Hacker News Reader

Comment by imaginenore | Hacker News Reader

That's the thing, you're fighting the straw man, "evil ways" is your invention. Wrong and unhealthy and costly ways is what I'd say.

I'd say that tactic (criticisms and making fun of) worked in many instances.

View on HN

Except fat people already know all those things. And also most of what this is about isn't that level of neutral, but at least not hurtful criticism. Most of it is of the "ugh let's all point and laugh at the gross fatty" variety.

But, in fact, fat people are constantly made to feel bad, without any evident slimming as a result.

Only, it would seem, in Western culture. In places like Japan, fat shaming is absolutely brutal and is a significant part of the reason that they have less obesity. (Source: Conversations with Japanese people, in Japan, about why Westerners were so fat.)

I've spent time in Japan too (I majored in Japanese and I lived there for a year), and, while Japanese people don't have very much tact about body image issues, I find self-reports like that very unconvincing. Japanese people will also wax poetic about the uniqueness of their having four seasons, which would probably be news to most of my fellow New Englanders.

There are a lot of other things different about Japan (most people walk more and drive rather infrequently, food portions are smaller, the actual foods eaten are not the same, for instance) than just how tactless or not Japanese people are about weight. I bet if you looked at Nikkei with Japanese immigrant parents you would see rates of obesity that looked much more similar to American ones than Japanese ones too.

In addition, although it's a slower creep, Japan is seeing average BMIs go up.

I know "correlation/causation" feels like a dead horse, but I would want far better evidence that there's an actual link and not just confounding factors (ex. diet).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com