Entries Tagged 'skience' ↓

Apparently, according to a survey by the Australian Heart Foundation. Kunoichi has a blog response here, and here’s my take. It was written as an email to send to friends who are not really into FA or sort of on the fence, so the framing is a little different to something I’d write to Advanced Fats.

The survey of 1200 people found one in four people who are considered obese using the body mass index (BMI) rate their health as being very good or excellent, and one in five believe their risk of getting heart disease is low to very low. The chief executive of the Heart Foundation, Lyn Roberts, said that despite years of public health messages, there was still an alarming lack of awareness about the cardiovascular risks of being overweight or obese.

Considering that the BMI is, frankly, a terrible indicator of one’s health, why is the Heart Foundation still using it? The man who invented it in the early 1800s, Belgian Adolphe Quetelet, never intended for it to be used as a measure of health, and a great many medical researchers agree that it is a poor way to measure overweight, obesity, and health risks, especially as epidemiological studies on the relationship between some health risks and BMI show only a correlation, not a causation, and that some health risks decrease with increasing BMI, such as osteoporosis and lung cancer. The same epidemiology continually shows that ‘overweight’ people have the highest life expectancy, ‘obese’ and ‘normal’ people the next best expectancy, ‘morbidly obese’ people rank third, and ‘underweight’ people, independent of illness which causes weight loss, have the worst life expectancy.

Thin people who are sedentary show just as much cardiovascular disease risk as fat people who are sedentary, and fat people who are active share the same reduced cardiac risk as slim people who are active. This was conclusively demonstrated by Drs Stephen Cooper and Glenn Gaesser in a comprehensive study, and has been shown further in yet more studies. How about we have a campaign encouraging healthy activity for all, not singling people out based on the flimsy BMI?

There is not one study that proves a causation between cardiovascular disease and larger amounts of adipose tissue on a body. There are, however, studies which show stress, stigma, discrimination, imposed low self-esteem, poor treatment by health professionals, low socio-economic status, repeated dieting and eating disorders are strongly correlated with and have some direct causation of obesity, all of which are known to contribute to poor cardiovascular health. There are well-known “obesity paradoxes” also, one of which is that obese people survive heart attacks far better than ‘normal weight’ people.

”As our waistlines expand, it appears that our perception of what is a healthy weight has also expanded, so many people who are overweight or obese do not actually see themselves in this way,” Dr Roberts said.

No, it’s that the BMI is rubbish and people know it. Have a look at Kate Harding’s BMI Project sometime and you can see photographs of what the various BMI categories actually look like. The vast majority of the ‘obese’ population are BMI 30-35, which, as photographs show, makes one look chubby at best. The headless fatties, unflatteringly photographed and used to illustrate obesity scare stories in the news, are of extremely fat people who represent about three percent of the Australian population. Surveys such as this one by the Heart Foundation also make no exception for people who are muscular and have solid frames. There’s no section after height and weight for people to write in their body composition and if they’re an athlete or not. A quick look at NRL player stats finds that Joel Clinton has a BMI of 29.1, Nathan Hindmarsh is BMI 28.3, and Wendell Sailor is obviously cause for concern at BMI 31, and most other players are Officially Overweight or Obese. One could claim that such people are not representative of everyone else with a BMI of more than 25, but I can’t seem to find any surveys of this kind which measure body composition and actual fitness levels as opposed to assuming that someone with a BMI of 31 is a couch potato. Assuming isn’t very scientific but it does get you good publicity! …And plenty of grant money, if I might be so cynical.

One in six who had a BMI of 30 or more believed their weight met health guidelines, compared to one in nine last year. The proportion of overweight people (those with a BMI between 25 and 29) who thought they were in the healthy range also increased,, from 51 to 57 per cent in 12 months.

Surely this should be taken as a measure of success, not despair. While “almost half of obese Australians had made no changes to their behaviour to reduce their risk of heart disease” this implies that the other half have, and have thus seen real measures of their health improve, such as decreased cholesterol and glucose levels, better mental health and exercise capacity. They may have lost a little weight (just 1%-5% of bodyweight lost is pushed by health authorities as improving health) but still remain in the ‘obese’ or ‘overweight’ BMI category, or remained the same weight but had body composition change to more muscle, less fat, or even not at all and just improved various actual health measures. There’s also some tricky wording here: believing one is in the official healthy weight ranges when you’re not and believing you’re healthy when you’re not are in fact different things.

