Episode 133 Transcript
Read transcript alongside audio.
You're listening to The Fierce Fatty Podcast Episode 133. I'm your host, Vinny Welsby. What is the title of this episode? Is the opioid crisis a myth question mark? Let's do it.
Unknown Speaker 0:31
Larry Larry sorry, I didn't have my my page I didn't have my my screen on the front of my scroll down in my document. Okay, I'll scroll down to my document. I wasn't at the title.
Unknown Speaker 0:45
Is the obesity epidemic Demick real that was the title is the obesity epidemic real I'm sure you'll you'll get it you'll get it. Hey, welcome to this episode. Nice to see. To see you nice. If you're British, you'll recognize that if you're British and about 37 years old
Unknown Speaker 1:08
Welcome to this episode.
Unknown Speaker 1:10
I'm feeling a I'm filling like a seven at attend today on the life satisfaction scale. But I just made up.
Unknown Speaker 1:21
I did a training yesterday. for healthcare professionals or anyone who has clients who are fat, dietitians, fitness influencers, that type of thing called How to make your social media presence fat, positive, critical mistakes to avoid and what to do instead.
Unknown Speaker 1:44
It was so fucking good, I'm tooting my horn to eat the shit out of it.
Unknown Speaker 1:51
So I shared case studies and examples on what to do what maybe what you want to avoid doing on social media or if you have clients like aka how to not fuck up fat people with your contact
Unknown Speaker 2:11
with a huge kind of disclaimer of
Unknown Speaker 2:17
we're all going to fuck up and I've made all of the mistakes, pretty much, pretty much have made. So many of the mistakes anyway, so that was really good. If you want to catch the replay the recording you can I'll put a link in the show notes. But if you ever want to do consulting with me in any way, shape or form, like having me come to talk to your company or train your dieticians or do an audit of your stuff, you can always go to first fatty consulting.com First fatty consulting.com Okay, so
Unknown Speaker 2:57
I can't believe I've not already done an episode specifically on the quote, obesity epidemic, huge trigger warning, I'm going to be using the Oh words, I'm going to try and like get rid of them get rid of that show.
Unknown Speaker 3:12
As much as possible. But
Unknown Speaker 3:18
I mean, is in the title, right? So.
Unknown Speaker 3:22
So if that's like, if you're like, I just don't want to hear the words, I don't want to have any say quote unquote, 75 times, then skip this episode.
Unknown Speaker 3:33
But
Unknown Speaker 3:35
I feel like you know what, they're sometimes when you're talking to folks. And like you when I say you, I mean you not me? Well, me too, I guess. But when, when we're talking to people about like this stuff, like, oh, how you know how fat people are human and stuff? And, you know, people are like, ooh, gross, no, they're not.
Unknown Speaker 3:57
They will come up with speaking points that they don't really know much about. It's just kind of like regurgitated information that they've heard online or the we'll know stuff, which is we all know that fat people are unhealthy and they're gonna die, and all that type of stuff.
Unknown Speaker 4:17
And so, I thought, you know, an episode talking about the obesity epidemic, like what it is where it's come about, is it real? Like, is it valid?
Unknown Speaker 4:30
At the end, I'll give kind of like a, an overview. So you've got that kind of overview. Also, I'm going to make it into a little social media posts, like, you know, bullet point thing. So, if you're listening to the episode, then it's probably going to be up on my Instagram already, kind of like a bullet point of everything that I'm sharing so that you can share that on your social media if you want or if you just want to reference it.
Unknown Speaker 4:51
About this pandemic of fat people going round and eating babies off the street.
Unknown Speaker 5:00
Wait, oh my god.
Unknown Speaker 5:04
Yeah, so fun time.
Unknown Speaker 5:07
I'm gonna be reading from a few different sources here. I've decided this one article is just so fucking good. I'm just gonna read the whole thing. I was like, oh, pick up this quote, and then I'm like, no pick up this quote, or this one to listen to. I was like, it's a whole fucking article. It's just so good. It's not that long anyway, so, but it's so good. It was just like, the person that they're the person they're interviewing is, is
Unknown Speaker 5:32
no longer alive because this is an interview from I think, like 10 years 1012 years ago. Anyway. So I'm, like, are so sad that they're not alive anymore, so we can talk about this stuff.
Unknown Speaker 5:44
Anyway, so
Unknown Speaker 5:48
basically,
Unknown Speaker 5:50
basic, basic, I think, basically, we're starting a probably hour long podcast. Exactly. talk for an hour.
Unknown Speaker 6:00
Let's start with let's start with this. Let's start with an excerpt from
Unknown Speaker 6:09
a book, a book
Unknown Speaker 6:13
written by Harriet brown that came out in 2015. I read it in 2015. And like, kind of heads up this she uses yo words, right.
Unknown Speaker 6:25
And the book excerpt was made into a kind of post for the New York Post. So it's an excerpt of the book, but you can read it on line link to all the show notes. All the All, all the all of the studies, everything I mentioned is going to be in the show notes. Or fist fighting.com. Forward slash one, three through.
Unknown Speaker 6:49
Yes. So the title of this article is, the obesity crisis is a myth. The book by Harriet Brown is called body of truth.
Unknown Speaker 7:02
Harry Brown author of brave girl eating, I read that one too. I think it was I think that was about her daughter who hadn't Edie correct me if I'm wrong. My person who is not here who's you can't respond? Nobody. There's not right. Anyway.
Unknown Speaker 7:20
So yeah, kind of like take this with a kind of grain of Harriet's maybe not as clued in on social justice language, versus looking at science and that type of stuff. Okay, so here's a quote from that.
Unknown Speaker 7:39
Back in 1958 AJ stunk ARD a well known obesity researcher and professor at the University of Pennsylvania wrote of, of obese people who lot lose weight, most will regain it.
Unknown Speaker 7:54
Just a heads up that is. So FYI, that is the first study what what Harriet is talking about here. 1958 simcard study is the first study that says 95% of diets fail. So
Unknown Speaker 8:13
people who are pro diet will say, well, there was just one study from the 50s that says that 95% of diets fail. And that's what people are quoting. And that's what people are using. So that is data is so out of date. If that was the only study then yeah, 1958 that data would be so out of date, but this is the first time it was established. And it's been reestablished many times over many times over really good science on that. But that's that's just like the inception of it. Okay, just a heads up. Continuing in the 1970s and 1980s site and scientists like Paul urns and urns Berger now a nutrition pressure professor and researcher at Case Western University began to document the ways dieting did and usually didn't work.
