I’m going to post a couple links to sources for the next couple days to hopefully start a conversation in this space! These will fall in the area of Fat Studies and there’s some norms you should be aware of:
- “fat” is taken as a neutral descriptor, think of it as reclaiming the word.
- “obese” arbitrarily medicalises fatness and Others fat people
I’m a cis man and I have (had) body image issues (in the past)
https://humanparts.medium.com/my-journey-toward-radical-body-positivity-3412796df8ff
I’m queer and fat
https://www.dropbox.com/s/yeefpijtl4s7orv/Flaunting Fat – Sex with the Lights On.pdf?dl=0
I’m queer and not fat
https://www.removedmedia.org/post/fat-liberation-is-totally-queer
The others don’t apply to me and/or I only have the energy/time to read one source
https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/everything-you-know-about-obesity-is-wrong/
:sankara-salute:
I think that Huffington Post article has some good points about how obesity should be addressed on a personal level and how the American medical system will never be able to actually address this issue. But I don’t think they approach the weight/health problem very well. They mention that weight isn’t inherently tied to health because 1/3 to 3/4 of obese patients may show no signs of high cholesterol or insulin resistance. However, obesity is like smoking in that you could take a cross section of smokers and find that a large portion of them are healthy. The real issue is that being obese or smoking are drastically increasing the odds of negative medical outcomes in the future.
I’ll post some sources about BMI tomorrow, however I direct you to this study which shows that it’s not as simple as fat = bad https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/02/health/study-suggests-lower-death-risk-for-the-overweight.html
Oh I agree that you can’t say fat=bad I was referring more to higher levels of obesity, which as that NYtimes article says is a large risk. The issue with that NYtimes article though is that the study isn’t really drawing a meaningful conclusion. Saying mortality rate is the end all be all is very misleading. I’m hoping that’s just an issue with the pop science reporting of the times and not the actual study, because the link to the actual study is dead.
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Ah yeah that’s what I feared. It’s similar to that study that was going around on reddit that claimed veganism is bad because vegans have a higher overall mortality rate but it also failed to take into account correlating factors. The amount of shitty science and shitty science reporting being done cannot be good for convincing the general public to trust the science of climage change.
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