The survey, which was jointly funded by the life insurance company Zurich,

Well, of course. Who better to fund a study proving fat people are walking time bombs, ignorant that they are about to die any moment now, than a company which has a vested interest in denying overweight and obese people insurance based on tenuous claims.

…found one in four obese people smoked, with most smoking daily, a proportion 70 per cent higher than people of ideal weight range.

Could it possibly be that they’re that desperate to lose weight that they’ll smoke to keep appetite down? Surveys have shown that young women would rather be blinded or lose two limbs than become fat. Hey, at least chemotherapy’s good for weight loss!

The tendency to judge ourselves against other people, rather than scientifically based weight guidelines, was ”normalising” obesity, said the Heart Foundation, which commissioned the survey.”

Oh yes, obesity is so normalised! Fat people can walk down the street and not have people sneer at them, small children point and stare, groups of teenagers snicker and throw things; fat kids can go to the beach and wear swimmers without their photographs being taken and exploited for anti-obesity articles; plus-size fashions are available at every designer boutique; Kyle Sandilands is telling Magda Szubanski to put those kilos right back on so she’ll be hot again; of course! Apparently Dr Roberts is living in a special magical fantasy world where fat people are not treated like a mysterious brown smear on the bottom of one’s shoe, and the BMI is a scientific measure. (Let’s remember high school maths: human bodies are three dimensional, and volume increases by the cube, not the square. BMI measured by the square: fail number one.)

What, exactly, is wrong with allowing fat people a little self-esteem? Psychiatrists and dieticians who work in the eating disorder wards know that good self-esteem and mental health is the foundation of good health. When Dr Roberts comes along and gets in a flap that even though you have taken to eating better and exercising you’re still a fatty and therefore all your positive health gains amount to nowt, and of course you must be completely ignorant of any of the anti-obesity messages which saturate our society, then it’s enough to make one feel like giving up. Perhaps that’s what they want. There are a lot of people whose entire careers depend on the moral panic that is obesity, and frankly it seems like some of these people get a sick little thrill about how they’re paid to bully fat people in public.

(Sorry.)

So, if having fat friends supposedly makes you fat, and thin friends makes you thin, and fat people are directed to make thin friends so they can catch Teh Thin and thin people are to avoid having fat friends so they won’t catch Teh Fat … how exactly is that supposed to work again?

Fatty Boombah: Hi, Slim Jim! Can I be your friend so I will become socially acceptable?
Slim Jim: No way! Oh my god, get away from me! The adiposity, the adiposity!
La di Da: My head a splode.

Yo-yo effect in dieters who get counseling, too reports the New York Times.

Counseling-based weight-loss programs — those led by dietitians, nurses or doctors — produced an average weight loss of 6 percent of initial body weight, or about 11 pounds, at the end of one year. By the end of three years, participants had regained about half of that weight, and at the end of five years they had typically regained all of it.

Still, the lead author, Dr. Michael L. Dansinger, a physician with Tufts-New England Medical Center in Boston, said: “When it comes to long-term weight loss, the health care system wants an A-plus grade, but based on this report, I’d give it a C minus. Primary care doctors should take a more active role in seeing patients more regularly for lifestyle management.”

So … supervised and monitored weight loss programs don’t work either, so doctors should see patients more often to tell them to eat less and exercise more, again. That’s what I’m getting here. “It doesn’t work! Let’s do it more!” (Because we all know what “lifestyle management” really means.)

How bloody thickheaded do you have to be?

Problem: Childhood and adult anti-obesity programs don’t work.
Solution: Let’s have more, just in case we weren’t sure the first 292612 times around!

Also, the moon landing was faked and if you say “Candyman” five times while looking in the mirror you will instantly lose 3lbs, provided you crap yourself in fright.

Whew, work’s finally slowed down enough for me to do something else! (And a big PHHHTHTHTHHTHBBT! to those people and diet books foisted upon me as a young ‘un that said fat people never ever get good jobs so lose weight now, fatty.)

Right. There’s an as-ever fantabulous post over at Shapely Prose on some of the more recent WTF? moments from the media on fat and diets.  The willingness of supposedly fully-grown, educated adults to engage in magical thinking and related ways never ceases to amaze.

