's not a cough in its carload of toxic fumes. Here's the CCF's response to the news story about obesity and lifespan. This outfit is a bunch of media whores, Jeff Gannon wannabes. http://www.consumerfreedom.com/news_...?headline=2768
The CCF's website has other examples of its flagrant uses of disinformation.
quote:
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March 17, 2005
Life Expectancy: Another Obesity Myth Debunked
In 2002, Dr. William Klish of Texas Children's Hospital told the Houston Chronicle: "If we don't get this epidemic [of childhood obesity] in check, for the first time in a century children will be looking forward to a shorter life expectancy than their parents." Since then, Klish's statement has entered the lexicon of obesity scaremongers, making its way into countless articles, editorials, and even Congressional testimony -- all without so much as a shred of credible research to back it up. Klish himself has told the Center for Consumer Freedom that while he is the originator of this pessimistic prognostication, his claim does not come from "evidence-based research." Rather, he explained, "It's based on intuition."
Today, more than three years after Dr. Klish first suggested the idea, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) released a deeply flawed study that seeks to justify Klish's assertion. It claims that because of obesity the "youth of today may, on average, live less healthy and possibly even shorter lives than their parents." But like Klish, Dr. S. Jay Olshansky and his team of co-authors admit that their dire prediction relies on their "collective judgment" rather than empirical, scientific evidence.
"This study is just half a step removed from science fiction," we told USA Today. "It uses discredited methodology, and it makes dire warnings that are not supported by its own data."
"The Olshansky piece is seriously flawed," Dr. James Vaupel, director of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany explained to us in an e-mail last week. "His perspective is that of an advocate making a case rather than a scientist evaluating the body of conflicting evidence."
Vaupel isn't alone in questioning Olshansky's prediction. Dr. Robert N. Anderson, the lead author of the CDC's National Vital Statistics Report on life expectancy, explained that he was extremely skeptical of Klish and Olshansky's claim about obesity's effect on life expectancy. He told us: "I really would be shocked if we got a generation down the road and life expectancy was lower than the previous generation. I really would be surprised ... We've never seen anything like that. Life expectancy has gone up pretty steadily."
Even noted obesity-scaremonger JoAnn Manson explained to the Associated Press, "the calculations that were made may not be perfect."
So what went wrong with the study? Although Olshansky purports to show that if the entire nation were an "ideal" weight we might live, on average, a few months longer, he provides no empirical research to back up his foreboding forecast about life expectancy actually decreasing. Instead, without so much as a footnote (except to their own work), he and his co-authors muse that the "trends" in the data suggest the possibility of life expectancy declining.
The study essentially ignores the influence of medical progress (e.g., discovering new vaccines and developing new disease-fighting procedures) in increasing life expectancy. Despite the enormous gains we've seen (more than six years since 1970), Olshansky and his co-authors write: "We believe that potential forms of technology do not justify developing or revising forecasts for life expectancy." At the same time, they offer a few guesses about future trends in obesity, which supposedly support their dire warnings.
The Authors
No one familiar with the study's authors would be surprised by their outrageous conclusions. Olshansky himself tops the list of the nation's life-expectancy naysayers. Dr. Richard Suzman, associate director of the Behavioral and Social Research Program at the National Institute on Aging, once told Knight Ridder newswire: "Olshansky's position [on decreasing life expectancy] is a minority perspective in demography." Dr. Vaupel added, "There is a small chance -- less than one in 100 -- that Olshansky's prediction of declining life expectancy might possibly prove correct."
Olshansky co-authored the study with long-time obesity scaremonger David Ludwig, who hysterically compared childhood obesity to a "massive tsunami heading for the United States." And as we explained to the Associated Press, co-author David Allison presents a number of troubling financial conflicts of interest -- so many, in fact, that NEJM published a three page financial disclosure, listing more than 100 organizations (mostly weight-loss companies) from which he's received money.
