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Fatsplaining, Children, and Racism
It’s not like we haven’t been talking about obesity in this country for years. Issues of weight gain were discussed in the early 20th century:
In the mid-1970s the obesity rate for the United States was about 14%. 1994 is the first year with CDC data for all states and shows all states at obesity rates of 19% or lower. By 1997, three states were in the 20-24% range: Indiana, Kentucky, and Missouri. In 2001, Missouri became the first state to have an obesity rate between 25-29%. By 2005, 14 states were in the 25-29% range while three states breached the 30% and higher rate (Louisiana, Missouri, and West Virginia). By 2010, no state reported an obesity rate under 19%.
Unfortunately, we have made little progress in improving these numbers for adults. And some people have decided rather than find solutions, they’d rather stigmatize the larger population with the latest popular attack from the University of Chicago’s school of public health:
‘Though lifestyle factors such as nutrition and exercise are important, it is essential to note the historical racism and injustices within our current food environment,’ the brief said. ‘As presented by Soul Fire Farm, the U.S. food system is built on stolen land using stolen labor from Black and Latinx indigenous people. Not only has this created a large-scale food apartheid and trauma for people indigenous to this land, it has caused a disconnection of indigenous people from their cultural practices and identities.’
And there’s this report:
Last week, the Institute for Bioethics & Health Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston hosted a lecture on ‘Fatphobia as Misogynoir: Gender, Race, and Weight Stigma,’ where University of California, Irvine associate professor Sabrina Strings addressed ‘fat stigma’ and the ‘centrality of slavery and race science in its perpetuation throughout the western world.’
Of course. It’s really about racism.
The worst part of this obsession on obesity is that the microscope is now focused on children. I guess we’ve given up on trying to convince the adults that there are good reasons for their children to maintain a healthy lifestyle and that moderation in weight maintenance is important; we wouldn’t want to damage their self-esteem. Yet there are serious reasons to be concerned about our youth:
More than half of young American adults are either overweight or obese, according to new Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine research. In a study published last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), a team analyzed a nationally representative sample of 8,015 nonpregnant people ages 18 to 25 from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.
The survey has been conducted multiple times over the past 40 years.
So, what are the solutions?—
One of the best approaches to reduce childhood obesity is to improve eating and exercise habits of the entire family and ensure families have access to healthy, unprocessed food. From a medical standpoint, the normalizing of obesity must end to prevent the overwhelming amount of chronic illness that is sure to ensue.
Works for me. Only it’s clear that most people are unable or unwilling to make these changes to achieve these goals. Worse yet, diseases such as type 2 diabetes, hypertension, hyperlipidemia, obstructive sleep apnea, fatty liver disease, and bone and joint dysfunction are appearing not just in adults, but in children, too.
But do not fear. The experts are not giving up on our kids. Instead, they’ve decided that drugs and surgery are the answers.
* * * *
Several factors have been identified which illustrate the complexity of the problem of obesity in children: the lack of physical activity; pre-occupation with computers; the urban v. rural lifestyle; poor education on healthy foods; desire to only eat foods that “taste good;” high sugar diets; and history with overweight family members.
But I also suspect that the problems go even deeper than those I’ve listed here. They have a great deal to do with factors like discipline, responsibility, discretion, self-gratification, habits, commitment, and other attributes that determine the ways we choose to live our lives. And especially if parents lack those values, the children are unlikely to learn them anywhere else. Perhaps most debilitating are the fear and anxiety that both adults and children experience. They use food to comfort themselves.
* * * *
There is also the question of whether the government should be involved in mitigating the “epidemic” of obesity. Is it any of their business? Isn’t this a role better suited for the private sector? We could argue that the private sector has figured out that pills, diets, and the latest exercise rage will be its focus, rather than making an in-depth cultural change; they know their potential customers want a quick and easy fix.
But what role should the government have, if any, in dealing with the issue of obesity in children?
And should we simply throw in the towel when we should be helping our kids regarding obesity?
Published in Culture
Great insightful comment, Annefy. It just shows how complicated the issue is, and how one size doesn’t fit all. I’m so sorry for your lack of taste buds. But I guess we all have our difficulties. Thanks for weighing in.
Pun intended?
Carbs down, calories under 1200 a day, and lots of micronutrients. I’d be healthier if I walked more, but I’m having trouble getting back into the habit after my back fracture healed. Everything else is fine; I’m as healthy as a very old, quiet horse.
Asking General Mills to help create the “food pyramid” didn’t help.
No! But it would have been a good one!
Sounds pretty darn good to me!
When the oil embargo hit the Carter administration gave Archer Daniels Midland lots of money to build plants to make corn ethanol, which they did. Before the plants could come online the crisis ended. ADM converted the plants to making high fructose corn syrup. Then they got some of their pet Congresscritters to pass import tariffs on Brazilian cane sugar and effectively destroy Louisiana’s sugar beet industry to make the HFCS cost competitive. A few decades later, we’ve all got Type 2 diabetes and there’s an obesity epidemic. Correlation or causation?
There are a number of articles on this, but high fructose corn syrup appears to have a different metabolic pathway.
This is a good article.
A sweet problem: Princeton researchers find that high-fructose …princeton.edu› news › 2010 › 03 › 22 › sweet-problem-princeton-researchers-find-high-fructose-corn-syrup-prompts
…a diet rich in high-fructose corn syrup showed characteristic signs of a dangerous condition known in humans as the metabolic syndrome, including abnormal weight gain, significant increases in circulating triglycerides and augmented fat deposition, especially visceral fat around the belly. Male rats in particular ballooned in size: Animals with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained 48 percent more weight than those eating a normal diet.