Here’s another scientifical snacky-cake:

Heavy moms who shed pounds still have big babies.

“However, overweight women who lost weight before their second pregnancy did not eliminate their increased odds of having an oversized newborn. This, the study authors speculate, could mean that a woman’s excess pounds have a lasting effect on subsequent pregnancies, even after she’s slimmed down.”

Gee … do you think it could have anything to do with body size having a genetic component? If you’re naturally a large woman and you manage to lose some weight for a while, it doesn’t actually change your genes and therefore your chances of having a big or small baby. Unless you have doctors who live in magical fairy land, or something. I especially like that last bit. Your excess pounds could haunt you even after you’ve become slim! Zombie fat: you can never be rid of it even if you cut its head off.

As a side note, if you’re fat and pregnant or thinking about it, head on over to the wonderful Plus-size Pregnancy Website. Hell, even if you’re not planning on any kids, it’s a very informative read anyway, and has information useful for all fat people, such as how to get an accurate blood pressure reading. (It’s more than just cuff size.)

And as a special bonus, now not only do we have cats and dogs and horses and birds getting in on the obesity crisis action,  now it’s the turn of inanimate objects. Yes, the vehicle world is suffering from fat cars! Read all about it: Carmakers face obesity challenge. At first I thought it might be about car makers actually thinking about installing seat belts rated to more than 200lbs, but no. “Market forces have sparked an obesity epidemic in the car industry.”

Sandy Szwarc does it again: A post on new “guidelines” for doctors to “treat” and “manage” fat kids.

It’s a recommendation from a USA committee on fat kids which is made up of (are we surprised?) interest groups with big financial stakes in diet pharmaceuticals, weight loss surgery, lab test supplies, and so on.

The most base idiocy in this is that what makes a kid fat is not actual adipose tissue, but jsut that they fall into the 85th percentile and above on the pediatric growth charts. So that’s a segment of the juvenile population that will be considered fat no matter what. I had a friend with a 4 year old daughter who was the size of the average 6 year old. Fairly skinny, too. But she fell in about the 97th percentile on those growth charts, so was counted as obese. With the proposed guidelines, she’d be faced with all kinds of micromanaging that, as Szwarc points out, you’d normally see only in elderly cardiac patients or the chronically ill, not healthy children. Then there’s all the recommendations on how much time the child is “allowed” to spend watching TV and how many meals the family should eat together.

These people are not living on planet Earth. They are well-paid people isolated from the everyday living reality of the great majority of the population, and especially from working-class families. Never mind that the recommendations are not even founded on science, I’d just like to see them try to deal with all that as a single-income or single parent minimum-wage family who have to struggle to put food on the table at all and spend quality time with their children let alone have their lives micromanaged on the order of sanctimonious fuckwits who don’t actually care about children, just their own reputations, careers and stockholders.

Hey, and when the kids fail to become slim, you can just blame anyone else but yourself and your idiotic policies. Must be nice to live in such a bubble of self-satisfied unreality.

I’ve had a doctor try to sell me weight loss surgery. He was one of those “Doctor always knows best no matter what” god-complex types, so I just said “Whatever” and left as fast as I could. It wasn’t gastric bypass, but the laparascopic banding (LAP©®™ band or whatever it is), which is admittedly less intrusive and destructive than gastric bypass, but it’s still surgically-enforced starvation with plenty of its own unpleasant side effects. And yet again based on the faulty premise that fat people just can’t stop eating.

Around 80-85% of this surgery is performed on women, usually young women who are actually fairly healthy. The men who have this surgery are much, much fatter than the women. It’s a feminist issue because this is mutilation of women, and we all know how much society loves that. SueW has a post on a recent “advertorial” program shown on US television, promoting gastric bypass surgery by glossing over the risks and hugely over-representing the potential risks of being fat.

Sandy Szwarc has an excellent and comprehensive post on why bariatric/obesity surgery is a really, really bad idea. And in yet another great post, she explains:

“…a woman at the very fattest 0.2% of women has a 99.9 percent chance of living another year.

So, by having bariatric surgery a woman increases her risk of dying 45-fold.”

