I still can't get over- even after all this time- how obsessed Americans are with food and fat and weight. Santa needs to go on a diet and so many parents don't think their kids are obese- when they really are.

The wonderful folks at Keep Santa Fat are doing a great job of addressing the first one (though I never thought I would see the day). The second one is much more disturbing, in part because people seem to be accepting the word of the 'fat police' at face value.

Not that I blame the parents. After all, the truth really isn't out there, not really.

The premise of this news article was that kids are obese, this is horrible, and parents need to know exactly how horrible it is. Parents are "in denial" about their children's weight issues. It's a press release about a study performed by the University of Michigan (Go Blue!) where parents of obese children were asked what they thought about their children's weight. Approximately one third said their child was "slightly overweight" and 13% said "very overweight." The rest of the parents (about half) said that their child's weight was fine.

The authors of the study bemoaned this finding, basically concluding that our world was going to hell, and all fat kids were going to die of heart disease before age 20. What was astounding was the lack of research by the journalist- no critical analysis was done of the study, either by the reporter or by interviewing other scientists. Okay, okay, it's an AP story, they work under tight deadlines. As a journalist, I get that. On the other hand, that's not an excuse for crap reporting. Most scientists love to talk about their research, and they also are (mostly) more than willing to put you in touch with their critics. This means that either the reporter didn't ask, that the scientist didn't give any critics, OR that most scientists are uncritical of such studies.

So-called legitimate scientists are willing to openly deny evolution (upon which all biology is based). Yet scientists aren't questioning this line of research. Granted, the question of evolution is much more central to science and medicine than obesity, but it's the premise that's important. You can question evolution but not obesity.

I had a different take than probably most people when I read the results of the study. I don't have PubMed at my parents' house, so I couldn't look up the actual findings, but even just reading what this person wrote, I thought:

"Maybe parents are accepting that their children come in a wide variety of healthy weights. Maybe they love their children for who they are, rather than what size clothes they wear. Maybe- get this- they don't give a shit."

Maybe this is a good thing. Maybe there's nothing to be in denial about.

Being "too fat" is not nearly as bad health-wise as being "too thin." It's not. Period. Also, as your self-consciousness about your weight increases, your risk of suicide also increases. Regardless of your weight. Suicide is a leading cause of death among young people. Not heart disease, not high cholesterol, not diabetes. So you're telling me that making kids feel bad about themselves is the way to decrease overall death rates. Right...

"Happy" and "healthy" have a large range of definitions. Why don't we keep it that way?