Unknown Speaker 9:01
nearly 30 years ago, urns burger and a colleague published an exhaustive, exhaustive review of the links between health and obesity. They pointed out that 16 long term international studies had found that overweight and obesity were not major risk factors for death, or heart disease. A US panel on obesity had relied heavily on data from the insurance industry. And since fewer heavy people bought life insurance because they had to pay more for it. The mortality rates linked to obesity skewed higher urns, Berger also drew attention to the fact that the mortality rates were lowest in the overweight category on the BMI chart chart. He and his colleagues hypothesized that some of the conditions associated with obesity, like hypertension, and elevated cardiovascular risk actually came from failed treatments that is weight cycling or losing and regaining weight over and over. And they suggested that many do
Unknown Speaker 10:00
Doctors disapproval of fatness was based on moral and aesthetic biases rather than medical facts, a suggestion that has since been borne out of research into doctors clear prejudices around obesity. In 2002, William clish and a pediatric gastroenterologist featured in the movie Supersize Me Did you watch that movie? I fucking love that movie. Oh my god that was Supersize Me was that what was that guy's name? Morgan
Unknown Speaker 10:29
gingerols
Unknown Speaker 10:31
he went no the premise of the movie was he was only allowed to eat McDonald's for X amount of days let's say a month two months whatever.
Unknown Speaker 10:40
And then they they couldn't he was a vegan before and if they offered to supersize at the at the McDonald's he had to accept it
Unknown Speaker 10:52
turns out he got fed up of eating McDonald's surprise fucking surprise
Unknown Speaker 11:00
and the thing is right like this whole
Unknown Speaker 11:04
I don't think most fat people are eating McDonald's three meals a day
Unknown Speaker 11:11
is the whole thing is just the whole movie was fucked up right? Oh, maybe it's fucked up. Anyway, continuing on. If you've not seen it, don't bother. It's fucking I loved it at the time because it was fat phobic. But you know, anyway, okay, so the the, the pediatric gastroenterologist featured in the movie Supersize Me told a reporter from the Houston Chronicle. If we don't get this obesity epidemic in check, for the first time in this century, children will be looking forward to a shorter life expectancy than their parents. Now, have you heard that before? That the children are going to be we're going to be bearing children, because they're going to be so fat and unhealthy? You've heard that before? I've heard that before. Maybe you haven't. But you know, it's very common rhetoric.
Unknown Speaker 12:01
Think about how much data and science is behind that.
Unknown Speaker 12:07
What we had to look into to get that that data that this gastroenterologist on the Supersize Me movie, saying that kids are going to die before the parents continuing as clish later admitted he had absolutely no evidence for this frightening seems scenario. It was based on his quote, intuition,
Unknown Speaker 12:29
which didn't stop it from being replayed in the media and cited by researchers of course it didn't because it's That's a sexy thing to say. Kids are dying before their parents because they're so fat.
Unknown Speaker 12:42
Evidence.
Unknown Speaker 12:44
Evidence. I've got a crystal ball. My mystic mag brain is saying kids are so fat they're gonna die.
Unknown Speaker 12:55
Research.
Unknown Speaker 12:57
Study silly.
Unknown Speaker 13:01
Yes, so continuing so plushies doomsday scenario lives on, in part because it's frightening. And fear, whether justified or not is a big part of the way that we talk about weight, especially when it comes to children. According to most recent numbers from the CDC, almost half of American kids and teens fall into the either overweight or obese category categories blah, blah, blah. The problem with a BMI is it's not accurate measurement and measurement or predictor of health
Unknown Speaker 13:26
blubbery blue blue, it says nothing about a person's future risk of disease or death and it was never intended to its creator. As we know its creator Belgian mathematician Adelphi
Unknown Speaker 13:40
quitter let came up with a BMI in the 1830s as a way of looking at trends in populations, not in people. We'll talk about that a little bit more.
Unknown Speaker 13:53
Meanwhile, the cuts of points for BMI have been moved somewhat arbitrarily within the last 15 years starting in 1994. The National Institutes of Health considered children in the BMI whose BMI put them in the 95th percentile or above for the age overweight. Those in the 85th and 95th percentiles were labeled at risk of being overweight,
Unknown Speaker 14:17
and 2005. The category shifted now kids above the 95th percent percentile are labeled as obese, while those in the 85th and 95th percentile are overweight. And according to Colorado law professor Paul campus, author of the obesity myth, another little known change happened at the same time. Those percentiles were defined using data from the 1960s and 1970s rather than data on kids today, who are both taller and heavier than kids back then. In other words, or its campus when Michelle Obama claims a third of our children are too fat. What she's really saying is that what was the 85th percentile on the
Unknown Speaker 15:00
height weight charts top 40 years ago is about the 67th percentile. Today, the changing definitions make it harder to track how kids weights rather than their weight categories have actually changed. Like adults, kids average weight rose between 1980 and 2000. When they more or less stabilized, let me read that again. Like adults, kids, average weights rose between 1980 and 2000. When they more or less stabilized. Childhood fatness is commonly referred to as both an epidemic and a call to action in 2010, when First Lady Michelle Obama launched her Let's Move campaign Her goal was to, quote solve the challenge of childhood obesity within a generation. Are we really raising a generation that for the first time will not live as long as their parents craft, Catherine Fleagle. We talked about Katherine Fleegle, a couple of episodes ago, an epidemiologist at the CDC National Center of health statistics set out to map the relationship between BMI categories and mortality, they expected to find a linear relationship, the higher a person's BMI, the greater risk of them dying prematurely. But that's not what they found. Instead, Fleagle and her colleagues discovered what statisticians called a U shaped curve with the bottom of the curve, the lowest risk of death, falling around 25 to 26 on the BMI chart, making the risk of early death lowest for those now labeled overweight.
Unknown Speaker 16:37
The differences we're talking about are overall pretty tiny, explains Catherine Flugel. So so so so that's all I'm going to read about that. But there's more to that article. So if you want to go read it, or read the book for lawyers do so.
Unknown Speaker 16:54
But I wanted to start with that kind of like talking about a few of the things I want to point out today
Unknown Speaker 17:01
about
Unknown Speaker 17:05
is there an epidemic?