The facts are pretty plain. Women have been so convinced by everything around them that their life will be better even if they are literally dying of malnutrition because they will be thin. Now there’s some fine woman hating right there. Every doctor who performs and promotes this surgery is guilty of misogyny and fat hatred. Everyone who makes money out of it. They know the surgery is dangerous and will not improve health. They lie to women, denying them agency. They convince them they deserve and need it. They mutilate healthy organs. They dump them when the side effects kick in or claim it’s their own fault. Sounds like rape and assault to me.

Another disturbing similarity, as discussed in Sandy’s posts, is that those bariatric surgery victims who speak up about the devastating side effects and try to ask for support are often threatened and ostracised.

I hope more feminists will recognise this and fight it.

Yes, as Twisty Faster says, women often have to do things that are varying levels of anti-feminist in order to survive like wear high heels and makeup to get a job to feed your kids, or marry someone they don’t want to so they’re not outcasts, you can think of a million more examples. I can understand perfectly why a fat person would be desperate to get this surgery: just to get some damn respect. But really, it’s nothing to do with actual survival, seeing as how you tend to die from it or have a greatly reduced quality of life in a way that other survival strategies rarely match. It’s wanton destruction.

Please stop.

Damn them all to hell. And the diet pushers. I was going to write about some of the weight loss crap I saw on the news sites today, but it was all so stupid. Every single one of them is premised on the idea that fat people just can’t control their appetites and/or are too idiotic or recalcitrant to get physical activity and just do what they’re told.

Incredibly, mind-bogglingly insane.

So read Sandy Szwarc’s latest post on the massive marketing campaign for Alli, the OTC version of Orlistat. It’s more like a misinformation campaign. It’s more like a campaign for an anti-wrinkle cream, because it has about the same efficacy.

The diet and weight loss industry and, it seems, most health professionals are heavily invested in the magical thinking that seems to be the source of the idea that long-term weight loss is possible for anyone. Despite mounds of evidence to the contrary, they continue to promote weight loss as the “solution” to “obesity”: a case of True-believer syndrome.

The latest weight-loss “breakthrough” in the news is Biologically tailored diets to beat obesity. Essentially, you should have your insulin checked and eat low-carb (low cal of course) if you have insulin sensitivity, otherwise stick with the low-fat kind of diet. Well, no kidding that people who have insulin/blood glucose problems may well have better health if they avoid lots of carbohydrates. I could have told you that.

But here’s the actual results from the study:

For those with insulin concentration at 30 minutes above the median (57.5 microIU/mL; n = 28), the low-glycemic load diet produced a greater decrease in weight (-5.8 vs. -1.2 kg; P = .004) and body fat percentage (-2.6% vs -0.9%; P = .03) than the low-fat diet at 18 months.

The young adults in this study lost a whopping 5.8kg (12lbs) in 18 months. Let’s come back in another 18 months and then at 5 years and see what’s happened.

The main point I want to make here is that this is what counts as “success” when you look up such medical studies. 1lb – 10lbs over 6 – 18 months. This is at distinct odds with what is expected of the fat person who is instructed to lose weight by their doctor, or joins one of the commercial diet scams (because they all are). “You’re 60lbs too heavy! I want you to lose at least 35lbs.” Beleaguered fat person dutifully and sincerely and with all the willpower in the world begins on recommended diet plan, oops, lifestyle change, say, for the sake of argument, one “tailored” for them as in the above study.

Should take 4.5 years to lose that 35lbs. But if that fat person went back to the doctor after one year and said “I’ve only lost 9lbs.” you can be pretty sure that there’d be disappointment all ’round: Most conservative weight loss programs are designed around the idea that you should lose 1/2lb to 1lb per week – 26 to 52lbs a year. This goes against all scientific evidence, and that’s not even getting into the sustainability of such.

The diet industry creates big fat unrealistic expectations about what kind of weight loss is possible and desirable in short periods of time. And most health professionals aren’t much better – they often seem willfully ignorant of medical studies that show large amounts of weight loss are rarely possible and sustainable.

Fat people are led down an impossible path to an alleged solution to their “problem” and then blamed for not having enough willpower, intelligence, time, money, nous, whatever – when they “fail”.

There’s another side to these diet studies too. I unfortunately couldn’t find any appropriate graphs, damn my university for not having full-text to medical journals, but often there’s a weight loss and re-gain within the timeframe. So a participant may have lost 20lbs in the first 6 months but then gained back 15. (And still gaining when they ended the study.)

You’ll never hear about that in the news, though.