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Comment by QuantumChaos | Hacker News Reader

>Personally, I find Guyenet's reward hypothesis to be nothing more than a rebranding of typical fat-shaming ("just control what you eat, fatso; and why don't you exercise some more?")

So a particular claim about the state of the world, e.g. "obesity is caused by a psychological propensity to overconsume, which can be controlled", simply cannot be true, because it might cause some people to justify a dismissive and callous attitude towards people with obesity?

That is what the logic of your statement sounds like to me.

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More like, "it's a theory that has significant gaps yet is able to bypass deep scrutiny because it panders to the common societal belief that fat people are all fat because they can't control themselves."

Food reward is a tributary in the flood (and a tributary will flood some houses), but Guyenet makes it out as "all the waters", and my belief is that people accept it uncritically because it resonates with society's view of fat people as gluttonous sloths with no self control.

But you are still equating "people are all fat because they can't control themselves" with "fat people as gluttonous sloths with no self control".

I'm not saying that a desire to look down on and judge other people doesn't bias people's views on obesity. But the main reason people believe that "people are all fat because they can't control themselves" is that there are so many individual stories of people losing weight by following a diet.

Losing weight is easy. I would hazard to say every obese person has lost weight, often times far more than they actually weigh. Maintaining weight loss is a completely different game, and one that is nearly impossible to do unless you address underlying hormonal disorders. The more unhealthy the starting point, the harder that is to do. And the standard reply of "just eat less and move more" is so useless as to be laughable.

With regards to fat shaming and "gluttonous sloths", Stephan did say: "I do not consider it a "moral failure" to eat unhealthy food that is under your nose, socially accepted and in some cases even considered healthy. I think one of the main problems is simply a lack of accurate information."

http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/2011/05/food-reward-do...

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