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There seems to be this unquestioned axiom that being poor makes you fat. I've rarely seen it considered the other way around, that being fat makes you poor. Fat people are provably less likely to get good jobs or to find personal/professional success -- this would obviously mean that they're more likely to remain neutral or shift downwards on the economic class ladder. When you take in account the health complications from obesity, like increased fatigue and stress, and vulnerability to illness, it's not hard to envision a situation where even if obese people manage to get good work they are incapable of putting in the effort or the consistency to be promoted or even to keep their jobs.
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Nov 23, 2015 18:01
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That's a great post from Cantorsdust though, thank you.
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Nov 23, 2015 21:08
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Lifestyle and diet changes are an individual-level solution, not a population-level solution.Mister Adequate posted:Nobody actually gives a poo poo about stranger's body shape or size, except inasmuch as it relates to their fapping. You care about your family. Your doctor has every right to care. You can care in the abstract about the potential economic effects of treating all these people. It's not only just the economic cost of medical treatment, it's also the cost of excessive consumption of resources; increased weight on transportation reducing fuel effectiveness and increasing wear-and-tear; the cost of retrofitting all those same transportation vehicles to both allow comfortable seating for the hordes of obese and to actually be able to structurally support them; similarly, the cost of redoing buildings for equal access and providing personal transportation vehicles; the lost productivity from increased proclivity to illness, stress, fatigue, and exhaustion; the higher rates of personal injury from falling; the reduced return on educational investment when they die decades earlier; injuries to medical staff from trying to handle obese patients; and the cost of new hospital and ambulance equipment to be able to actually intake and treat these patients instead of sending them to veterinary hospitals. Appearances aside, there are reasons that people dislike being near obese people on transportation: invasion of personal space (thus the aforementioned need to retrofit transportation vehicles) and odor. Either way, whether we solve the obesity epidemic, or just simply accept it, it will be very expensive. Mister Adequate posted:nobody got over any kind of addiction or bad habit by being bullied into it. Obviously, not all people respond the same to negative reinforcement, and many people escalate their habits or withdraw in response to negative reinforcement, but many people also have said that the negative responses were what pushed them from denial into realizing that a change was needed. There's also the issue that many people are conditioned into perceiving positive reinforcement or frank appraisals as bullying or harassment. You need look no further than the HAES movement's response to doctors telling them that they need to modify their lifestyle and diet.
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Nov 24, 2015 20:51
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Fast food isn't even the problem. Most fast food is healthier than most people think they are, and besides it's way too expensive (yes, even for the poor) to eat fast food for every single meal. The problem, I think, is more the sheer prevalence of preprocessed meals and snacks, along with a general inability to cook for oneself. Go to your local grocery store, look at how much of the store space is devoted to basic raw ingredients or minimally processed food vs how much is devoted to brand-name boxes of highly processed and engineered food. (I'm aware that I'm stepping into a minefield of pedantry about basic foods like cheese or bread going through a bunch of processing but I trust that people will extend me some benefit of doubt and know that I mean stuff like Hungry Man dinners, Pop-Tarts, Doritos, etc, and not buckets of sour cream or cans of soup stock.) Multiple generations of Americans have forgotten or were never taught how to cook, and not only do they not have the knowledge of how to, they don't have the time to devote to learning how nor do they have the motivation to go and look up the thousands of recipes and videos online of how to do so. This sort of awareness of how to eat and how to prepare your food really needs to be instilled into people at a young age, or else they spend far too much time and effort teaching themselves later in life -- if they ever do so. Home ec classes are often one of the first-cut in public schools when budgets are tight. Anecdotally speaking, I was raised in a white school system in the 90s/00s and the home ec classes were absolutely awful and barely taught me anything. I can't imagine what it was like for poorer schools, or how bad it's become since then. It's too bad there was such a strong backlash against Michelle Obama's health programs because that sort of thing is what we need and what would be needed to build any larger initiatives on.
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Nov 24, 2015 23:56
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computer parts posted:It's not even clear that "home cooking" would save the day anyway. In Mexico a lot of their foods are fatty and calorically dense but because they're (at least historically) very active you don't notice that much. France is the other often-cited example of a food culture with high amounts of fat and calories. There's a growing obesity problem in France, but it's nowhere near as bad as it is in North America or the UK. (It's still pretty bad.) France also, of course, has a strong public transportation infrastructure and walkable cities. If you look at the places where they have First World levels of access to food but a high level of walkability, urban density, and public transportation there are significantly lower rates of overweight and obese people. The global rate of overweight people is shockingly high (2007). I can't imagine it's gotten any better in the 8 years since, though a few countries are actually leveling off instead of experiencing increases. There's some more data here.
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Nov 25, 2015 02:22
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Why are obesity and overweight rates significantly higher across the board for women compared to men?
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Nov 25, 2015 20:22
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Why are we assuming dietary fat is unhealthy?