Unknown Speaker 17:09
Is it right to class it as an epidemic? What if there is an epidemic? What could we do?
Unknown Speaker 17:18
And so we mentioned that article weights in children and adults going up from 1980 to 2000. And then stabilizing right and
Unknown Speaker 17:31
people have slowly got have slowly become higher weight over a number of decades, decades, right?
Unknown Speaker 17:43
Kind of like a slowly uptrend, what we know is not a lot.
Unknown Speaker 17:50
We don't know why. But the there is a theory that the 70s is when we started really going balls to the wall with dieting.
Unknown Speaker 18:06
And here's the thing with people are getting a you know, a little fatter, people are getting a little fatter, right? So what we're talking about here is fat people. So people who were already fat, getting a little fatter.
Unknown Speaker 18:21
What we're not seeing or saw, because since 2000, stabilized what we didn't see was
Unknown Speaker 18:32
thin people becoming fat.
Unknown Speaker 18:36
Okay, so this rise in oh my god, you know, in 1960, everyone was thin, and there was a couple of bad fatties walking around. And now it's 2002 and this fat people everywhere.
Unknown Speaker 18:53
It's just not true, right? It's just not true, right? It's not like, there was this huge change in body sizes and thin people overnight was suddenly you know, very fat people and oh my god, it's spreading. It's you know, contagious. It's a terrible thing that's happening. It's just not happening. I'm gonna talk more about that in a shark arms.
Unknown Speaker 19:22
But I this is this is the next kind of this is the thing that I'm going to read out totally and then we're going to have shorter quotes. So this next article is from the Atlantic and it's called America's moral panic over obesity by Megan McArdle. Megan McArdle
Unknown Speaker 19:43
actually both Megan and Paul in this article,
Unknown Speaker 19:48
poor campus are say kind of things which I'm like they're a little bit ableist Megan is saying things that you're good diet culture II, so
Unknown Speaker 19:58
I don't want to just point them out when they come up.
Unknown Speaker 20:00
up. So kind of just a heads up.
Unknown Speaker 20:04
But Megan interviewed Paul. And I was just like, This is so interesting. I wish I could hear the audio for this. But so this is how it goes.
Unknown Speaker 20:13
With healthcare in the news, everyone's looking for magic bullets to save money. Obesity seems to be a growing favorite wouldn't be, it'd be great if we could make everyone look like Jennifer Aniston and be cheaper to treat. By the way, this is written in 2009. If you're thinking what the fuck is she referencing Jennifer Aniston? What it's like me when I'm like, was a stereotypically attractive Hollywood celebrity. And I'm always like Brad Pitt. And it's like,
Unknown Speaker 20:41
Brad Pitt is like 75 years old now. So, like, come up with a new example. Right? So yeah.
Unknown Speaker 20:50
And of course, He's not 75 He's 60 or something. 50 Whatever. So continuing, there are a lot of holes in this theory. And also, even if he is 50, or 60, doesn't mean he's not attractive anymore, but I'm just thinking of, you know, the stereotypical hunk Hollywood hunk. Anyway, there's a lot of holes in his theory. The morbidly obese are very sick but die young, while lower levels of overweight slash obesity aren't so well correlated with poor health. But still the idea that ideas power seems to be growing every day.
Unknown Speaker 21:22
This week again, take take what she's saying with a pinch of salt. This week, Health Affairs published a new study showing that kill Sopris obesity accounts for an ever growing share of our health care costs. They put the number at about 10%.
Unknown Speaker 21:39
I found that very interesting. Right, so 10% of health care costs, is treating fatness man a minute.
Unknown Speaker 21:48
I thought that we were in an epidemic where everyone's fat. Should I be like be like, I don't know. 90%. Like, it'd be a higher number than 10%. I was like 10%. And anyways, we just established another episodes. Those numbers are really faulty. And we're talking about but anyway, Keep coming. Keep going. giving it all away. So I decided to ask Paul kamphaus, the author of the obesity myth, what he thought the book which everyone should read, argues that the health benefits of losing weight are largely imaginary, that we are using, quote health to advance our class bias in favor of thin people, particularly thin women, women, women, women, we mean
Unknown Speaker 22:36
that's how my mum says women women, my mum says women in a really weird way. Okay, so Megan,
Unknown Speaker 22:43
Should I do a different voice for Megan? So you know, when Megan speaking and when Paul speaking?
Unknown Speaker 22:48
Yeah, I do. Like I'll do like a slightly different voice for Megan. And then just in my normal voice. Well, Paul,
Unknown Speaker 22:54
what's always going to be the CDC is sponsoring a conference on obesity this week. In conjunction with this, the journal Health Affairs just published a study showing that almost 10% of US medical costs may be due to obesity. As we're debating the cost of public health care plan. Controlling obesity is moving even further to the forefront of American public health agenda. What should we think of this pool?
Unknown Speaker 23:23
It's a terrible idea on all sorts of levels. There are three big problems as attempting to control healthcare costs by reducing so called obesity. First, it's a vague problem. Second, the solutions for the problem a nonexistent even assuming the problem existed. Third, focusing on making American Center diverts resources from real public health issues.
Unknown Speaker 23:47
Megan, let's start with the first. Is there some one thing is that if there's one thing that everyone in America knows is that being fat is really unhealthy? Why do you call it a fake problem?
Unknown Speaker 24:04
The correlations between higher weight and greater health risk are weak except at statistical extremes. The extent to which these those correlations are causal is more is poorly established. There is literally not a shred of evidence at turning fat people into thin people improves their health. And the reason there's no evidence is that there's no way to do it. So saying let's improve health by turning fat people into thin people is every bit as irrational as saying let's improve health by turning men into women or old people into young people. Actually, it's a lot crazier ableist because there actually are significant health health differences between men and women and the young and old, much more so than between the fat and the thin.
Unknown Speaker 24:54
So why is it that the health public health community is so set on this issue?
Unknown Speaker 25:00
You as a major driver, or healthcare costs,
Unknown Speaker 25:04
because we're in the midst of a moral panic over fat which has transformed the heavier than average folk,
Unknown Speaker 25:12
heavier than average into folk devils, to whom all sorts of social ills are ascribed,
Unknown Speaker 25:19
assigned aside from rising healthcare costs, well, according to the obesity mafia,
Unknown Speaker 25:26
love that phrase, NBC mafia, kids are all going to die sooner than their parents, which sounds like a moral problem as well as one of one of healthcare costs. It's all complete nonsense. Do you think being overweight is a proxy for for things that do make a difference like fitness?
