Laura pointed out this little, um, gem of an article to everyone.

Business Week Debate Room- Anorexia: A Media-borne Illness?

One person said yes, one person said no. The sheer lack of understanding of each respondant was remarkable. And I don't know that either had a shred of background in psychology, neuroscience, or eating disorders.

Said the person who disagreed that anorexia was a media-borne illness:

Enough of this nonsensical blame game. It’s time to let personal responsibility back into the picture.

And those people with cystic fibrosis just need to take personal responsibility for their lung functioning. And people with diabetes just let their pancreas get out of control. Don't even start for the people with Down's Syndrome. They just haven't taken responsibility for their extra chromosome 21.

Ugh.

There have been many good (and horrific) responses to this post, including one from me, but the best is from Julie O'Toole from the Kartini Clinic.

The first medical text description of anorexia nervosa was in 1689 by Richard Morton, and it--like other human illnesses--existed before it was officially described.

Rather than worry about the effects of the media's absurd and constant portrayal of thin body size on the 1% of women (and perhaps about 0.1% men) who have anorexia nervosa. Let's worry about the effects of it on everyone else, especially children and adolescents who are just now forming their own self-image.

The current obsession with "thin" has done nothing to reduce obesity, but it has made scores of people feel bad about their own inability to attain these unrealistic (and often completely unhealthy) weights.

Why are we so concerned about what everyone looks like and so unconcerned about what everyone acts like?

Raising a toast (of milkshakes!) to some good common sense. Rock on, Dr. O'Toole.

I'm interrupted my (scanty) series of posts on athletics, exercise, and eating disorders to bring you the worst article about anorexia I think I might have ever seen.

How to talk to your anorexic daughters: they may have a correctible health imbalance

• Have anorexia? Try a parasite purge to flatten your tummy!
• Encourage weight loss through excessive exercise rather than dieting.
• Your daughter is either afraid of becoming overweight like you, she's learning "tricks" from YOUR eating disorder, or you're feeding her too much.
• Just let her be thin- that's all she really wants, anyway. As long as the eating disorder is "only moderate" it's better than eating all of that "unhealthy food".
  

(Because we all know that people with anorexia are young women from wealthy families- who likely have blond hair, blue eyes, and perfect skin)

Special thanks to Libby for the link!

Thindustry triumphs again. This time in quite possibly one of the most bizarre items of clothing I have ever seen.

The Nintendo Wii-Fit is (apparently) all the rage right now. I've see the ads on the tops of the taxis that drive by in my city. I've heard a bit of the hype in passing. Otherwise? I couldn't be bothered.

Then again, I grew up on Atari and Frogger, so go figure.*

The idea of Wii-Fit is clever and interesting, and it's not something I would flat-out refuse to consider buying. Until I read this: the machine measures your BMI. And then tells you whether or not you are fat.

I guess that throws the whole fit-and-or-fat debate right out the window, huh?

You tell the little Wii-fit machine your age** and your height, and the platform you exercise on weighs you, spitting out your BMI. A number, of course, is not enough. You see, to the people at Nintendo, BMI isn't arbitrary enough. No. The Wii-fit has to then tell you whether your are "underweight," "normal," or "fat."

That's right. Not "overweight." Not "obese." Fat.

Now I am all for making fat a less loaded term. It's an adjective, that means the opposite of "thin." But that's not how most people use that word anymore, nor is BMI a rock-solid indicator for the amount of fat you have. And the Wii-fit measures your BMI each time you play. A person's weight can fluctuate up to five pounds each day. So a machine that tells you fat/normal/fat/normal/normal/normal/fat/fat is just a super-quick way to become utterly paranoid about your weight. As if we weren't before.

With any sort of fitness equipment, there's a bit of a caveat emptor. But the Wii-fit is also marketed at children, specifically those children who are taking our country to hell (hell, I tell you!) because they have velcroed their fat asses to the sofa to do nothing more than stuff potato chips in their faces and suck down gallons of Coke. Because we all know that's just what kids do these days.

Never mind that more children than ever are involved in athletics. But that's beside the point.

The issue was raised when a man's healthy, active, fit ten year old daughter (weighing 84 pounds) was told she was fat after playing Wii Fit. Thankfully, for all of the other families out there, he cried foul, bringing the issue to media attention.

BMI for kids is random and arbitrary at best. Tam Fry, of the National Obesity Forum in the UK, had this to say about the Wii Fit:

"I'm absolutely aghast that children are being told they are fat," he said. "BMI is far from perfect but with children it simply should not be used. A child's BMI can change every month and it is perfectly possible for a child to be stocky, yet still very fit.

"I would be very concerned if children were using this game and I believe it should carry a warning for parents."

Wii-fit doesn't need to measure your BMI to work properly. I'm no super-geek (at least not in the tech sense), but I can't see why the machine would need to know your BMI and then rate you accordingly in order to work. Rather than a warning, parents should be allowed to disable the feature. I don't think this will give anyone an eating disorder. But it can be one more step on the way to anorexia or bulimia. And I do see MUCH potential for it to be abused by a young person with an eating disorder.

