(See https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html )
Deaths from Anorexia are about 150/year
(See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11513012 )
Yet we're all hypersensitive about telling women they are overweight or obese.
It would be like spending weeks in urban schools talking about how to avoid poisonous snake bites and spending 15 minutes on automobile safety.
If you look at a middle-class supermarket in France and in the US you understand why your poor are obese pretty quickly.
In Europe I do not even own a car anymore. Most things can be done with a bike, by foot, or by public transport. For a few things where I prefer a car, I just use car sharing. So now I am way more active every day.
And thanks to certain trains always be running late, I am running at least once a day as well!
Further many of the most wasteful calories are not caused by high-sodium, high-fat processed foods but by excess sugar consumption in the form of sugary drinks. Switching to water, black coffee, or unsweetened tea could help the "Big Gulp" demographic big time.
0: http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullart...
Most Americans are confined to a wheeled chair for many hours a week. We just call it a car, but good luck getting free of it.
(I have lived without a car for about a decade, so this comment is not expressing discontent with me feeling trapped. I escaped that trap and walking everywhere has helped me shed a lot of weight without intending to.)
A couple will make 3 kids and say "I can't do without a car". But the couple never ponder the cost of making a family. The fact or having a car or not, and other matters of life style, are an after thoughs. And if you raise the issue, you are a cold robot for thinking that way instead of with your "heart".
I am super uncomfortable with statements that suggest people just need to exercise some self control and stop cranking out babies. That position is incredibly dismissive of very complex issues, including lack of access to health care in the US. Historically, health insurance that paid for Viagra did not pay for female birth control. We have this underlying assumption that men have a right to get laid, even if they need chemical help to get it up, but women do not. Yet, most of those men are getting laid with women, not with other men.
Questions of reproduction and sexual morality are incredibly complex and a very touchy subject because when two people have sex where the result may be a child, there are a great many people impacted. It isn't as simple as her rights vs his. The rights of the child are an issue, but so are the rights of the rest of society.
It really isn't a discussion I care to see injected here.
This is simply mistaken. The cost of making a family is nearly always what people are thinking about in that situation.
If you're saying that people aren't careful enough when they have sex, then yeah, that's always been a problem. But what's to be done? The kids exist now and you need to provide for them. Now what?
And no, in many places in USA a car is just about the only way how to get kids to school. Which you have to. And yep, cycling along unsafe road when you are adult and when you are 8 is not the same. So ype, familly with children needs car more then single healthy adult.
And yep, unless you want to face aging population problem later on, 3 kids should be doable. Just to get replacement level of population.
Fast-forward to now and I'm seriously contemplating buying another car (which I am utterly loath to do), solely because of how unreliable public transport is in my part of the world.
Besides the above, I had a conversation with a cyclist in work earlier this week who is considering giving it up and going back to driving (also against his will) because he finds it hard to breathe with all the diesels on the road that have had the particulate filters ripped out (a law that is completely ignored here, so is commonplace).
(As a side note, if you're wondering how he knows which cars have had this done, Google "coal-rolling" and you'll understand quickly.)
This is far more nuanced (and ridiculous) than people understand. While it might be healthy in the US to walk and cycle rather than drive, in Europe it's borderline hazardous.
Americans want to abuse their bodies (and minds) and expect healthcare to remain cheap. It doesn't work that way. Healthcare resources are limited. Increase demand and prices increases.
Sometimes I wonder if that's cause or correlation. That is, ill and wealthy just don't go together.
I am a strange mix of privilege and poverty. I was in gifted programs in public school and I have six years of college. I also am a woman and I have serious health issues.
I am getting healthier and I am getting more well off as a consequence. I think a lot about the details of the very complex relationship between health and wealth.
It is a really complicated thing that cannot be pinned down to any one thing. Education, social fabric, enhanced personal agency, greater de facto rights and a whole raft load of stuff tends to be involved in who is both rich and healthy and who gets access to neither.