Unknown Speaker 25:46
It's a weak proxy. But yes, it has some magical marginal significance. It's good to encourage people of all sizes to be active and avoiding eating disorder behaviors, like dieting, but this isn't because lifestyle changes will make fat people thin. They won't. I'd like to talk a little bit about the statistics, if I may, please, we're all about statistics here. Okay. The CDC honchos and the authors of this study you referenced are in hysterics, because the obesity rate, so called has roughly doubled in the last 30 years, but let's consider what that actually means. Obesity is defined completely arbitrarily as a body mass index of x x x. Now, body mass follows more of a less normal distribution, more or less a normal distribution, which means if the mean body weight is in the mid to high 20s, which it has been for many decades now, then 10s of millions of people will have BMI just below or just above the magic 30 line. So if the average weight of the population goes up by 10 pounds, 10s of millions of people who were just under the line will now be just over it. This might be meaningful if there were was any evidence that people who have BMI in the low 30s have different average health than the people with BMI is in the high 20s. But they don't at all. So the obesity epidemic is 100%, a product of 10s of millions of people having their BMI is creep over an arbitrary line is exactly as sensible as declaring that people who are 511 are healthy, but people who are six one are sick. Adding to the absurdity of all of this people with BMI in that mid to high 20s actually have the best overall health and longest life expectancy, more so than those in the so called quote normal BMI range.
Unknown Speaker 28:03
So we can't save billions of dollars by making people thinner.
Unknown Speaker 28:08
Consider the methodology of this study, it tried to calculate changes in health costs, if everybody with a BMI over 30 had a BMI under 25. But leaving aside the preposterous assumption that all increased health risks associated with a level of body mass are caused by that level of body mass. The idea that somehow we could make fat people into thin people is bizarre. A study like this isn't talking about turning an 180 pound woman into 165 pound woman, which, at least in theory might actually be possible. He's saying that because with when you're in a set weight range, right, our set weight is you know, been between 10 and 20 pounds. And so it's kind of like losing weight to be in that set weight range is is more likely possible. And especially short term it is then losing weight from outside of your setpoint range continuing it's talking about turning a 200 pound woman into 130 pound woman on statistical average, the success rate for such attempts is around about 0.1% I'm going to read the whole thing I started like this isn't talking about turning in 180 pound woman into 165 pound pound woman is talking about turning a 200 pound woman into 130 pound woman. On statistical average, the success rate for such attempts is around 0.1% Even stomach amputation does not turn fat people into thin people. So even if there are if it is true that we knew it would be beneficial to turn fat people into thin people, which we don't. It's not something we have any idea how to do the statements in the study indicating that there are known methods for doing this
Unknown Speaker 30:00
are simply lies of the most egregious sort. Now let's talk about excess health care costs. If you look at the study, nearly half of the excess health care costs associated with being fat, have our higher rates of drug prescription. But Why Are Fat People being prescribed more drugs and largely because they have the quote disease of being fat, which is then treated directly and indirectly by prescription drugs, for instance, statins, statins are a multibillion dollar business, but there's very little statistical evidence that they benefit the mass vast majority of people to whom they're prescribed. Basically, the only people who have lower CVD cardiovascular disease, mortality after taking statins are middle aged men with a history of CVD. But the heavier than average are prescribed statins at higher rates simply because they're heavier than average, even though that's no evidence this is beneficial for them. And of course, this doesn't touch touch on the cost of all the treatments for obesity in itself which are uniformly ineffective. Also here I would add in that Paul's not mentioned is that fat people are are treated or tested more often, right? So fat people if a fat person walks in, and it's like oh shit, we need to test that motherfucker for for for diabetes because they're fat. Whereas a fat whereas a thin person is under diagnosed because it's not likely that that a doctor and nurses has some sort of history or signs or whatever is one thing person's body and say we need to run tests.
Unknown Speaker 31:37
I know like my blood work might fucking how like, you've got a history of my life and blood work
Unknown Speaker 31:44
forever, right? I feel like I've been tested for everything.
Unknown Speaker 31:48
And I wonder if that would be the same if I was thin? I don't know. But I know that that fat people are more routinely checked for certain things because people are just doctors, healthcare providers presume that
Unknown Speaker 32:03
there's health risks there. And therefore then there's going to be more money spent on fat people versus thin people because thin people aren't getting the treatment that they deserve. And fat people are being tested more often for things that they might not have.
Unknown Speaker 32:18
Continuing so this is Megan, you're saying that increased risks from being heavy come from what having gained weight in the first place bad genetics or dieting.
Unknown Speaker 32:29
As for where the increased risks associated with being heavy come from, such as they are, many of them come from weight cycling, which is clearly bad for people and which is the outcome of 98% of diets. Others come from the stress and stress and social discrimination generated by having what's considered an inappropriate cult body and its culture. Other comes from diet drugs, eating disordered behavior, like dieting poverty, all the things strongly associated with higher higher than average weight.
Unknown Speaker 33:00
This is me talking now since this this article since Paul's been speaking about this research has come out to show that there's there's literally hundreds of reasons why white people are fat. And
Unknown Speaker 33:14
and the risks are exactly what he's saying. Is this stuff, right?
Unknown Speaker 33:20
Yeah, continuing Megan says, What about gastric bypass? The quoted figures for gastric bypass seem pretty impressive when doctors talk about them on television. Great question, Megan. I'm thinking gastric bypass is surgically induced bulimia people start for the first few months. So of course there but blood sugar levels go down at five and 10 year follow up. The average weight loss from these procedures is about 10 to 15% of body mass. It's actually less than that since lots of people drop out from the studies, which means most of these people will still end up quote, morbidly obese and they can never eat normally again. Why do you think that we never see the actual stats for weight loss on stomach from stomach stapling. If they were good, they'd be on Billboard's 50 feet high. Yeah, right.
Unknown Speaker 34:09
Right. Megan says those shows on TLC that basically invite the audience to go get fat people usually say they'll lose 50% of their excess body weight. Notice how Megan says excess body weight as if the body weight is bad. Paul says if you put people on starvation diets, which is what these methods do, of course, you'll get huge amounts of weight loss, then most of all, or all of it will be gained back which among other things is a recipe for congestive heart failure? I'd love to do a quick reality show on the contestants on shows like The Biggest Loser three years down the road, but that would be probably a little bit too much reality. And actually since this has come out there wasn't an article study kind of follow up on the biggest losers to see how they're doing. What was it
Unknown Speaker 35:00
it what it was in the New York something, whatever.
