Taking Aim at The Anti-Fat Warriors
Gina Kolata’s new book "Rethinking Thin" is a welcome addition to a series
of recent publications trying to get Americans to think more rationally
about the relationship between body weight, dieting and health.
Gina Kolata’s new book "Rethinking Thin" is a welcome addition to a series
of recent publications that have taken on the daunting task of trying to get
Americans to think more rationally about the relationship involving body
weight, dieting and health.
For many years, Kolata has written on such issues for The New York Times,
where her articles have featured the sort of skepticism often missing from
much contemporary journalism about health and medicine.
"Rethinking Thin" joins, among others, Eric Oliver’s "Fat Politics," Barry
Glassner’s "The Gospel of Food" and my own book "The Obesity Myth" in making
a number of points that are simultaneously difficult to dispute and
completely contrary to conventional wisdom.
All these books cite reams of data that will convince anyone who isn’t
blinded by prejudice of the following: First, the health risks associated
with higher-than-average weight are greatly exaggerated. Second, claims that
weight loss in and of itself improves health are poorly supported by the
medical literature. Third, the belief that people can choose to be thin is
largely false.
Ironically, this third point — which is so well established as a matter of
scientific fact that even some of the most shameless "obesity" fear-mongers
don’t bother to deny it — is the hardest to get both the public and our
public establishment to accept.
Kolata lays out the case against the nation’s multibillion-dollar
weight-loss industry with compelling clarity. She shows how a combination of
genetic and environmental factors ensure that, no matter how hard they try,
most people will stay within a fairly narrow weight range that tends to
creep higher with age, before declining somewhat when they get old.
In particular, she emphasizes that most people who are naturally inclined to
be fat can only maintain a significantly lower body mass by remaining in a
state of semi-starvation. Since the combination of willpower and neurotic
compulsion necessary to pull this off is fairly unusual, perhaps 19 out of
20 people who lose a significant amount of weight will gain the weight back
within a year or two.
All this is, in scientific terms, exceedingly well known. Why, then, does it
seem to make almost no impact on the culture? Both the diet scam artists and
their enablers in the public-health establishment keep selling, with great
success, the following utterly incredible message: Americans are fat because
they aren’t trying hard enough to be thin.
This claim is about as plausible as the hypothesis that Americans are poor
because they don’t care enough about being rich. Imagine the absurdity of an
argument that the reason there are 50 million poor people in America is
because our culture is insufficiently materialistic.
Yet this, in effect, is the claim of our anti-fat warriors: Americans are
fat because they don’t care enough to make the sacrifices necessary to be
thin. Interestingly, it’s somewhat difficult to find people of even moderate
intelligence and education who can maintain the level of self-satisfied
ignorance necessary to believe that poor people "choose" to be poor, yet
it’s very easy to find such people who accept as self-evident the notion
that fat people "choose" to be fat.
This inspires me to point something out to my more liberal readers. Remember
that particularly clueless right-wing acquaintance of yours? The one who
believes that anybody in America can become rich, because he thinks about
poverty in a completely unscientific, anecdotal way, which allows him to
treat the exceptional case as typical? The one who can’t seem to understand
the simplest structural arguments about the nature of social inequality?
The next time you see some fat people and get disgusted by their failure to
"take care of themselves," think about your clueless friend.