A few years ago, a picture of a bikini-clad young woman on some famous street (I believe it was the Hollywood Walk of Fame) made the rounds in social media. There was a caption to the effect that she was showing off her (what seemed over 300 lbs) body as a way of emancipating herself and showing her pride in a society that “taught her to be ashamed of her body.” The accolades went flying. There were the usual, “You Go Girl,” “So Beautiful,” “Such an Inspiration,” etc. Mischievous me then broke the cycle of stupidity, for which I was roundly condemned. “Show me her college degree or her benevolent work in society. Then I’ll find her an inspiration,” I wrote. “But until then, all that I’m seeing is a silly young woman in her twenties who might be dead by her mid-thirties if she doesn’t wake up from her comatose state of stupidity to understand that she has the heart of a human, not a bovine. She needs to lose some weight and deal with her health responsibly.”
It was a harsh comment and not at all “fat-shaming.” It was more like stupidity-shaming. At what cost do we make a health pandemic into a point of pride? Our weight is a mega-factor of our health; our health disproportionately lies in our weight. Obesity means poor cardiovascular health and a whole slew of derivative maladies, relative to average or thinner people, given all other factors being constant. Seeing the connivance of idiocy in people who willingly and “politically correctly” cheered on a young woman to an early grave rather than suggest a responsible and healthy alternative – life in abundance – was just too much. Health and well-being, along with finance, should be among the first milestones of personal responsibility. But it’s not, primarily because it is now the only thing that pervades America, across social strata, gender, and race. We are all poorly educated about our food and health, and we still believe in leaving issues of health solely in the hands of our internists. But that should not mean stigmatizing people, as bioethicist Daniel Callahan argued for in his 2013 journal article. He tells writer Michael Hobbes that “People don’t realize that they are obese or if they do realize it, it’s not enough to stir them to do anything about it.” Along with the connivance of encouragement, I can hardly think of a more deplorable approach to any deficiencies in life.
Ground zero in threats to American health and well-being is obesity. For more than three decades, obesity has been the fastest growing health problem for America. More Americans live with “extreme obesity“ than with breast cancer, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and HIV combined. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has declared that nearly 80 percent of adults and about one-third of American children now meet the clinical definition of overweight or obese. But not to worry. The Department of Defense is busy researching and developing millennial robots to be commissioned for fighting our wars by mid-century. Take that Vladimir!
Writer Michael Hobbes rightfully points to the history of traditions, ideological dogmas, and financial incentives of the society trumping the need to implement safety and public health measures, no matter how significant the cost in lives. In this health crisis though, I do not see how corporation America, driven by big Pharma and the food industry, can escape the death spiral when considered that we have always been a culture that cared more about our medications and finding a “cure” for everything but never one that cared about our food. At the heart of anti-intellectual and free America is the vested right to eschew eating healthy. Acceleration in every aspect of life – hours at work, family, etc., leaves little time to think about eating well or even to work at eating well. The simplicity in value for the family dinner that exists in Europe went the way of the dinosaur in America. Poor eating habits have even taken on a chic image. A key part of the online profile of many women on dating site will herald their love for “eating out” – in other words, consuming countless amounts of junk, sugar, steroids, antibiotics, ultra-processed foods and preservatives, and other fat-causing additives.
It’s not just obesity, but relative levels of overall maladies that present a clear distinction between America and Europe, for example. Yet whether the issue is cancer or obesity, they are myopically ignored by American scientists. Anecdotally we can point to a Europe where smoking rates more than double that of America yet with cancer rates that are a fraction of America’s. We cannot begin even to imagine the level of poisons we ingest in America, and the least effort to question our food consumption is viewed as “elitist,” “leftist,” etc. Some ignorance will be attached to it. For example, there are hundreds of proven cancer-causing agents that are banned in Europe but widely consumed in America but we never see our top scientists up in arms about their continued inclusion in our food supply. The following are just a few:
- Olestra: As a rule of thumb, synthetic and processed additives should enter no part of our body. If you’re going to consume sugar, for God’s sakes, consume real sugar and not the synthetic stuff, which does more harm in the long run than any benefit gained in the short run. Olestra is an additive found in “fat-free” chips. It reduces fat-soluble vitamins in the body and is linked to diarrhea, cramps and other a whole slew of gastrointestinal problems. And that is just for starters.