Unknown Speaker 35:03
And basically, that they're fat right?
Unknown Speaker 35:07
On the ones that who have kept it off or are having to do really disordered things to keep it off.
Unknown Speaker 35:15
Paul continues, gastric bypass is the most radical method available for weight loss and it basically doesn't work. Everything else is is even less successful, though usually not quite as dangerous. Over the last five years or so I've noticed that public health efforts about obesity are not just amping up the volume, but exploring increasingly coercive methods to induce weight loss, taxes on junk food, lawsuits against fast food companies, which are basically tax on junk food and so forth. Does that match your analysis? Notice here how Meghan uses words like junk food, and that's that's stigmatizing right? A lot of people will eat convenience food. And that's what's available. That's what's easy. That's what filling and nutritious to feed the family. If you're you know, for many different reasons, and it doesn't make it junk.
Unknown Speaker 36:07
That's that's not Paul. That's me saying that it's kind of like pointing out the things which are my color, though. We weird. No, this is 10 years later, I probably change a few things here.
Unknown Speaker 36:19
Not that I did it. But you know, Paul says it's a classic pattern of moral panics. As public concern about the damage being done to the fabric of society by the folk devils increases, increasingly intense demands are made on public officials to do something about the crisis, usually by a limited eliminating the folk devils.
Unknown Speaker 36:41
Yeah, that kind of hand wringing, do something about this, you have to do something. And you know, policymakers who, who don't understand. Don't know what's going on is like, oh, okay, well, I'll put a tax on, on food and
Unknown Speaker 36:58
taxing food that's going to help make sure that poor fat people die. Yes, great idea. Continuing that, that, of course, is a strategy for this crisis crisis. If fat people are the problem, then the solution is to get rid of them by making them thin people. The most amazing aspect of this whole thing for me has always been the imperviousness of policymakers, and even more so people who consider themselves serious academics and scientists, the overwhelming evidence that there is no way to do this. I mean, there's no better established empirical proposition in medical science that we don't know how to make people thinner. But apparently, this proposition is too disturbing to consider, even though it's it's about as well established as cigarettes causing lung cancer. So all of these proposals about improving public health by making people thinner are completely crazy. ableist they are nonsensical as anything being promoted proposed by public officials in our culture right now, which is saying something.
Unknown Speaker 38:00
Yeah, like, it makes me think about, you know, policymakers or scientists or whoever.
Unknown Speaker 38:08
And now even in nowadays, right, it's very well established that we can't make fat people thinner.
Unknown Speaker 38:16
How it's almost like,
Unknown Speaker 38:20
then like zombies, right? Something has overtaken their brain.
Unknown Speaker 38:25
Right? This, whatever it is, that happens to zombies. And in our society, we've got the idea of fat people or unhealthy fat people who just lose weight, you know, all of these things that we just quote, no.
Unknown Speaker 38:40
And no amount of evidence, even if they're there, they're doing the work themselves, and they know that there is no evidence to prove that we can make fat people thinner. And that fat is not necessarily unhealthy. It doesn't matter like same with a zombie. It doesn't matter if you would reason with a zombie. If you said, Hey, zombie, please don't eat me. The zombies like give me your brains. Give me your brains. And it's the same with, you know, like, obesity researchers. They're just like, I don't care. Because I think that it's bad to be fat. There's no reasoning, there's kind of like they just want to they just come in for the phase, you know, they come for the phase, I think the phase should just go away and stop being fat.
Unknown Speaker 39:22
And that's how I kind of see it of, Oh, my goodness, sometimes there's just no reasoning. You just have to run yes or run.
Unknown Speaker 39:32
Continuing, it's conceivable that through some massive policy interventions, you might be able to reduce the populations average BMI from 27 to 25, or something like that. But what would be the point there aren't any health differences to speak of for people between BMI of about 20 and 35. So undertaking the public health equivalent of the Apollo program to reduce a populaces average BMI by a unit or two and again,
Unknown Speaker 40:00
Then I will emphasize that we don't actually know if we could even do that is an incredible waste of public health resources.
Unknown Speaker 40:10
The idea I'm hearing now is that we need to change the environment. But of course, if losing a great deal of weight actually makes you unhealthier, that might not save us money. The other idea I'm hearing a lot is these days is that we have to save the kids intervene when they're young, so they're no get fat in the first place.
Unknown Speaker 40:28
So the strategies that have failed, so spec tacular, Lee with adults, tell them to exercise more and eat less and shame them about their weight will work with children. Because if there's one thing that kids need, it's to be made to feel bad about being fat. The current stigma stigmatization of fat kids is essentially child abuse is government policy. And the people behind it are, as far as I'm concerned, either incredibly stupid, ableism or very evil, or in some cases, both. Here's an idea, stop harassing people about their weight, because it appears that focusing on the idea that fat actually makes people fatter, because it appears that focusing on the idea, but focus on the idea that being fat actually makes people being paid, make people fatter. This would I'd say this would be a little bit I want to like point out here that that's not necessarily a bad thing, right? We're present we're positioning it as fatness increased fatness is a negative outcome, whereas it's just, you know, a different body size. And yes, there could be negative outcomes in regards to increase stigma and, and everything that comes from that. And, and what Paul's saying here is that it's doing the opposite that what people are trying to do, right, so if they genuinely want people to be thin, harassing them about being fat is not going to do that, right. At least there's an extremely strong correlation there. I bet if we stop demonizing fatness people would actually be a bit thinner. There, they'd certainly be happier and healthier.
Unknown Speaker 42:00
Megan says, What should we do instead, if you want to reduce healthcare costs, here are some proposed ideas I've heard taxes on soda, new urbanism, making people walk more. That's what new new urbanism is, bringing back physical education and schools make gym memberships tax deductible menu labeling? Will any of this make us healthier? If not thinner? And if not what will
Unknown Speaker 42:26
some of those ideas may have merit and merit independent of whether they'll make pin people thinner? They won't. It's good to encourage physical activity, but not if the purpose of encouraging it is to try and make people thinner, then it's counterproductive. People will be healthier if they're more active, and don't smoke, and if they avoid eating disorder behaviors, like dieting in particular, but Americans are actually very healthy and getting healthier all the time, despite the massive inefficiencies and dysfunctions of our healthcare system. Paul says another thing here, I'm not going to finish reading this but But Paul says nothing here is
Unknown Speaker 43:02
how people don't engage in, in, quote, health promoting behaviors because their health promoting it's because they will make them thin.
