Buy Walking VideosPenn and Teller Address The Obesity “Epidemic”
This clip from Penn and Teller’s television show called Bullsh!t! talks about the obesity epidemic and how it isn’t much of an epidemic.
Paul Campos, the author of the book The Obesity Myth, talks about the myths about what is going on.
Myth 1: Weight is a good proxy for health: You can’t tell what’s going on with a person’s organs just by looking at them.
Myth 2: If you take a fat person and turn them into a thin person, you will improve their health.
Myth 3: We know how to produce significant long term weight loss.
Glenn Alan Gaesser, author of the book Big Fat Lies, talks about the dangers of constant dieting:
It is far more dangerous to ones health to be chronically yo-yoing up and down in weight on one diet after another than it would be to be a stable weight. Even if that happens to be heavier than the charts say you should weigh. Fat people who exercise regularly are better off healthwise and have lower mortality rates than people who don’t.
These issues are real and they aren’t going away quickly. The biggest problem is that we are being judged by our government and the insurance industry based on our weight. They have the right to raise our insurance premiums if we gain weight and are even pushing for the right to deny payment for illnesses that they consider weight related. The best thing we can do is work our hardest to get within their recommended ranges until the insanity of this country subsides and a more realistic approach is adopted.
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March 6th, 2008 at 9:35 am
If nothing else, My wife has seen numereous patients (she is a nurse) whose Diebetes is DIRECTLY related to obesity. — When they lost the excess weight, their diebetes went away. She has also seen first hand the damage that diebetes visits on the human body — blindness, wounds not healing and eventual amputation, as well as the damage to the internal organs.
There are health problems with obesity — however as these books show it is not simply fat = bad, thin = good, as you know I dealt with the thin = bad with my daughter (anorexia) HOWEVER Obesity (and perhaps the food used that caused the obesity??) can and does create major health problems. To write books that gives the idea that obesity does NOT create a health problem seems to not address all the issues either.
March 6th, 2008 at 4:37 pm
I also believe these books are 100% correct! When I was heavy, I am 5′ 7″ and was 210 lbs. I started to body build and lost 60 lbs in 2 months.. I now know that was not remotely healthy, after that I have had a lot of kidney problems! I now know if I need to lose weight a steady 1-2 lbs a week is good not 14 lbs in one week (not water weight) in one week…. This is a very good website for people that want to lose weight, the right information is always good to have. 🙂
I had no clue this was going on:
“They have the right to raise our insurance premiums if we gain weight and are even pushing for the right to deny payment for illnesses that they consider weight related”
Thank You Ian
March 7th, 2008 at 6:06 am
This is a tricky issue. I don’t think obesity causes diabetes, high blood pressure, heart failure and some of the other health problems that folks above me have listed. It certainly doesn’t cause self esteem issues, that’s a societal problem. In fact, many of the health issues that are associated with obesity are the same health issues associated with a high stress lifestyle, so it’s quite possible that the stress of living in a society that reviles the obese contributes to the health problems.
However, obesity is a good proxy for poor diet, lack of exercise and such that do cause those health problems. Fat people can be healthier than thin people, but I’d guess that those people are not the norm. It’s easier for most people to generalize to fat=bad than to look deeper and focus on the real issues.
BTW, there’s a typo in the second quote. I don’t think fat people have lower “morality” rates, although that is exactly what the ban-fat-people-from-restaurants crowd would seem to believe.
March 7th, 2008 at 10:40 am
Thanks for the correction, Alice! I fixed it!
March 10th, 2008 at 9:22 pm
Read the Amazon reviews of Campos’s book for some more sober takes on it. (You’ll have to be satisfied with that, since Campos’s book isn’t even in print anymore, despite being rebranded from Obesity Myth to Diet Myth.)
March 11th, 2008 at 9:23 am
Mark,
I don’t know what Amazon reviews you read, but most of them are quite positive. The ones that aren’t continually put the blame on people instead of attacking the studies or data he tracked down.
Laura
November 30th, 2009 at 7:29 am
I liked this episode on the issue of the BMI.. (overall, I believe that it is common sense. We all know people who are heavy, but can out perform those with a smaller BMI, and simply looking at muscular people)
However, I am not convinced it dove deep enough on the issue of whether or not people can control their weight, in a sustainable manner..
The doctor had said that it is healtheir to maintain a heavier weight, then to constantly yo yo up and down.. HOWEVER, he did not dive into how much weight qualifies as “yo yoin”. Yes, I sometimes gain 6 pounds, but lose it, is that “yo yoing” or is he talking about substantial weight, 20+?
Is the yo yoing, bad because most diets have you lose A LOT of weight in a short period of time? So if I stick with the 2lbs a week, would I be perfectly fine?
Pen mentions that we evolved to eat a lot,and pretty much has the atitude that we might as well roll with it.
Is pen really willing to be consistent with this, and EAT like our ancestors?
Hell, our ancestors ate a lot of bugs, and small animals (lizards, turtles, squirells). Things that are healtheir then todays junk.
A big mac, soda,salty fries, finished with a apple pie. Did we really evolve to eat like this?
Also, our ancestors were very ACTIVE people. Many studies show that excersize is a perfect antidote for depression!
So we evolved to EAT HEALTHY, and be ACTIVE.
December 20th, 2009 at 11:08 pm
@ russ
there is absolutely no evidence that diet alone is the cause of diabetes, only a contributing factor. We do not know if those who have weight-related diabetes would ultimately be larger than normal regardless of diet.
Many people can eat all day and exercise moderately and still maintain an “ideal” body mass index. Others on the other hand do everything “right” and are still larger. There is really no conclusive evidence that ties unhealthy weight with lifestyle in a direct correlation over the general population of common ancestry and family medical history.
Last, it i interesting to me that the so-called “fattest states” are also have the highest number of hispanic immigrants, that the largest jumps in average BMI were in years which also had high numbers of hispanic immigration, and that HEALTHY hispanic individuals also tend to have a higher BMI than healthy non-hispanic whites.
Furthermore the only weight related condition that has increased in the last 50 years has been diabetes, but today few people ever are reported of dying of “unspecified natural causes” or “old age”. It is entirely possible that we have become more capable of treating and diagnosis diabetes today than we were in the past, and that many of those who died of “unspecified natural causes” actually died of undiagnosed diabetes-related conditions.
If so many people are so fat, then why isn’t there more plus-sized clothing? Why hasn’t the fashion industry adapted to this change in demographic? Why is it still difficult for larger women to find clothing that fits? Ask any full figured woman about this, and they will tell you that most clothing available isn’t designed for them. The fashion industry isn’t being idealic. If there were such an “epidemic” then they would respond to such market demands.
The science behind these claims is exceptionally poor and often based of correlation studies which are easy to conduct and are inexpensive but are extremely limited in their scope. Before anyone jumps on the ‘overweight epidemic’ bandwagon I would encourage them to actually read the studies and understand the methodology.
Also understand that drug companies, and the food industry make a lot of money off of weight control products and specialty diet foods, and it is no wonder that “overweight epidemic” would make headlines before studies that doubt this so-believed “fact” do. Some studies have concluded that being “slightly overweight” is actually beneficial.
Yet these reports and studies are never given as much press as the studies which are more appealing to advertisers. We all want to believe that Brian Williams and Co. are out to “seek and report the truth”. But how is this possible when the facts of often are not convenient for those who are signing the paycheck?