They say Ronald McDonald is the cousin of Joe Camel : comments.
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![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(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!!
(no subject)