Olestra. - rBGH (rBST): rBGH / rBST are found in milk and yogurt. They are growth hormones that cause sickness in cows, which leads to increased antibiotic use and therefore even more antibiotics in the milk we consume in various forms. They also increase the presence of the hormone “IGF” that is linked to breast, colon, and prostate cancer.
- Ractopamine: Ractopamine is found in pork, beef, and turkey because it increases lean muscle at the end of an animal’s life. But it affects the cardiovascular system in both humans and animals, such as hyperactivity, increased heart rate, and death.
- Potassium Bromate (Bromated Flour): Potassium Bromate is found in Hamburger, hot dog buns, and other packaged baked goods. It makes bread fluffier and whiter. But studies on rats and mice have shown it to cause thyroid and kidney cancer. In the EU, as well as in China, Canada, and Brazil, Potassium Bromate is recognized as a potential human carcinogen.
- Brominated Vegetable Oil: Brominated Vegetable Oil is found in sports drinks and sodas to keeps flavor from floating to the surface. World scientists believe that when consumed in large amounts, it can build up in fatty tissue and cause nerve disorders.
- Azodicarbonamide: Azodicarbonamide is a flour bleach found in over 500 common supermarket products in America – frozen “TV dinners”, pasta mix, packaged baked goods, etc. But it’s also used to treat plastic used in making things like sneakers and yoga mats, and it is linked to asthma and respiratory illnesses. Because it is also used to treat plastic, the EU banned it from even being used in containers that come into contact with food.
- Coloring agents (Red #40, Yellow #6, Yellow #5, and Blue #1): These are found in Cake mix, candy, soda and sports beverages for changing and accentuating food color. In the EU, coloring agents are legal only with special labels. But there is no such requirement in America, enabling widespread usage. In the UK, in particular, synthetic colors (petroleum derived) are illegal because of links to hyperactivity and inattention in children for example.
- BHA and BHT: BHA and BHT are additives used to make foods last longer and are found in gum, cereal, vegetable oil, butter, beer, etc. But these cancer-causing agents are also found rubber products and packaging materials, hence banned in the U.K. and throughout Europe but all over American food.
My friend, a doctor, was still infuriated by a woman he used to date when he recounted the story to me many months later. If I feel like eating a god-dam hamburger,” he said. “I’ll eat a dam hamburger, not some veggie burger because she has some kind of health bug up her ass about hormones and antibiotics.” Knowing when to pick my battles, I just shook my head in agreement. “You’re right,” I told him. After all, he is a medical doctor who is defined by obesity. He is a walking case for a heart attack, among his many impending disasters. Beyond the paradox of a doctor treating hundreds of patients while being ignorant of his own health risks, we live in a free society where his outward unhealthy appearance should give his patients some pause – if they were so inclined to associate healthy doctors with “health-care.”
As we read the opinions of well-intended writers on the issue, we find that more and more, there is an effort to exculpate the individual of any responsibility for her / his well-being while great emphasis is now placed on discrediting and shaming those who would dare to tell Americas to change course and start valuing what they put in their mouths. Indeed to speak of poor eating habits is now to “fat-shame.” Yet the very tide that took us from more healthy-sized human beings in the 1980s to near-bipeds and marsupials today was the current of shamelessness that guided our comfort-consumption habits. It’s our right – as cherished a privilege as the right to bear arms in a free society. Who knows? Maybe at such time that we decided to relax a little about our Second Amendment Rights, we might take notice that pesticides, antibiotics, hormones, sugars, etc., will kill us faster than any threat to be put down with an AK-47.
