Again, I Say “Duh”

Wow! Just a few YEARS after studies showed that overweight and even moderately obese people lived as long or longer than their normal weight fellows, scientists and newspapers have started to report that that overweight and even moderately obese people live as long or longer than their normal weight fellows! It is amazing!

The same article also reported that “Experts also said the data suggested that the definition of “normal” B.M.I., 18.5 to 24.9, should be revised, excluding its lowest weights, which might be too thin.” Moreover, while “The study did show that the two highest obesity categories (B.M.I. of 35 and up) are at high risk” it turns out that this only held true until people were out of middle age, because “people 65 and over had no greater mortality risk even at high obesity.” And lest we forget, “studies on specific illnesses, like heart and kidney disease, have found an “obesity paradox,” that heavier patients are less likely to die.”

It even turns out that “Fat per se is not as bad as we thought,” said Dr. Kamyar Kalantar-Zadeh, professor of medicine and public health at the University of California, Irvine. “What is bad is a type of fat that is inside your belly … Non-belly fat, underneath your skin in your thigh and your butt area — these are not necessarily bad.” He added that, to a point, extra fat is accompanied by extra muscle, which can be healthy.”

Nevertheless, the article could not let all this information making fat a normal concept instead of the death-bogeyman used to shame and discriminate against fat people slide by without making at least some attempt to reinforce the idea that us lard asses are axiomatically unhealthy. Nope. Readers had to be warned not to “scrap those New Year’s weight-loss resolutions and start gorging on fried Belgian waffles or triple cheeseburgers” because fat people only become fat by eating unhealthy foods in vast amounts like the gluttonous sub-human pigs they are. Readers were also cautioned that although “the research said it suggested that overweight people need not panic unless they have other indicators of poor health and that depending on where fat is in the body, it might be protective or even nutritional for older or sicker people … over all, piling on pounds and becoming more than slightly obese remains dangerous.” They don’t really go into WHY readers should continue to think fat is death and the fatter you are the more dead you will become, but by gum experts know that the only thing stopping everyone from weighing 350 pounds is their self control in the face of cheesecake. Not genetic or socio-economic factors, mind you.  It’s just non-fat people don’t let themselves go and MUST continue not to let themselves go! 

“We wouldn’t want people to think, ‘Well, I can take a pass and gain more weight,’ ” said Dr. George Blackburn, associate director of Harvard Medical School’s nutrition division.

Yeah. Imagine if people didn’t feel fear and self-loathing when they gained weight! What a crisis!

To make sure the fear of the “ unhealthy” and thus “abnormal” body was still going strong, the article shook it’s finger in the readers face and scolded that “death is not everything. Even if “being overweight doesn’t increase your risk of dying,” Dr. Klein said, it “does increase your risk of having diabetes” or other conditions.”

Yeah! So you may not die younger, but you would still be an unhealthy burden on everyone else, you grotesque fatty!

Of course, science suggests that short guys live longer, meaning that to be really tall is to court the Grim Reaper as well as a basketball scholarship, but no one is out there leading the charge to stunt people’s growth for their own damn good. There has been no society revulsion toward tall people.  They are not even extended pity for their unfortunate genetics. No, that bullshit is reserved for fat people.

It is almost like fat is more about cultural control of the social body than about the individual’s health! Golly! Who knew??

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