AND
The role of high-fructose corn syrup in metabolic syndrome and hypertension
Abstract
Obesity and related diseases are an important and growing health concern in the United States and around the world. Soft drinks and other sugar-sweetened beverages are now the primary sources of added sugars in Americans’ diets. The metabolic syndrome is a cluster of common pathologies, including abdominal obesity linked to an excess of visceral fat, fatty liver, insulin resistance, hyperinsulinemia, dyslipidemia, and hypertension. Trends in all of these alterations are related to the consumption of dietary fructose and the introduction of high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) as a sweetener in soft drinks and other foods. Experimental and clinical evidence suggests a progressive association between HFCS consumption, obesity, and the other injury processes. However, experimental HFCS consumption seems to produce some of the changes associated with metabolic syndrome even without increasing the body weight. Metabolic damage associated with HFCS probably is not limited to obesity-pathway mechanisms.
Ah yes, the multitude of ways we can poison our systems. Sigh.
Thank you. You’re fast.
More proof that coffee is the perfect food, in my humble and caffeinated opinion.
Actually, we were thinking along the same lines. I hadn’t seen your comment yet. But they do match up, don’t they? :)
My wise wife got us all in the habit of avoiding foods with HFCS. We read labels carefully.
Fortunately my kids didn’t get the asthma anywhere near as bad as I had it. Before the blessed ascent of rescue inhalers and Advair I had to carry an adrenaline injection kit. Imagine being in a carload of longhair hippie freaks that gets pulled over by a state trooper, and having to explain that. Happened to me more than once in college in the early 70s.
Brian is in great shape and works to keep it that way, biking to work and back, in spite of having his bike stolen more than once; he works at the Starbucks plant in Seattle, which is not in a bad part of town, but still. Valerie got Graves’ Disease in her senior year of high school and her weight ballooned. She has fought the medication fight all these years and is making good progress. She’s certainly healthy otherwise; she does cross-fit three times a week, where the gym regulars call her She-Hulk. I’m sure it’s an affectionate nickname; since she can bench press a Jeep, you would have to be pretty dumb to get her mad at you.
Do some people live in a fantasy world where a western hemisphere that had never been colonized by Europeans would mean that there would be no obesity? Or is this just the type of statement the University of Chicago feels must be put into every report, regardless of the topic? “OK, we’re writing a report on whether concrete or blacktop is the most cost-effective road building material. Somebody figure out how to work in a paragraph denouncing white people or capitalism or the patriarchy or something.”
EXACTLY RIGHT!
When we (well, at least some of us) were young, there were very few opportunities, or the financial ability to, eat out. I remember a huge family event was once a month or so going shopping in the mid-size town 15 miles from home and stopping at the legendary hot dog place for a chili dog and a soft drink. A restaurant dinner was rare because there just weren’t that many.
In the last 40-50 years, fast food franchises, “family” restaurants, pizza places, and carry-outs have sprung up on every corner of every intersection in every town, village, and highway interchange. No one needs to cook healthy food and sit at the kitchen table any more. Jut buy some burgers and fries!
I disagree. This is often the business of governments and communities. It’s how we maintain a decent society.
I do like the pun about how “everyone else weighs risks,” in a post about obesity. Good one!
I don’t think that severe controls on food and drink are a good way to solve this problem. There might be better ways that would involve government. Maybe heavier taxes on fattening foods? This works, somewhat, with alcohol and tobacco.
Welcome to national healthcare.
This is just too funny! Literally LOL that I just woke the dog.
I love this but I’m afraid if I try it I’ll end up laughing and spraying my wine all over the place.
The insertion of CRT-adjacent ideas into the obesity discussion removes agency from individuals. When you couple it with fat-acceptance, and introduce all the intersectional palaver about fatphobia and top-down societal enforcement of skinny-normative body images, you have a vague miasma of Social Justice Thinking that uses the croupier’s rake to move a certain portion of obese people into the Victim category, where they are conferred certain moral advantages. But outside of a few shouty people on TikTok, no one believes any of it.
Junk food and junk science are probably to blame. Everything has sugar, crap food is tasty, government-endorsed pyramids encourage carb-loading, marketing fads capitalize on the demonization of “fat” and push more junk (the label says 64g of carbs but only 2g of fat, ergo, I will not get fat), and at a certain point people just sigh and resign themselves to a spare tire as a consequence, or perhaps a reward, for living.
“I gained 53 pounds and I’m SUPER PUMPED”
Essential? Note?
Essential to what?
And instead of jumping to conclusions, how about making an argument and drawing the causal connections more explicitly, looking at the evidence and discerning which causal effects are supported by the evidence, and which are better explained differently?
This comment is a month old, The Reticulator. I went back and tried to get a context for it—I quoted someone else. I don’t think I agreed with it.
I put “[quoting]” in brackets in the hope that it would make clear those words weren’t yours.
I do have some notifications in my notification list that are more than a month old. I’ve been deleting some of them in the realization that I’ll never get to them, but I thought that one of the great things about the internet is that we can think a while before responding to something. A month is not too long to think before replying. (That is not what happened in this case, though.)
You haven’t been inside my brain lately. . . ;-)