What I think is really going on in the war on trans fat.

William Saletan on the "war on fat":

The whole world is engulfed in a war on fat. On one side are health crusaders. On the other side are food sellers and libertarians. Lately, the health costs of obesity have prodded politicians into the war, shifting the balance of power to the crusaders.

I simply do not believe that the so-called health side is really composed of people who are solicitous about everyone else's health. I can't prove it, but my intuition is that all the strength on the "health" side of this war comes not from people who really care whether other people are healthy, but from people who don't like having to see fat people. They are concerned about their own aesthetic pleasures, and they think fat is ugly. And that argument about how much money fat people are costing us? I say it's bogus... a strategy to win more support for more restrictions. Fat people burden the taxpayers? I simply don't believe it. I'm sure fat people have various ailments they need to put up with, and some of these are going to tap into public funding -- drug benefits for blood pressure medicine, amputations, and so on. But what about the offsets? They are going to die younger. (On average. Not you, of course.) I don't trust the numbers concocted by the people who want to intrude here. Those who want to be left alone don't work hard enough at putting together their own facts. Saletan:

Purging trans fats in New York would save at least 500 lives a year and possibly 1,400, said the health department. That's more than the number saved by seat belts.

Where does that number come from? If people are dying of trans fat, won't we save on Social Security and Medicare? If fat is so fatal, why do fat people walk among us?

The instigator of the New York ban, city health Commissioner Thomas Frieden, says chronic diseases such as obesity and diabetes are eclipsing infectious diseases. Most experts and politicians share that view. We already regulate restaurants for infectious disease; why not extend that scrutiny to chronic disease?

Regulate restaurants because they cause the "disease" of making people fat. That's the argument. But he's NYC's health commissioner. He must have thought this through. You remember Frieden. He's the guy who offered the explanation “This is something we hadn’t fully thought through, frankly,” when withdrawing that proposal to let people change their sex on their birth certificates, even if they hadn't had sex reassignment surgery. (Are you fat? Try the Atkins diet! It's about eating fat.) ADDED: I should add that I do realize that trans fats and the fats that will substitute for them are equally caloric, and presumably equally fattening. Saletan's piece is clear on this point, and I assumed readers would take the linked article as background and assume that I understood it. But I see from the comments that some readers think I didn't. Nevertheless, it's fair to ask why I think people are really alarmed about appearances, not health, when they back a regulation like this, considering that it's rather unlikely to make anyone thinner. I'm talking about the emotions here, not reason. I think people are buying into the theory that the food industry is nefarious and must be controlled because they see a problem and they want a villain. People support ineffective regulation all the time: they want to see something done. Look at all the people fretting about "high fructose corn syrup," with assertions that it's making everyone fat, even though, if it were banned, other, equally caloric sugars would be substituted. Yet people think there's some special problem with the stuff. They want to blame the food industry. One thing I didn't think about, however, and wish I'd put in the original post, is that plenty of fat people themselves support regulation like this. It's not just a matter of feeling alarmed about what is happening to other people. Some of this is alarm about one's own body. People cannot control their own weight, so it must be some outside force making them fat. This failure to take personal responsibility is a downward spiral. There will never be enough regulation to make people thin. After every ban, people will wolf down whatever is still legal, and then cry for more help. If you keep an honest tally of how many calories you consume, you'll see it's your own fault if you're fat. It may be a terrible fault to overcome, but it is still your fault. If you think it isn't, it will only become harder to overcome. Which may be why people are getting so fat. They've been lured into thinking that their bodies are not their own responsibility.

"We're all fat," said Trump, last night, in his big — really big — big fat rally in Wildwood, New Jersey.

New Jersey! He came to New Jersey. They capture him in the courtroom 4 days out of the week, and they seem to be hoping he'll barely be able to campaign, but there he was, expanding his scope beyond the battleground states and into one of Biden's supposedly safe states, New Jersey.

I see how the mainstream media has been covering the rally. WaPo has "Trump insults prosecutor at Jersey Shore rally filled with vulgar jabs/The presumptive Republican nominee spoke at a large rally where there were plenty of personal attacks and vulgar expressions from Trump and his supporters." Large? How large? WaPo says "thousands," but Trump was saying 80,000. 

Anyway, I watched the whole thing, and I heard the "vulgar jabs." I just wanted to quote this:

You look at the Afghanistan disaster. You look at the border. You look at the real economy, not the fake economy. Everything they touch turns to what?

The thousands cry out "Shit!" He teasingly chides:

You shouldn't use that kind of language. Look, you can't use the word "shit," okay? 

Mysterious fat.

We're still talking about fat. Back here.

Freeman Hunt said:

[I]t ... comes down to math... There is no mystery to getting in shape.

Noumenon said:

I think it's a complete mystery. As some magazine article I read pointed out, it's impossible to do controlled experiments with diet regimens because there's no proven way to lose weight and keep it off to use as a control group. We haven't a clue.