A couple of excerpts from my food blog:
I basically live on diet coke. Coca cola products contain extract from the coca plant. This has medicinal benefits. No other cola products have this. Other cola products tend to be mostly sugar water -- though I do sometimes drink ginger ale because ginger helps with nausea.
http://miceats.blogspot.com/2016/09/diet-coke.html
Plain water has been gradually creeping into my diet here lately. This is noteworthy because I rarely drank plain water for quite a few years.
Look at how much more expensive cigarettes are in France and the graphical warning labels that accompany them and then look at how much more commonplace smoking is in France, particularly among the youth. Regulations don't change cultures to nearly the effect many want them to.
Compared to my parents or grand parent generation, the new ones:
- spend much more time seated;
- spend much more time in front of a screen;
- have much less people knowing how to cook. Or choose tasty fruits or vegetable for that matters, and hence they believe good food taste like crap.
- have more fat people, especially young ones;
- eat less home made food;
- consume more cereals, dairies, meat and refined sugar and less vegetables or fruits;
- eat more, and more often;
- consume products with less nutritional density, and a bigger concentration of additives of all sorts;
- eat while doing something else, faster, with less mastication.
So clearly our society is starting to fail on the health part as well.
Long to short, I'm not so sure the less well to do are making decisions that keep them healthy. Soda, ice cream, sugary cereals, etc. These things are in the upper class stores aw well, but it seem less people are interested.
I agree with you. But I want to added that the consumers' choices factor in as well.
In fact approx 10+ yrs ago the NY Times Sunday mag ran an article that said what you just did. In short, corn subsidies lead to cheap sweeteners, and those to cheap (but frutose based) foods.
Ironic that cities (e.g., Philadelphia) have a (so called) sugar drink tax" but their tax dollars (via subsidies) were already used to lower the cost of those drinks. Ultimately, the consumer pays. The consumer always pays.
One of the reasons for this is that women don't really get told they should work on their fitness to improve their own quality of life. The framing is almost always that the only real value a woman has is as a sex object. Telling women they need to lose weight is also a blame game where people with relatively little control over their lives are tasked with yet one more standard to meet instead of being given the support they need.
I am a woman. I am still alive when I should not be in part because I refused to cave to enormous social pressure to diet and force my body to conform to certain expectations. After getting the right diagnosis in my mid thirties, I was empowered to finally take proper care of myself. I shrank dramatically, even though that was not a goal of mine and my doctor was not trying to get me to lose weight because my condition usually leads to people being severely underweight and this helps kill them.
Our built environment used to be designed with fitness is mind. Now, many Americans are prisoners of their cars, spending long periods driving to and from work or school and finding nothing within walking distance. Elevators and escalators have replaced stairs. Sedentary office jobs are more the norm than hard physical labor. Everyone is too time stressed to go home and cook a real meal from scratch, so folks eat crappy microwave meals or get fast food at the drive through window or some other equally unhealthy option.
From my perspective, women giving push back and saying "I'm not your bitch, don't hang your shit on me. Quit judging me for how I look and pressuring me to conform." is actually the essential first step for trying to take control of their lives. That control leads to better health. Women starving themselves to try to conform does not lead to better health. It is just one more source of stress and problems for people who already tend to have too little control over their lives.
I also used to be obese, and I also made my own decision to become healthy. I don't think you can force someone to become healthier, but I doubt that I would be in my current state today if nobody mentioned my weight to me. Maybe you feel differently, but ignoring a problem rarely helps make it go away.
Blaming your environment (Elevators? Really? Every building has fire stairs...) or society at large for people not being motivated to lose weight is an odd perspective (especially blaming people who are trying to help by bringing the problem to your attention). Letting things slide, and a lack of constant affirmation is what caused to me to remain obese for several years. There are better ways of helping (offering to go for a run with someone), but ultimately that's just a nicer way to remind someone of their weight.
