Overheard at the lunch table

Recently I had occasion to take my kids on an all-day excursion, to which they were allowed to each invite a friend. As we cruised the lunch joint we'd chosen, the 12-year-old friend seemed, well, anxious about what to choose. She wanted nachos, she said, but that wasn't healthy. (Sound familiar, anyone?) Her parents, she explained, have a rule about eating fruits and vegetables at every meal. She finally settled on nachos and a container of cut-up fruit. "My father says I don't eat enough for a girl my age," she commented. Gee, I wonder why; could she be learning from them to be afraid of food? If she has the genetic loading for an eating disorder, she's in big trouble.

As we ate, the conversation turned to a new movie, Ratatouille. This girl had seen it. "I really liked it," she reported, "except for all those rats who were so fat!" Then she went on: "It's so disgusting! They had all these bulges of so much fat!"

I was fairly stunned, but only because she was articulating what I know so many people think. I didn't know what to say, honestly, and what came to mind wasn't great: "In our family we don't feel fat is bad. People come in all shapes and sizes."

"But all they have to do is eat less and eat healthy and they wouldn't be fat!" she cried. Out of the mouths of babes, huh? "That's not actually true," I said, and then changed the subject, feeling like a coward. But I really didn't feel like taking it on, especially since I could see she was just parroting what she'd heard at home.

Later in the day, everyone else got ice cream, and so, I was happy to see, did she. The fruit went home unopened. For what it's worth.

PETA's fat-hating frenzy

The folks over at PETA have a gripe with filmmaker Michael Moore: they want him to make a documentary about animal rights.

That's cool. But the way they go about airing their gripe--very uncool.

The president of PETA, Ingrid Newkirk, wrote an open letter to Moore last week, which was publicized on PETA's blog. In it, Newkirk urges Moore to go vegetarian:

"Although we think that your film could actually help reform America’s sorely inadequate health care system, there’s an elephant in the room, and it is you. With all due respect, no one can help but notice that a weighty health issue is affecting you personally. We’d like to help you fix that. Going vegetarian is an easy and life-saving step that people of all economic backgrounds can take in order to become less reliant on the government’s shoddy healthcare system, and it’s something that you and all Americans can benefit from personally.”

PETA's blog goes on to say, "The idea is that if people didn't make themselves unhealthy in the first place by eating meat products that are known to cause heart disease, high blood pressure, and strokes, the situation would easier for everyone. As Ingrid puts it, 'Yes, America’s health care system needs to be fixed, but personal responsibility is a big part of why people look and feel as ill as they do.'"

Take that, Michael Moore! It's YOUR fault if you get sick—and so is the whole crappy health care system in America!

Hoo-wee! It's great to feel powerful, isn't it?

Note to Ingrid Newkirk: Go have a doughnut or something.

Of pregnancy and fat phobia

Another post from Sandy Szwarc highlights the peculiar and dare I say twisted mentality that comes from living in a culture that's fat phobic in the extreme. Szwarc's talking about the latest media anti-fat media blitz, this one focused on the relationship between weight gained in pregnancy and overweight toddlers. Specifically, according to the study's authors, women who gain even the accepted amount of weight during pregnancy run four times the risk of having a child who's overweight at age 3.

Scary, huh? Apparently much scarier than another finding buried in the study, which received neither headlines nor any media attention: the fact that women who didn't gain enough weight during pregnancy had double the risk of having a baby with intrauterine growth retardation. According to Szwarc, Babies with IUGR are at vastly higher risks of stillbirth and serious medical problems during infancy if they do survive.

This reminds me of the recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which found that being underweight or of "normal" weight (and let's not even go there for now) correlated with higher rates of mortality than being overweight. (Thanks to Paul Campos for writing about this!) This unpopular finding has been scrutinized and rationalized to death, because apparently it's unbelievable that having nutritional reserves (i.e., being fat) could possibly confer any health benefits.

This, in turn, reminds me of the way doctors and therapists who treat eating disorders sometimes fall inadvertently into the language and perspective of those eating disorders. How people with anorexia can walk around at weights that are dangerous, yet no one notices because we've been so conditioned to think that thin = healthy and good.

Apparently we live in a culture where death is preferable to being fat. Even for babies. Even for toddlers.

Some years ago I dealt with this in my own life, after a severe depression sent me into a tailspin (what would have no doubt been called a nervous breakdown 60 years ago). Antidepressants lifted the fog and gave me my life back. They also, over a period of 5 years, led to a 50-pound weight gain. To me it was no contest: I'd rather be sane and happy and fat than thinner and miserable.

I wonder how many people would agree with me?