At the core of the pandemic are a few things: (a) Coupled with the explosion of the fast-food culture at mid-century, food and nutrition has never been an acculturated aspect American life (b) the food and agricultural industry has gained too much power and influence in polluting the food supply and in marketing it to the most vulnerable in society, such as kids (c) general habits of the populous are hard to break (d) society lacks education and resources to untrain the mind from what is now poor habitual consumption (e) obesity has become weaponized as an agent of popular culture, class, gender, race, and even politics. The case of the bikini-clad young African-American woman was one of “emancipation” in showing her blackness in all its form. But the moment an issue becomes weaponized as an agent of the times, both its subjects and objects are soon reduced to unhealthy levels of stupidity. Finally, in the linked article, writer Michael Hobbes points out another catalyzing agent of our obesity epidemic – (f) allopathic medicine in America has never placed any emphases on food and nutrition:
“Many of the financial and administrative structures doctors work within help reinforce this bad behavior. The problem starts in medical school, where, according to a 2015 survey, students receive an average of just 19 hours of nutrition education over four years of instruction—five hours fewer than they got in 2006. Then the trouble compounds once doctors get into daily practice. Primary care physicians only get 15 minutes for each appointment, barely enough time to ask patients what they ate today, much less during all the years leading up to it. And a more empathic approach to treatment simply doesn’t pay: While procedures like blood tests and CT scans command reimbursement rates from hundreds to thousands of dollars, doctors receive as little as $24 to provide a session of diet and nutrition counseling.”
Hobbes also points out the con that is the trillion dollar diet and exercise industry. While he is correct in pointing to this most unhealthy aspect of lifestyle that often leads to eating disorders or unhealthy yo-yo weight loss-weight gain, for example, I believe he still misses a key point: A certain “provincial” mentality in America ensures a permanent place for “fads” in our society. Many people diet because it makes them feel good; it permits them to then go right back and eat garbage.
“For 60 years, doctors and researchers have known two things that could have improved, or even saved, millions of lives. The first is that diets do not work. Not just paleo or Atkins or Weight Watchers or Goop, but all diets. Since 1959, research has shown that 95 to 98 percent of attempts to lose weight fail and that two-thirds of dieters gain back more than they lost. The reasons are biological and irreversible. As early as 1969, research showed that losing just 3 percent of your body weight resulted in a 17 percent slowdown in your metabolism—a body-wide starvation response that blasts you with hunger hormones and drops your internal temperature until you rise back to your highest weight. Keeping weight off means fighting your body’s energy-regulation system and battling hunger all day, every day, for the rest of your life.”
But he also points to outward discrimination and pariah status to which the obese is condemned by the medical industry and many of its professionals. Having been a caregiver to an elderly family member, I was outraged by the level of discrimination and the indifference shown to persons above a certain age. One doctor was honest enough to ask me who would I prefer the resource be expended to (if I were a patient in the hospital) – me or an 85-year-old. It seems that the medical industry holds the overly obese in the same regards.
“This phenomenon is not merely anecdotal. Doctors have shorter appointments with fat patients and show less emotional rapport in the minutes they do have. Negative words—“noncompliant,” “overindulgent,” “weak willed”—pop up in their medical histories with higher frequency. In one study, researchers presented doctors with case histories of patients suffering from migraines. With everything else being equal, the doctors reported that the patients who were also classified as fat had a worse attitude and were less likely to follow their advice. And that’s when they see fat patients at all: In 2011, the Sun-Sentinel polled OB-GYNs in South Florida and discovered that 14 percent had barred all new patients weighing more than 200 pounds.”
There must be a healthy medium between fat-shaming and responsibly educating and addressing the need to be healthy as a society, especially when health is becoming such a major financial burden and could even reach national security issue in the next few decades. We cannot deprive individuals of agency and treat them as children by dictating to them, what we believe to be the right course of actions in a free society. Likewise, fat-shaming is no different from laughing at a person with a handicap. It’s grotesque. But on the other hand, dumbing down to accept unhealthy ways of life as the norm because it is politically correct, is equally grotesque and very much the onset of decadence. Has anyone ever noticed that some of the most militant advocates for the obese are waif skinny people? It’s ok for others (on whose behalf they advocate) to be obese, but there is no way in hell you would find them playing Russian Roulette with their lives.