So unless Nintendo starts sending the Wii-Fit to medical school (and it can start writing refills for some of my meds, which would be mighty convenient), it shouldn't tell me whether I'm fit or fat. That's just Wii-diculous.

*Yes, this dates me. Horribly. But, damn- wasn't Frogger great?
**Isn't that silly thing supposed to know you aren't supposed to ask a lady her age? Methinks Nintendo doth protest too much...

I could NOT make this stuff up, people. Just couldn't.

So not only is there an obesity epidemic among people, there's also one in dogs.

::cue scary music::

What does a good pet parent do when Fido gets fat? Why gives him a diet pill!

Slentrol was approved by the FDA last year for the treatment of "clinically obese" dogs- NOT for those who are just "overweight." Estimates are that 5% of America's 65 million dogs are obese.

Which leads me to this question: how do you measure canine obesity? Is there a DMI- a Doggy Mass Index? Waist* to hip ratios? Are we going to see photos of headless fat doggies lumbering around town stuffing their faces with kibble?

Slentrol also sponsors the National Canine Weight Check month, which happens every February. On that website, they have a BARC- Body Assessment Rating for Canines. Oh you're too clever. Somebody please stop me from laughing. You can even download little badges for your blog.

I'm technically a freelance science/medical writer. I do lots of other things, but if I need to make money, I ask people very kindly if they will let me write something for them, and then give me money in exchange for my words.

Nice system, really.

What I'm learning here at school is that there is not only an art to writing about science, but also an art to creating the stories you want to write. I didn't realize what a strange, bizarre world I was about to enter.

Any time you write a story, there's going to be spin. Sometimes, writers have a specific idea of what's happening and it can show. The infamous epidemiology maxim: you tend to find what you're looking for. Looking for stories on how bad overweight is? You'll find them.

The problem comes when you're looking for stories on how essentially inconsequential overweight is.

Those don't really exist.

The horrors of obesity are promulgated far and wide- so far and so wide, in fact, that hardly anyone seeks to question them any more.

Sandy at Junkfood Science posted two recent updates on the Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) Dietary Modification Trial, the latest results of which were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. I read the science and health news section of most major publications on a very regular basis, yet I hadn't heard anything about the study.

So I searched Google News. I plugged in "Women's Health Initiative Dietary Modification Trial" and hit Enter. Nineteen results popped up. All of them- all, every last one- said that a low fat diet could reduce the risk of ovarian cancer.

Of course- the results of any study having anything to do with food/weight, has to have a conclusion that the intervention or whatever it is, helps people lose weight. Therefore, that must be the main point of this study. The actual objectives of the study are quite different:

To report data on body weight in a long-term, low-fat diet trial for which the primary end points were breast and colorectal cancer and to examine the relationships between weight changes and changes in dietary components.

However, after reading the results of the trial and then going back and reviewing the abstract, I realized that the scientists themselves were putting spin on this issue.

The results section- which consists of megalith tables, many over a page in length- posted many results. Some of them weren't all that surprising- the women placed on the low fat diet consumed slightly less calories from fat, more whole grains and more non whole grain carbohydrates. However, the interesting results were the issues of weight.

BOTH women who were told to follow and low-fat diet (the intervention group) and those who were told to follow their normal eating routines (the control group) lost weight during the study. They intervention group lost approximately 1.5 pounds, and the control group lost approximately 0.5 pounds. The difference, when you look at a massive group of 44,000 women, was statistically significant. However, is it meaningfully significant? Does one measly pound difference warrant all of this effort, time, and money (not to mention blood, sweat and tears)? I mean, if you told the control group to drink an extra glass of water on the morning they were weighed, there would have been no difference at all.

The researchers concluded the following:

Weights in the intervention group were lower than those of the control group, who followed their usual eating pattern during the follow-up period, suggesting that a low-fat dietary pattern may help attenuate the tendency for weight gain commonly observed in postmenopausal women.

According to the TV show America's Next Top Model, a size 8 is now "plus sized."

So much for that theory of vanity sizing, huh?

This is one of the most messed up things about our society's views on size and shape. Theoretically, we're fatter than ever. And our models are thinner.

Sarah Hartshorne, the contestant on ANTM, stands 5'10" and weighs in at 150 lbs, for a BMI of 21.5. Though she's quite a bit taller than me, she's roughly my size. This means that I'm a plus-sized model.

Um, hello.

What is a model? You can make model airplanes, or design a computer model to simulate things like global warming. These things are paradigms, the penultimate version of what we're supposed to be and do.
Yet if you look at TV, we can't be anything remotely resembling one of the models. The obvious solution is: get realistic models. You know, men and women that look like, um, us.

But that would make all of these multi-billion dollar corporations lose money. It's much more profitable to sell us an endless like of crap to make us feel just a little bit more like one of the models.

Here's what I don't get. Most of the women I talk to agree that models have very unrealistic body sizes and shapes. They would like to see more normal looking women showing off the clothes that they're going to be wearing. Which is all well and good, except for the small, tiny, itsy-bitsy detail that models are still as thin as ever.