Unknown Speaker 43:13
And he says here, I know for a fact because they've told me that some public health officials engage in what they think of as a noble lie about the effects of physical activity on weight because they know people won't become more active just to be healthier. So the he's saying that public health officials are gay, he public health officials have told him that they lie about the fact that working out will make people thinner because it doesn't really it doesn't it doesn't have any effect on our on our weight.
Unknown Speaker 43:44
And so they lie about it, because people won't do it if they think this is what you know, the public health officials, people won't do it if they think that it's just going to be good for your health. They're doing it because
Unknown Speaker 43:58
they want to become thin. Yeah, so that's from the Atlantic so we talked about like the Oh, word epidemic of there and I want to go to a an oldie but a goodie. Well, it's actually a lot more recent underneath ones but
Unknown Speaker 44:16
the piece by your fat fat friend, Aubrey Gordon, the bizarre and racist history of the BMI. I'm going to tie all these things we're just I'm just putting all these like we're all these like ideas, concepts or whatever information out there and then I'm going to sew it all together. Okay. So I their bizarre and racist history of their BMI. So they just want to call it quote from here the body mass index was invented invented nearly 200 years ago by a Delphi quitter, let notably Cadillac and was not a physician, nor did he studied medicine. He was best known for his sociological work aimed at identifying the characteristics of long Moya, the average man whom do
Unknown Speaker 45:00
To quit let represented a social ideal Quizlet was Belgian publishing works in Western Europe during the early 19 century, a boom time for racists science. He is credited with CO founding the school of positive criminology, which asserted the dangerousness of the criminal to be the only measure of the extent to which he was punishable. That positive school laid the groundwork for criminologist like Cesar Lombroso, who believed that people of color was separate were a separate species. Homo criminalists long Lombroso argued were, quote, savages by birth, identified by physical characteristics that he claimed linked them to primates. For Lombroso people of color were some kind of subspecies congenially driven to commit crimes, in addition to paving the way for Lombroso his work what led was also credited with founding the field of Anthro
Unknown Speaker 46:07
poetry including the racist Sudha pseudoscience of phonology so phonology you remember in
Unknown Speaker 46:15
Django, when when Leo DiCaprio brings out
Unknown Speaker 46:22
a skull and so saying, okay, we can tell different races
Unknown Speaker 46:29
by this girl and this is why white people are better obviously, all of that is fucked up on bullshit
Unknown Speaker 46:36
and
Unknown Speaker 46:38
not true you know?
Unknown Speaker 46:40
But you know, this this is kind of like finding out the long way in the ideal man and man being the word exactly. Anyway, continuing to like believe that the mathematician mathematician, mathematical mean of a population was its ideal.
Unknown Speaker 47:00
And his desire to prove it resulted in the invention of the BMI a way of quantifying law Moya has weighed in initially called the Quizlet index Quizlet derived the formula basically, so based solely on the size and measurement of French and Scottish participants, that is the index was devised exclusively by and for Western Europeans. By the turn of the next century credits long Moya would be used as a measurement of fitness to parent and, and as a scientific justification for eugenics, the systemic sterilization of disabled people or autistic people, immigrants, poor people and people of color. While cat cutlets work was used to justify scientific racism for decades to come. He was clear about one aspect of the BMI. It was never intended as a measure for individual body fat build or health. For its invented, the BMI was a way of measuring populations, not individuals. And it was designed for the purpose, purposes of status statistics, not individual health.
Unknown Speaker 48:09
So
Unknown Speaker 48:11
do you remember Do you remember the episode where we talked about the psychology of hunger?
Unknown Speaker 48:19
And in there, we'll see Minnesota starvation experiments.
Unknown Speaker 48:25
The Minnesota starvation experiment was ran by Ancel Keys. So Ansell, so it worked, because the BMI wasn't called the BMI until Ancel. Keys got his hands on it. And he was basically like, Okay, well, we need to identify who is fat. Because,
Unknown Speaker 48:47
like, it might seem obvious to us now like us in this year that will obviously we know who's fat, because we will weigh them and because our eyeballs will tell us that they are fat. But actually, that's not helpful, right? It's like saying, Okay, here's a bag,
Unknown Speaker 49:12
we can see the size of the bag, but we don't know what's in the bag. So let's just measure the size of the bag to guess
Unknown Speaker 49:22
how much is in the back. And so how much fat tissue is in the body. We're going to measure how wide the bag is and how tall the bag is. And that's going to measure how much fat is in the body. Which you could open the bag and it could be filled with who knows what right. And anyway, even if it was filled with 100% fat or whatever. We don't know. We don't have the evidence to show that that is
Unknown Speaker 49:54
a negative thing. Right? So even if we could say okay, so this person is just
Unknown Speaker 50:00
Just 100% fat,
Unknown Speaker 50:03
no brain is just flat. And the BMI has told us this because we've measured their height and their weight. And the weight is how much gravity that they have.
Unknown Speaker 50:15
It's not then telling us much else. Right? And it's like this categorization of it's a disease but one of the the only thing about a disease
Unknown Speaker 50:28
what are the commonalities between diseases, you know, like, okay, so we can say that if someone has asthma, like me, I have asthma.
Unknown Speaker 50:39
Everyone who has asthma experiences,
Unknown Speaker 50:44
to certain degrees, shortness of breath,
Unknown Speaker 50:48
tightening of the airways,
Unknown Speaker 50:51
they will take an inhaler, they may need to have other
Unknown Speaker 50:56
things they also might have eczema.
Unknown Speaker 51:01
But the main thing is everyone will have tightening of my tightening of the chest some restriction and they won't be able to breathe properly. What is the what is the commonality between fat people apart from nothing? Right? There's no There's no kind of common outcome. There's no common.
Unknown Speaker 51:21
There's no I mean, connected clear kind of like okay, so fatness, the disease
Unknown Speaker 51:28
is here or the hearing here is what the outcomes of having the disease are. You know, every fat person, every fat person has heart disease, every fat person has type two diabetes every fat person, because that's not true. But hang on, they all have the disease of fatness.
