Coming soon: Big Brother is watching you--eat

You've no doubt read about the this article in the New York Times by Gina Kolata, in which she covers the "fat is contagious" study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

As a fellow journalist, I understand that Kolata had to cover the story. An obesity reporter's gotta cover what an obesity reporter's gotta cover (which is why I left the world of hard news long ago). But the tone of this article is a little too uncritical in my opinion, a little too quick to accept the study's dubious findings as valid research.

The quote that sent me reaching for my keyboard: When a close friend becomes obese, obesity may not look so bad. “You change your idea of what is an acceptable body type by looking at the people around you,” Dr. Christakis said.

In other words, size acceptance causes obesity.

I'm not even going to try to unpack all the assumptions here. Like, for instance,the fact that thin people can become fat, or that fat is always Bad with a capital B, or that it's better to be thin than to be comfortable with yourself, whatever your size is. And then of course there's the fact that these researchers don't seem to understand that--repeat after me, class--correlation does not equal causation.

Kolata certainly didn't try. She appears to have reported all this with a straight face, more or less, despite her considerable knowledge about obesity and scientific research and, well, bullshit.

Gina, Gina, Gina. I may have to take your book off my shelf.

What we know about fat and thin

In response to an anonymous comment made on my last post--don't you love people who attack behind an "anonymous" handle?--I want to clarify a few things about fat and thin.

The biggest cause of fatness is genetics. Heritability for obesity is .7, according to this article in the Proceedings of the Nutrition Society published by Cambridge University Press.

Upward of 90% of people who diet to lose weight gain the weight back and then some. So . . .
Diets don't work.
And . . . when diets don't work, they make people fatter.
Calories in do not equal calories out. (Contrary to anonymous' assertion, this concept does not defy the laws of physics; it's a function of metabolism, which is not uniform from person to person, and which is affected by a wide variety of factors. This not something that I "somehow think"; it's been observed over and over by scientists far more knowledgeable than I.)
Fat people tend to stay fat. (See Kolata.)
Thin people tend to stay thin. (See Kolata, Sims, Minnesota Starvation Study.)
Obesity appears to put people at risk for diabetes.
The relationship between fat/obesity and mortality is much more complicated than fat = bad, thin = good.
The current "moral panic" over fat hangs on a "health and wellness" peg but actually derives more from aesthetics than true health.
Even if we all agreed that fat was bad, we don't know how to make people thinner. See point #1.

And finally:
Fat haters have a lot in common with racists. They may cloak their arguments in other terms, but the bottom line is that they see fat people as ugly second-class citizens who don't deserve to be happy, healthy, or whole.

Now, that's ugly.

The war on fat, in someone else's words

I won't say where I found this, but this post was written in response to someone raising the question of whether, perhaps, obesity might not be a completely evil phenomenon:

"Obesity is unhealthy. There is no doubt about it. It increases the risk of high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes (and subsequent problems with high blood pressure, kidney disease, and major foot problems, including multiple surgeries and amputations), stroke (partly secondary to the high blood pressure), arthritis (from the sheer weight on the joints), plus other medical and psychological problems. When it is also combined with smoking, which it often is, there is even more disaster.

It is a huge expense to society to have so many obese people with their medical problems. It is a preventable disease. People just need to eat less and exercise. They need more self-control.

To flaunt it as a nonpreventable problem is just not true. What has changed during the past 50 years is that people eat more and move less. Obese people want respect for their eating problems and acceptance. I think that as long as other people are able to control themselves and discipline themselves to exercise, then there will be contempt for those that cannot.

Also, I think that a lot of people resent the high cost of obesity. Health care would be a lot less if people just didn't eat double bacon cheeseburgers, fries and a Coke, then go out for ice cream or beer, and then sit and watch TV (or drink more beer, which has a lot of calories.)

Personally, I resent so much money being spent for accomodations and gastric stapling/bypass surgery because people want to gorge themselves constantly with fatty food!"

It's rare to see so many misconceptions and such hatred right out there in the open. Next you'll be telling us that fat people are responsible for global warming.

Personally, I resent the millions of dollars being wasted on ill-directed and ineffective "wellness" campaigns in schools and offices. And I resent the hell out of the ignorant assumptions behind your words.

So I'm going to exercise tremendous self-restraint (and you know how hard self-restraint is for a fat person!) and recommend that you educate yourself rather than simply parrot the anti-obesity rhetoric of our time. Start by reading Gina Kolata's new book, Rethinking Thin. Kolata is a well-respected New York Times science writer. She is also, if it matters to you--and I think it does--a thin person.

Then I'd suggest reading a little Paul Campos--he's also a thin person, though formerly fat. Then read this post at Kate Harding's fantastic blog.

Then come back and tell me how you feel about fat.

Gina Kolata rocks

Tomorrow's New York Times Book Review features a review of Gina Kolata's new book, Rethinking Thin. While the reviewer accepts Kolata's most relevant point--that most fat people do not get thin despite countless diets and interventions--she scoffs at Kolata's conclusion: that maybe there's nothing so wrong with being fat.

This is one book I can't wait to get my hands on. The reviewer was obviously biased from the get-go, but luckily that bias is so clear that there's no mistaking it for critical judgment. Kolata is a wonderful science writer who knows her stuff. I'm looking forward to reading it for myself.