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Nov 27, 2015 16:46
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Lyesh posted:And again, by most standards people in the United States aren't "lazy." The labor force is highly productive and works more hours than those in many countries with less of an obesity problem. Both of those things are diametrically opposed to laziness. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGa6BPj3Mcw Further I would suggest that an extra 2 hours a day sitting in front of a computer monitor (at vastly reduced pay) is not meaningfully working "harder", even if it is far more productive thanks in large part to enormous advances in technology, technological assistance, and education
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Nov 29, 2015 07:16
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fishmech posted:People already know that being fat is bad for health though. Maybe there's some guy living in the desert who has had no contact with the outside world who still thinks being fat is healthy, but you're not going to reach him. fishmech posted:Those people know it's bad for them, also there's barely any of them. Like 50,000 internet nerds wordwide aren't setting the narrative for the US. I think you're overestimating how aware people are of this stuff. You're right that people know being fat isn't healthy. You can point at a 300 pounder and the vast majority of Americans will go "Yeah being that fat is bad for you", but there are articles coming out weekly misrepresenting studies* such as the one that shows that fat people are more likely to live longer than thin people (because it measures weight at time of death, and many diseases do a number on someone's weight before finishing them off), as well as a general shift into what's viewed as "average" and "normal". The average 160 pound woman or 180 pound man in America (going off average height for each sex) don't consider themselves fat at all even though they're significantly overweight and aren't likely to think that their physical condition is actively harmful to them rather than "just carrying a few extra pounds" or "not an athlete". This is continually reinforced by a media that tells them about real people, showing them fat people Just Like Them, and constantly talks about the cultural obsession with being thin (one that isn't reflected in our population or our behavior). If you aren't seeing any of this then I don't know what to say. The problem isn't that people don't know fat isn't healthy, it's that they're recognizing less and less what being fat looks like. * A couple examples picked off the first page of Google results: quote:So, while I cannot tell you when "obesity" becomes a major health problem, I can definitely tell you that being "overweight" is the healthiest and most "normal" weight of all. quote:If scientific opinion now states that overweight people live the longest, surely it’s in everyone’s interest to be overweight. It's not hard at all to find more examples of this being published in major media outlets. The opposite view being published draws mucho vitriol and protests even from non-HAES crazies.
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Dec 3, 2015 21:37
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Effectronica posted:I think you're insane to look at Cosmo or GQ and conclude they are pushing/normalizing fatness. Or to look at the movies and conclude that they are normalizing fatness. No, but I do know that people will gripe and complain that the people depicted in those magazines and movies aren't "real" people, nor representative of them. Which to be fair, looking at the statistics and looking around when I go shopping, is accurate!
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Dec 3, 2015 21:46
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Does someone have journal access for this? It's been years since I was a student. http://journals.ama.org/doi/abs/10.1509/jppm.14.020 quote:The (Ironic) Dove Effect: Usage of Acceptance Cues for Larger Body Types Increases Unhealthy Behaviors
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Dec 11, 2015 18:32
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Fishmech, the Chief Medical Officer in the UK recommends a sugar tax. What do you think? Full report here.
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Dec 11, 2015 18:40
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Discendo Vox posted:What do you need from it? Pretty much the main thrust of the summary, I want to see the numbers that they used to conclude that society/media showing obese bodies increases unhealthy behavior (eating more, less activity) in those affected. Sorry if that's unclear, I don't have a hard science background. edit: Their suggested implications for public policy would be interesting to read over as well. Brannock fucked around with this message at 18:52 on Dec 11, 2015 |
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Dec 11, 2015 18:49
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Discendo Vox posted:As it turns out, I don't need to have a moral crisis- one of the authors has the final proof up on their personal website. Excellent, thank you. Reading over it now. I also came across this. quote:Three experiments by Crystal Hoyt and colleagues, recently published in Psychological Science, found that presenting obese people with a passage that described obesity as a disease decreased the dissatisfaction they reported about their own bodies, but also made them more likely to select a high-calorie sandwich from a list of options. The study in question. Also further down in the above article: quote:Consistent with these ideas, other studies have found that describing obesity in biological terms can decrease the perception that people have control over their weight, and it can also influence behavior: reading a fictional news story about "obesity genes," for example, led participants to eat more cookies in a subsequent task. Ditto.
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Dec 11, 2015 19:07
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Discendo Vox posted:I can probably speak more to discussion of making obesity a disease this evening, if nothing comes up. I'd be interested in reading your take on this, as well as anything you could write about common methodology problems that come up in this field.
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Dec 11, 2015 19:39
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Discendo Vox posted:drat it, I have work to do! let me live, thread! I'll tell you what little I know on this in a couple hours. The fun thing about any area of scientific research is it takes like a minute of scratching the surface to start seeing massive problems in practice. There's no rush, I'll look forward to reading it whenever you find the time and inclination to write it up. And thank you.
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Dec 11, 2015 21:21
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 08:20 |
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I've mentioned before in this thread that part of the problem is that people have no clue anymore what actually being overweight looks like, is like for regular people. Looks like it's not a problem restricted to America.
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Dec 13, 2015 19:07
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