Also, GP was pointing out the double standard when it comes to how anorexia and obesity are treated by society.
No, not at all. If you don't frame it differently, you won't change anyone's mind. That reveals the goal for what it is: to feel good about thumbing your nose at obese people, rather than actually persuading them to do something about it.
If you want to persuade people, it's best to be clear about that in your own mind. But if you only want to feel superior then being like "You're fat, yo" is a fine way.
I know the motives of the judgy people who were a part of my life better than you do.
This kind of comment really should just never happen. In one sentence, you are casually dismissing conclusions about my own life that have taken me decades to arrive at.
Also, GP was pointing out the double standard when it comes to how anorexia and obesity are treated by society.
The article is about France, not the US. The observation that Americans are oversensitive about this could be deemed "off topic." The article lays out the completely valid reasons why France is concerned about a) excessive emphasis on thinness in its country and b) photos not simply lying to you about how people look.
Really, it is kind of BS to act like there is something wrong with requiring a two word label notifying you that the photo has been retouched. We are inundated daily with endless photos. Knowing which are legitimate representations of what actual people look like vs photo shopped fantasy bull seems like a completely valid desire for a long list of reasons.
If this was the case, why specify women and not men, why use shaming techniques that are scientifically proven not to work, why argue that this is to protect the feelings of women as if it is a bad thing, when there is proof that making women feel bad about their bodies with unrealistic media actually contributes to obesity?
So if you are really serious about reducing harm from obesity, promoting more realistic, healthier body images is a valuable step in that direction.
[1] e.g.: http://www.jahonline.org/article/S1054-139X%2815%2900288-8/p...
[2] http://www.sirc.org/publik/mirror.html
[3] e.g.: the phenomenon of "shadow pies" http://memehuffer.typepad.com/meme_huffer/2008/06/who-ate-al...
[4] http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/07/health/fat-shaming-sick-study-...
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3140795/#R27
> Yet we're all hypersensitive about telling women they are overweight or obese.
The UK already tackles these issues by banning a great deal, if not all food adverts on TV channels at times that children will typically watch, it's very easy to say that we should be focusing more effort on some subject but actually in fact we are focusing on the problem of obesity the one of the things we haven't really focused a huge amount of effort on is anorexia which still kills people ( and even more tragically, typically young people )
> Deaths from Anorexia are about 150/year
I actually went through and read the paper that you sourced that quote from and I think the author actually misses a big issue source of possible fatalities, primary it's not focusing on the suicide numbers. Instead it goes to focus on the death certificate counts for anorexia, there's probably doesn't mean that it's going to have a very good representation in the same way that you can't directly blame a lot of deaths on obesity directly because it causes other long-term issues
What there is a lack of is compassionate, practical help. It's quite a bit like smoking; few people would argue that they didn't know they were smoking, the issue is whether they care about the negative health effects and how they can actually do something about it that sticks.
I used to be obese, so I completely agree that fat people usually are somewhat aware of how fat they are and of the health impacts. It's just hard to make them care, and they need help with going through a lifestyle change that they are going to make mistakes during.
[1]: http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/mediareleasesbyCatal...
For example, years ago Greek Yogurt became popular in supermarkets in the U.S. If you look at the nutrition label of a yogurt like Chobani, it contains roughly 4 teaspoons of sugar in one small container. And yet yogurt is advertised as a healthy food.
If you "quit sugar" in the U.S., you'll quickly realize just how many items at supermarkets have added sugar. I'm more concerned about "sneaky calories" then straight-up junk food.
Also smoking is very normalised in many parts of the world, thanks to American lobbying. I really wish more countries would follow Australia's lead on smoking legislation. Smoking kills ~500,000 a year[1].
> It would be like spending weeks in urban schools talking about how to avoid poisonous snake bites and spending 15 minutes on automobile safety.
As an aside, in Australia we teach both (not to mention spider, tick, blue bottle, jellyfish, and octopus safety).
