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purplerabbits at 09:54am on 28/02/2007
purplerabbits at 09:54am on 28/02/2007I couldn't agree with this more if I tried with both hands for a fortnight. It is absurd to try to learn about trends in child obesity from the story of one extremely fat boy Also - "The Today programme has a sodding cheek hectoring McKeown about her nutritional know-how, when this is their McNugget version of current affairs." Well, quite.
I feel very uncomfortable with the coverage of both obesity and binge drinking in the meeja - and not, I suspect, just because I'm morbidly obese and like a tipple. But one thing that bugs me is that I feel I can't comment (at least to normal people) because it feels like I'm defending my own feckless burger and alcopop guzzling ways (I don't consume either burgers or alcopops, but that's not the point.)
Is it even possible to have a civilized debate about these things?
I feel very uncomfortable with the coverage of both obesity and binge drinking in the meeja - and not, I suspect, just because I'm morbidly obese and like a tipple. But one thing that bugs me is that I feel I can't comment (at least to normal people) because it feels like I'm defending my own feckless burger and alcopop guzzling ways (I don't consume either burgers or alcopops, but that's not the point.)
Is it even possible to have a civilized debate about these things?
(no subject)
I fear not. The reason is religious, but not in a contemporary sense: we associate being overweight with overconsumption (which ain't necessarily so, in this era of high fructose corn syrup injection), so fat is a symptom of Sinfulness (in the form of Gluttony), and being overweight is Divine Punishment. This is all low-level cultural baggage inherited from the middle ages, and it's bloody hard to do away with.
To make matters worse, if this aspect of the debate is framed in Catholic guilt, the gilding on the frame is all Protestant -- divine favour is shown to those who deserve it, so if you're poor/ill/fat you've clearly sinned, somewhere along the line. (This is most evident in US social policy, but there's a good chunk of beat-the-poor over here in the UK social services.)
Finally, as Ken MacLeod pointed out recently, we go through a roughly 150-year cycle of puritanism here in the UK, and we're overdue for another wave of it. It's not necessarily religious, and he figures a lot of the current wave is finding its outlet in green/environmental politics -- not the common-sense "we need to stop poisoning ourselves" strain, but the hair-shirt environmentalism that berates people for not bending the neck before the new dogma. Fat people make highly visible targets, overconsumption can easily be associated with environmental damage in the minds of the onlookers, and it's always useful to have someone to whack on pour encourager les autres.
I don't think we're going to see a civilized debate about these things -- not this generation, anyway -- because the folks hosting the debate want it to be uncivilized.
(no subject)
The question is who organises the debate and can you exclude people from the debate too, to keep it civilised.
I feel very sorry for this kid, and hope the media interest leads to him getting useful help (as opposed to his mother being told she's crap, which I suspect she knows already). Also, while you can't learn much about trends from one outlier, you can learn about system failures from a worst-case scenario - eg why no doctor or school nurse picked up on this boy's problems earlier, what sort of exercise is offered at school, what are children allowed to eat at their school, etc. Similarly a train crash can teach us a lot about the requirements of maintenance and where the failures are, but nothing about why on average 10% of trains are late.
My job atm is creating more healthy and sustainable food in London, which involves working with schools, hospitals, NHS, DoH, farmers, supermarkets, etc, to influence what food gets eaten, particularly in schools and hospitals where the consumers can't go elsewhere. Lots of work on education for children and adults, and lots of successes, but in some areas it's a hard struggle - eg the nutrition information scheme that most supermarkets refused to use, creating their own misleading one based on percentages of an adult's daily intake, even for foods eaten mainly by children.
On the plus side, there's loads more public awareness than there was a year ago - you can't open a paper without seeing a story about healthy eating or buying local food. On the minus side, most of that, outside rural areas where coverage is based round 'support your local farmers', is based on the idea of 'keep your body healthy and the planet's life support systems healthy'. And the perceived decline in health is solely thanks to people seeing increased obesity.
People don't register more people having heart attacks or strokes, but they notice fat people.
(no subject)
I don't want to judge from the media coverage whether she is crap or not. Certainly, I think it is far more likely that the professionals are. The mother claims that she has asked for help from medical professionals and not got it, and that is a common feature of such stories both here and in the US. I'm sceptical that the boy will get any useful help from the media attention - what he's got so far has led to him losing ten percent of his body weight in two months, when it is known that losing that proportion in a year significantly increases two-year mortality. Each 10% loss of body weight also reduces the metabolic rate by 15%, which is counterproductive. In addition, dieting in a child of that age is a classic trigger for eating disorders. What would be useful would be getting him under the professional care of someone who understands that (a) the risks of obesity are grossly overstated; (b) the risks of dieting are significantly understated; (c) there is no evidence whatsoever that dieting leads to a person acquiring the health benefits they might have had if they were naturally of a lower weight; and (d) dieting has a success rate of 10% in the most optimistic studies. Unfortunately, such people are rare and not likely to be credible to social services, given the prevailing hysteria on the subject.
(no subject)
Do you have a useful source for your stats on weight loss there? I'm particularly interested in the reduction of metabolic rate - given there exist societies where food is eaten in boom and bust cycles and people lose weight until the next harvest when they put it on again, I'd have thought the body would be more resilient than that. I'd also guess that the reason for the weight gain/loss would factor in.
I completely agree with your a) and b) and the importance of c). For d), I would guess it all depends on what is defined as 'dieting' and 'success'.
(no subject)
The studies on long-term dieting success define it as "maintained weight loss for two years", mainly because it has been extremely difficult to find sufficient people who have maintained it for longer. Solovay has some interesting comments on how difficult it was even to recruit people who fitted the definition above, and why even the 10% figure may be optimistic.
(no subject)
Ooh! Ooh! Can I come and work with you? [/perfectjob]
job
Would you be interested in working 1,2, or 3 days a week? Any relevant experience? [thinks of how you could explain your PhD thesis as relevant...]
Looks like we have more funding for the next financial year and will be looking for more people.
Re: job
Re experience - well, I've done a bastardload of research in various areas of science policy, technology development, and public understanding of science. My PhD thesis is on socio-cultural-economic aspects of knowledge exchange (ie. could be *how* various socio-economic groups get their info/share their info on food). And my MSc thesis (in Science and Technology Policy) was on perceived risks of organic food, from the perspective of farmers, policy makers and the general public...
But nothing until I finish the damn PhD!!
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