Allison authored a 1999 study blaming obesity for 300,000 deaths a year in America. The study, which was printed in JAMA, included the disclosure that Allison "has received grants, honoraria, monetary and product donations, was a consultant to, and has contracts or other commitments with numerous organizations involving weight control products and services." An internal review committee at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has called his method for counting obesity attributable deaths "fundamentally" flawed. Despite the controversy surrounding Allison's method, the authors of the NEJM study explain that because they only wanted "plausible estimates rather than precise numbers," they chose to rely on Allison's "simpler approach." Not surprisingly, that "simpler approach" tends to exaggerate the problem.
From Science to Activism
Earlier this year, well before Olshansky's article was to be published, we set out to determine the veracity of Dr. Klish's initial claim about this generation of children living shorter lifespans than their parents. At that point, dozens of activists, researchers, and even respected public health officials had already taken Klish's statement and run with it. They include Yale University professor Kelly Brownell, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine ally Dean Ornish, and some of the nation's most respected health officials. In March of 2004, the Surgeon General told Congress:
Because of the increasing rates of obesity, unhealthy eating habits, and physical inactivity, we may see the first generation that will be less healthy and have a shorter life expectancy than their parents.
We contacted the Surgeon General's office to inquire about the source of his doom-and-gloom statement. After all, it's hard to believe that the nation's top doctor would offer testimony before the United States Congress based merely on one doctor's intuitive guess.
Carmona's spokesman told us: "I don't think that there is a study somewhere that life expectancy will shrink if we don't do this. I think that it was just based on some literature that he had read ... It was an amalgamation of the information he has been reading."
Considering the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC) recent admission that its study on the number of deaths attributed to obesity grossly overestimated the problem, Carmona's reliance on Klish's "intuitive" guess seems, sadly, par for the course. This fall, the Department of Agriculture's Undersecretary for Food, Nutrition, and Consumer Services told a Congressional subcommittee that "this may be the first generation of children not to live as long as their parents as a direct result of [childhood obesity]." His spokesman did not return follow-up calls after telling us in an initial conversation that he could not find any research to substantiate this claim.
Last summer, when TIME magazine and ABC News co-hosted a highly publicized and decidedly one-sided conference on obesity, the head food cop at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) began the proceedings by saying: "If we don't do something to reverse these trends, we will raise the first generation of Americans to live sicker and die younger than their parents." A similar statement showed up in a policy proposal by the RWJF-funded Trust for America's Health, titled "F as in Fat: How Obesity Policies Are Failing in America." The first page of the proposal reports that "many experts ... predict that the nation's younger generation may be the first in American history to live sicker and shorter lives than their parents." We contacted the Trust to see if they could name their "many experts." Predictably, the group cited three: the Surgeon General, Klish, and "someone" at the CDC. (We contacted the CDC, and after a day of searching all they could produce was an editorial quoting a doctor affiliated with the agency's VERB program.)
The Trust's spokesperson added: "The reason that we use these kinds of facts is because it does draw press attention to the problem ... A lot of policy organizations [do not rely on scientific literature], because they draw attention, quite honestly."
Dean Ornish offered by email a similar explanation for his, and others, regurgitation of Klish and Olshansky's false claim: "I think this gets quoted because it gets people's attention to what is a real problem that only seems to be getting worse. To that extent, it can be useful."
All told, we contacted more than a dozen people who had stated publicly that childhood obesity would make this the first generation of children to have a shorter lifespan than their parents. And time after time, they failed to provide us with even a single source to back up their claim. The only exception was Yale Professor David Katz, who suggested two studies (they can be found here and here) that supposedly prove his point. Of course, they don't.
Although both studies indicate that the severely obese may suffer health complications due in part to their weight, neither comes close to suggesting that obesity could change the CDC's estimate that people born in 2004 are expected to live more than six years longer than their parents. And neither does this week's study from Olshansky, Ludwig, Allison, and their colleagues.
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PURE CRAP....but nowadays we get this kind of spin, disinformation, and cynical propaganda from many places in our society.
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"It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in an argument." William Gibbs McAdoo. US Vice-President under Woodrow Wilson.
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