[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/data_statistics/fact_sheets/heal...
When the show was broadcast in Australia they left that episode out, because all the spiders in Australia probably will kill you. :)
But I don't recall stories about Reemtsma trying to interfere in Australia's laws about anti-smoking. Marlboro did (they failed spectacularly, but that's a separate topic).
Probably because that offends/annoys more people (300,000 over 150 times more) than warning about anorexia.
> (See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11513012 )
treatment for anorexia has got very much better. It used to kill about 20% of people with the diagnosis. More people get full recovery than used to, and more people live long term (either maintaining low weight, or relapsing & remitting) with anorexia.
But, also, deaths from anorexia are often coded as something else.
EG https://twitter.com/MaskedAMHP/status/910465836170846208
https://twitter.com/AgnesAyton/status/913722609610760192
etc.
It is interesting to note that several centuries ago, when far more of the population was underweight, being somewhat overweight or even obese was considered the ideal. Now that the average weight has increased significantly, it seems the "unrealistic body imagery" has gone in the other direction.
Do you believe that obese women don't know they're fat? What would telling them they're fat accomplish? None of this makes sense and it's just an excuse to be unkind.
Your comment is a perfect example of being hypersensitive about this issue. As someone who used to be obese, I find it quite horrifying that more isn't being done to protect children from harmful advertising. I'm lucky that I found my motivation to combat my weight problems in my late teens, many people aren't so fortunate.
I agree with you. But their argument was little more than an excuse to be rude.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm says that some 2.6 million Americans die each year. I think it's safe to estimate that more than the 36.5% obesity rate for the entire population applies to this group, implying that some 958 thousand people died while obese (ignoring cause). The top 10 causes of death include heart disease at #1, strokes, and diabetes; these factors alone total to 853 thousand deaths due to conditions largely caused by obesity. Furthermore, studies suggest that some fraction of the almost 600k cancer deaths are caused by obesity. I think you're at least a factor of 3 too low.
I will play devil's advocate for a moment, though, and say that among high school girls, anorexia is a much more frequent problem than death by heart attack. No, it doesn't lead to death, but that doesn't mean it's not a problem.
Women don't need to be told they're overweight and obese, all fat people know it, they think about it every day. Are you really so insensitive that you think they need to be told?
Showing extreme thinness is probably not healthy, but that is not what this is about.
All these photoshopped images show fit, but not anorexic bodies.
Encouraging healthy diets and exercise to achieve bodies like that is not a public health threat.
So you think the problem lies in obese people being unaware of how much they weigh?
If it's hard (socially) to approach something, because people are hyper-sensitive, then it's simply hard to help those people.
In a lot of Western culture it generally seems accepted to tell people they're too skinny, but not to tell people they're too fat—obviously I don't just mean walking down a street and saying this to a stranger, but in appropriate settings.
Although I still think telling a person that you consider he or she to be either overweight or skinny is quite meaningless. If they ask you for your opinion, it makes sense to answer, but I have a really hard time believing that an over/underweight person wouldn't have noticed this already while looking in the mirror.
It's a bit like telling a cigarette smoker that smoking is unhealthy and that they should quit. The chance that they didn't know this already is practically zero, which means you're not offering any help.
What I took away from the original poster is that, it seems more appropriate in many Western societies to make available help for those who are under-weight or who smoke. It also seems more appropriate to proactively try help others too.
AFAIK too, we don't have the equivalent with smoking of people promoting that being severely overweight is okay. As for the equivalent with being under-weight, from what I see, many years ago the focus was being on skinny for the sake of being skinny as it's attractive. These days it seems to be a focus on being fit (and healthy), which generally means not being skinny, but having a more toned body, or rather, simply not excess fat.
Actually, yes. Maybe not obese, but everyone compares themselves to the general population. In a society where everyone's carrying a couple of stone more than is really healthy, noone thinks of themselves as "fat", they think they're just average.