I wish a designer would be willing to take a chance on designing for the any-woman so that she could feel like wonder-woman. All women deserve to feel beautiful. It's not a privilege or a payoff for starving yourself half to death. Here's the sick part: I was at 75% ideal body weight and people were asking me for weight loss tips. My heart was failing and people wanted to know how I did it.

Ludicrous.

Some part of me feels as if I should be grateful that ANTM has a plus-sized model.

Wait a minute, though. That's what they should be doing. If women come in all shapes and sizes, then shouldn't models? Why should I feel grateful? Especially when she's probably a token effort (like the obligatory minority or disabled contestant at a beauty pageant).

She's a beautiful girl, and I hope she wins. Not just because she's plus sized or would be sending a strong message to young girls (though that doesn't hurt). But also because she's a good model.

Don't ever step in the way of a senior and his/her doughnut. Just don't. 'Cuz it could get ugly.

Ug-leeee.

The owners of a senior center outside New York City found this out the hard way. The government of Putnam County, NY, decided that too many doughnuts were being donated and then consumed at their senior center. Concerned about the health and well-being of their residents and visitors, they banned all pastries from the center.

"Officials were concerned that the county was setting a bad nutritional precedent by providing mounds of doughnuts and other sweets to seniors," says the Associated Press article.

Some residents didn't really care, some approved of it, while yet others took matters into their own hands.

They are now protesting outside the front doors of the facility with placards and sandwich boards.*

One reads, "They're carbs, not contraband."

Another: "We're old enough to choose."

Damn straight.

There was, of course, a little more to the issue than just the calories/carbs/fat issue that is immediately associated with a trip to Dunkin'. Reports said that as many as 16 cases of donuts were being delivered to the center each day, and that some had been sitting in car trunks overnight, or showed up with a sprinkling of mold.

The easy, obvious solution would be to limit the number of doughnut donations, and once the limit had been reached, to go visit another community group in need of free pastries. As for the mold issue, maybe you could just have potential donors eat a little of their donation before they leave. I guarantee that the number of moldy sweets will plummet.

****************************************

I was reading the Baltimore City Paper the other day, and found this cartoon. It's not the easiest to read, but it's so worth your time. And so relevant to this article.

posted under activism, news, ridiculousness | 4 Comments

There is a new security threat to our country: obesity.

(If nothing else, the sheer creativity of the fat-o-phobes is impressive. I have to hand it to them on many levels. They never stop thinking.)

Really. I shit you not. In a recent news article covering a governor's conference, former Republican governor of Arkansas Mike Huckabee said that obesity was America's most pressing problem, to the point that it was an issue of national security.

"Today we hear a lot about the war on terror, how we need to fight it," said Huckabee, who lost 110 pounds several years ago when he was governor of Arkansas. "Let me ask this question: Who's going to fight it in the future if we're a generation so sick that we don't have the capacity to show up for work?"

Or, dear Mr. Huckabee, what if we have a nation that's so freaking obessessed with food that they can't focus even if they DO show up for work? Who knows how much you could have improved your great state of Arkansas if you weren't dieting so damn much. And rumor has it you had gastric bypass surgery, so don't give me all of this dieting bull. If you did, just 'fess up. You'd look much less like a wanker if you admitted it in the first place.

Okay, I'm going to stop this random rant and get back to the point.

Basically what was said at this "conference" was a bunch of standard anti-obesity hype. Americans eat too much junk and velcro their fat asses to the couch every night with a bag of potato chips.* One of Mr. H's glorious solutions? Test all kids' body fat percentages.

I object to this on several levels.

First, the only really accurate way to measure body fat is by either DEXA scan or by submersion in a special tank thing. I don't think they're going to be dunking a bunch of 6-year-olds anytime soon. It's expensive as hell. So if you do measure body fat, you're going to be getting crap numbers anyway. It's pointless and just serves to shame fat kids even more. They don't need it. Even kids (like me) who weren't fat but told they were by classmates don't need this shit. I always thought I was fat. I wasn't small (85% height and weight for age), but I was healthy as a horse.

Second, there is no evidence that this works. None. Study after study has been done and there has never been one shred of efficacy. Of course, some people are quite determined at this, and their theory is that if a single-pronged intervention doesn't work, we just need to try harder. Because one of them has to work, somehow.

Unless you're working with a flawed theory. It's like trying to make me tall. You can try stretching me like Gumby, but the only way I'm going to grow is by putting on a pair of stiletto heels. Which I will then take off and use the heel to give you a lobotomy.

Of course, this wasn't the end of things. There had to be one more classic anti-obesity comment, didn't there?

"You've got a serious situation with a generation of kids coming up so unhealthy they won't be able to pass the military physical," Huckabee said in an interview after the panel discussion. "We keep talking about the war on terror- who's going to fight it if we don't have enough people who are healthy enough to show up and pick up a backpack?"

I suppose one solution would be don't start completely pointless, futile and unnecessary wars. And, failing all else, we could just sit on the enemy.

*If you do decide to do this, I would highly recommend kettle chips. They're extremely tasty, especially the sea salt and cracked pepper kind. Salty stuff usually isn't my thing, but these...damn.