Unknown Speaker 51:47
So surely it makes sense that there is commonalities. There's because it's not actually a disease, but it's been labeled a disease.
Unknown Speaker 51:56
So that we can sell drugs and get insurance companies to pay for drugs and we can continually stigmatize fat folks, because you know, and even though,
Unknown Speaker 52:07
you know, some people were like, well, if we say that fatness is a disease, it's going to stop stigma, stigmatization.
Unknown Speaker 52:16
Does anyone? Has anyone looked at the talk to the disability rights advocates, and said, how much how much stigmatization? Do people who have chronic illnesses disabilities experience do?
Unknown Speaker 52:32
Do they have a lack of stigmatization? No, they are really stigmatized. And obviously, it's, it's different for everybody with different marginalization that might come into play and different diseases be or disabilities being seen, as you know, quote, better than others, but I mean, shit that. No,
Unknown Speaker 52:55
no, no.
Unknown Speaker 52:59
Anyway, so, yeah, what I was going on talking about that was, yeah, Ansel keys, even when he was doing his kind of like, why do we define fat people? He was like, wow, the BMI is not that good, but it will do pig. You know, it's the best we've got. Because he was using calipers and water retention.
Unknown Speaker 53:24
And now we think about like water retention, that seems so funny and weird, like how we would decide a fat person about how much water they had in their body. And it seems funny and weird, because
Unknown Speaker 53:35
we're not used to it, but and it seems so obvious that will fatness is, is defined by way, but that's not obvious, because it doesn't make sense, right? The same way, like if you had gone with water, we'd be like we're obviously fatness is how much water you have in your body. And what do you mean, it's how much you gravity you have compared to the earth?
Unknown Speaker 53:58
That sounds weird. You know, it's just because it's just so normal for us.
Unknown Speaker 54:04
So, so, so, so So, so let me read this a little bit from here from Reagan. Chastain who it's it's titled Is it or it is wrong to charge large people more for insurance. And in this, Reagan talks about the newer history of the VMI, and it's categories. So three members of the committee responsible for releasing the standards for obesity, including BMI as a risk measurement at the NIH, the National Institute of Health, I've should have included that but had ties had direct ties to pharmaceuticals, that managed manufactures diet pills for profits. Let me read that again without me interjecting. So and at the NIH, the three three members of the committee responsible for releasing the standards for OB
Unknown Speaker 55:00
BCT including BMI as a risk measurement had direct ties to pharmaceuticals that manufactured diet pills for profit. A fourth member was a lead scientist for the program advisory committee of Weight Watchers International. This committee advocated dieting for everyone who has a BMI more than 24. They shave 15 to 20 pounds off the definition of quote, ideal weight, which made over 60% of Americans overweight. Overnight. Soon, we were hearing that 300,000 deaths a year were attributable to obesity. In January 2005, the CDC came out with the new quote obesity and death figures, these figures stated that no more than 110,000 deaths per year could be connected in any way with obesity. That's a Catherine Fliegl thing. They also stated that the link may be a weak one. And so even with that 110,000 ones that's associated with fatness, the link quote, maybe a weak one, the lead scientists of the CDC also said that a critical analysis of their data found that people whose weight fell within the overweight obese and severely obese BMI ranges tended to live longer than those whose weights fell within the so called, quote, normal BMI range, Jules.
Unknown Speaker 56:28
Also,
Unknown Speaker 56:30
I want to point out here is that, you know, how, you know, everything that we talked about, it's so kind of US centric, right? And, and, and then also, like UK centric, maybe in Canada centric. Did you know that the BMI categories all over the world are different? Right? So you could go travel to
Unknown Speaker 56:52
one country and then suddenly be quote, a normal way and then travel to another one and then suddenly be overweight?
Unknown Speaker 57:00
And it's not true, right? In regards to us, your weight has not changed is that someone? Somewhere? A group of people have decided to fuck it. I think that's what fat is. Yeah, fuck it. Wow, why not? You know? And also the numbers the numbers of, okay, well, you know how it's 25 to 3030 to 3535 to 40. They just said,
Unknown Speaker 57:29
it sounds good.
Unknown Speaker 57:31
If the if five, five point difference between them. That sounds good. There's no stats behind it. There's no evidence to say, actually, you know, what, if someone it goes from 29 to 30, then that's when shit gets real. And I really just go into like, you know, death fat? No, they just thought it sounded easy to remember.
Unknown Speaker 57:55
Science. So is obesity is every see epidemic real. So I want to kind of wrap it, wrap it wrap this with a ribbon. epidemic, the word
Unknown Speaker 58:11
means
Unknown Speaker 58:13
affecting or tending to affect a disproportionately large number of individuals within a population, community or region at the same time.
Unknown Speaker 58:23
Excessively prevalent, contagious, right? So
Unknown Speaker 58:29
what we know is,
Unknown Speaker 58:32
slowly over a few decades, people got fatter. The people who got fatter were the people who are already fat and straight size people didn't tend to get fat, this is leveled off.
Unknown Speaker 58:49
And even if there was like this huge rise in fatness, oh my god, everyone is fat overnight. Which, by the way, you know,
Unknown Speaker 59:01
when that happened is when the NIH was like, let's just change the let's change the numbers.
Unknown Speaker 59:11
Even if people even if 100% of the population was fat, okay, imagine that the population was fat. We don't have evidence to suggest that
Unknown Speaker 59:23
fatness causes poor health outcomes. Correlation is not causation. We have evidence to show that being fat
Unknown Speaker 59:34
reduces mortality.
Unknown Speaker 59:38
And we have no evidence to show how we can make fat people thin or even if we could make fat people thin that it would have any health benefits. In fact, we have evidence to show that it does the opposite has health consequences. So
Unknown Speaker 59:59
it's like say
Unknown Speaker 1:00:00
Hearing
Unknown Speaker 1:00:02
We have an epidemic of people with brown hair.
Unknown Speaker 1:00:08
Since 1980, to 2000, the number of brown haired people walking around the streets with their brown hair is disproportionately large. It's excessively prevalent, and it's contagious.
Unknown Speaker 1:00:28
And the reason why that sounds silly is because we know that brown hair is just a normal trait of being a human being.
