They say Ronald McDonald is the cousin of Joe Camel

[purplerabbits]

I 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?

Comments

[lizw.livejournal.com]

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).

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.

[thekumquat.livejournal.com]

Urg - I mistyped. I meant she 'knows that other people think she's crap'.
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'.

[lizw.livejournal.com]

I got the statistics from Tipping the Scales of Justice: Ending Weight-Based Discrimination by Sondra Solovay, which includes citations of the relevant studies. I don't have my copy to hand at the moment, as I'm at work (and won't be home till Sunday evening).

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.