Unknown Speaker 1:00:37
We don't think brown hair,
Unknown Speaker 1:00:42
it means that the person is unhealthy, that they're going to die. And that they should just change their hair color to red hair or whatever.
Unknown Speaker 1:00:53
We're just like, Well,
Unknown Speaker 1:00:57
okay, so there's more brown haired people. That's interesting. I wonder why, you know, you might be like, well, you know, whatever. Or, you know, whatever, whatever characteristic about a person which which is not actually
Unknown Speaker 1:01:12
something that we need to be alarmed about.
Unknown Speaker 1:01:15
But because of the way that we view fatness in our society, we're alarmed if there are more fat people around, even if it's not that many more fat people.
Unknown Speaker 1:01:28
Even if we know that you can be fat and healthy.
Unknown Speaker 1:01:33
Even if we know that
Unknown Speaker 1:01:37
fat people can't die from being fat, right? You can't die from being fat you you die from things that are related to fatness and we know that we can treat those things outside of weight loss. There are more
Unknown Speaker 1:01:50
fat people than there were.
Unknown Speaker 1:01:54
Previously, we are
Unknown Speaker 1:01:58
healthier
Unknown Speaker 1:02:01
as a society than ever before in human history.
Unknown Speaker 1:02:06
So fatness does not mean that story increase of fat people does not mean that we are unhealthy, that that that well known quote of children are going to die before their parents was based on some gastroenterologists quote, intuition. Yeah. So basically, in a nutshell, I'd say, you know, there we say everyday America is just a load of bullshit, right? It's just a load of fat stigma. It's just a load of fat phobia. It's just loaded up shirt.
Unknown Speaker 1:02:37
Okay, so let's get all that information. And just one little thing here. So is the O word epidemic real. So first, let's look at the word epidemic epidemic means affecting a disproportionately large number of individuals within a populous community or region at the same time, excessively prevalence, contagious. So the only reason that there were suddenly millions more fat people overnight is because the National Institutes of Health changed the BMI categories. Fat people have been getting a little bit fatter since the 1970s 1980s, up to the 2000s. But straight size, people haven't been getting fatter. So the fat people have been getting a little bit fatter, but straight sides, people haven't been moving into that fat category.
Unknown Speaker 1:03:31
The obesity epidemic is based on the BMI which is 200 years old, the data was collected from European white, presume is presumably sis men was never meant to measure individuals or health at all. It's just really just not based in science and is just no way to measure anything apart from someone's height divided by their,
Unknown Speaker 1:04:03
their weight.
Unknown Speaker 1:04:05
The third thing here to consider is that the categories of what normal weight and overweight have been that they've been changed many times. And and that's because of the influence of lobbying, influence and lobbying of diet companies. Also their arbitrary numbers, they're literally made up and they said, let's just round it to five because five sounds good. It's easy to remember. So 25 To 3035 to 40, etc.
Unknown Speaker 1:04:36
is not based on anything. It's just because it was sounds good. And it's easy to remember, the most recent change in 1998 from the NIH sparked the rhetoric around this epidemic, which came from that overnight change in numbers on our chart. So a group of people got together in a room and was like, okay, so we think we should lower what fatness is
Unknown Speaker 1:05:00
is lower the numbers? Oh, turns out we've got millions of fat people just rolling around the streets and yesterday we didn't it's an epidemic, is it? Or is it just a change in some numbers.
Unknown Speaker 1:05:14
It also then presumes that people who fall into higher weight categories are automatically unhealthy and a burden on society do due to increased fat or weight on their body. There is no evidence to prove that actually having more adipose tissue which is fat tissue on your body leads to poor health outcomes. What we do know that causes poor health outcomes is one weight cycling, which is yo yo dieting or dieting to subpar or lack of access to health care, and three experiencing weight bias or stress, or that comes from that. Remember, correlation is not causation. We also have great evidence to show that quote, overweight people have reduced mortality compared to quote normal weight people, which is called the obesity paradox, a paradox being hmm, we thought that fat people were dying all over the place, but they ain't. It's a paradox. And the word paradox means a seemingly absurd or absurd or self contradictory statement or proposition that when investigated, or explained, may prove to be well founded or true. And so yeah, for years, we've had have evidence that we, you know, health outcomes of fat folks is not due to increased fat tissue.
Unknown Speaker 1:06:50
And so we know that it's coming from if it's if it is there, from other things, but then when evidence show there's there's decreased mortality in fat folks, people are like, Oh my God, it can't be true, even though there's many, there's many years of evidence to show that it's okay to be fat.
Unknown Speaker 1:07:10
Also, you cannot die from fatness, right? You can die from things that are associated with fatness. But again, it is not proven, that fatness in and of itself causes these negative outcomes. And let's just say we ignore all that, let's say that we are in an obesity epidemic. Making a fat person into a smaller person doesn't mean that they will then same that have the same health outcomes as that smaller person pursuing health outside of weight loss is possible and proven. Also, there are zero peer reviewed, controlled clinical studies that show any method of internet intentional weight loss works in the long term. So is the obesity epidemic real doesn't show that there's any evidence that it's this thing where fat people are running around the streets and eating babies. And even if it was real, we don't have evidence to say that being fat makes you inherently unhealthy. Or that we can
Unknown Speaker 1:08:26
lose weight in any way. So I mean, the obesity epidemic basically, is just a load of fat phobia, weight stigma, weight bias, moral panic about fat bodies, and we need to stop talking about it. Because it's not real and it's fucked up. Air Okay, so
Unknown Speaker 1:08:52
hopefully I tied everything together for you there.
Unknown Speaker 1:08:59
Yeah, so when you're at the new next dinner party, and, you know,
Unknown Speaker 1:09:04
cousin Keith says Allah
Unknown Speaker 1:09:09
says that basically, they'll say something about fatness and you'll hear blah, blah, blah. And then you can say you did but if you do hear you
Unknown Speaker 1:09:19
that's what you know, we've talked about in this episode, as
Unknown Speaker 1:09:24
well, thanks for hanging out with me today. If you like the show, when you really want to you can send a review on Apple podcasts. That would be cool. It would make me happy. If you don't want to you don't have to, but it would be really cool if he did.
Unknown Speaker 1:09:45
That's the show. Thanks for having hanging out. Stay fares, fatty and I'll see you in a while.
Unknown Speaker 1:09:51
Alligator Guggulu.