I said:

I agree that it's a mystery, but you can extract one truth: if you're still fat, you need to eat less. It doesn't matter why other people don't get fat when they seem to eat the same thing. Look at your own situation. If you're still fat, cut down. Eat less, and weigh yourself. Do it every day for the rest of your life. There's nothing wrong with you. It's just the natural impulse that allowed your ancestors to survive through famines. You have a healthy urge and a healthy body, but in times of affluence, that will make you fat. You've got to go against your nature and eat less. Until you're not fat any more. Or, as Roseanne Barr once said: "Just be fat and shut up."

UPDATE: Some people are getting very upset at that Roseanne Barr quote -- which is from that great concert she did before she had her sitcom. It's almost as if people don't remember that she's a comedian... and that she's fat. Some folks are reading this post as insulting fat people and calling them lazy. Huh? Where is that? And many, many of the comments here and on other blogs are testament to how amazingly strong the mental defenses are. People simply do not want to face the fact that if they are fat they've been eating too much, which is all I said. It is utterly irrelevant to that point that some people can eat a lot more than others without getting fat or that if you'd exercise more you could get away with eating more. If you are fat, you are eating more than you need to fuel your body as you are using it. That doesn't mean it's easy to just eat less, and it doesn't mean that there aren't some ways of eating less that are better than others. But, good lord, it's absurd to keep denying that you're fat because you're eating too much!

"Is the rise of central heating a contributor to the obesity epidemic?"

Asks Instapundit, linking to Stephan Guyenet, a neurobiologist, who describes some biological processes related to brown fat (fat with lots of mitochondria) and thermogenesis (activated by the brain). Maybe the lack of exposure to cold air is keeping the brain from activating the brown fat? Guyenet describes a study:

The protocol involved exposing people to 60 F (15-16 C) air for two hours on day 1, four hours on day 2, and six hours on days 3-10. Although I assume they were lightly clothed, this is a pretty mild cold exposure.

Here in Wisconsin, where I'm only hoping for temperatures above zero and wind chills above the negative single digits, we set the thermostat at 60° so it's interesting to hear this called "pretty mild cold exposure."

"[D]on’t do me any favors. The last thing I need is someone telling me it’s okay to be fat."

Says a fat man, objecting to the following emergent dogma:

Telling fat people they ought to be thin is about as helpful as telling gay people they should be straight. It took many decades for the medical establishment to recognize that its “cures” for “homosexuality” did far more damage than the imaginary disease to which they were addressed, and that the biggest favor it could do for gay people was to stop harassing them. Fat people are still waiting for the same favor.

Let's bring in Ricky Gervais:

"Was SNL’s Take on Sarah Huckabee Sanders Sexist?"

"Critics are arguing that Saturday Night Live’s spoof of White House deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders took low blows at her weight," reports The Daily Beast.

“I will say this: you guys were mean about Huckabee Sanders,” CNN’s New Day co-host Chris Cuomo said on the morning program. “You were fat-shaming her. You were talking about how she looks and what she wears. I thought it was mean, not funny.”...

Regardless of where you fall on the matter of offense, it is certainly lazy to go after a woman’s appearance as the sole source of comedy. Surely there are other punchlines—Sanders’ brusque, exasperated demeanor, her poor grasp of the meaning of “atrocities”—that don’t mock her body image.

ADDED: Ricky Gervais — an actual gifted (and fat) comedian — has strongly and on many occasions defending making fun of fatness. Example:

I heard someone on the radio once say that they were tired of the prejudice aimed at the overweight. They said something like "you're not allowed to make fun of gay people, so why are you allowed to make fun of fat people? It's the same thing."

It's not the same thing though, is it? Gay people are born that way. They didn't work at becoming gay. Fat people became fat because they would rather be that way than stop eating so much. They had to eat and eat to get fat. Then, when they were fat they had to keep up the eating to stay fat. For gayness to be the same as fatness, gay people would have to start off straight but then ween themselves onto cock. Soon they're noshing all day getting gayer and gayer. They've had more than enough cock... they're full... they're just sucking for the sake of it. Now they're overgay, and frowned upon by people who can have the occasional cock but not over indulge.

When a doctor tells me that that's how you become gay, I'll stop making jokes about fat people.

I think what that mostly proves is that if you are funny enough, you can joke about anything. Here's George Carlin's classic defense of that concept.

Now, I haven't watched the SNL about Sarah Huckabee Sanders, but I think it might be that they just show her eating. Is that funny enough? I don't know. Depends on how they do it! I remember years ago on SNL, John Belushi playing the role of Elizabeth Taylor — at a time when Liz was pretty fat — and just having her eat, but it was funny eating.

"A magazine like that has never put someone like me, an actual fat body, on the cover of a magazine."

"To be on a glossy where you can actually see my body, they haven't altered how I look, makes me really, really proud. It not only meant a lot to me, but the work that I'm doing, which would therefore impact millions of bodies that look like mine.... I'm saying that I love myself and because that happens to be coming from a fat body and a bigger body like mine, people then equate it saying 'I'm promoting obesity and that I'm unhealthy.' Even if it was what I do with my body it's no-one's business."

Said Tess Holliday, quoted at BBC.

Here's the cover:

Yes, that's a Miss Piggy tattoo on the right forearm.

What to make of the top story, "Is Success an Illness"? I can't find the article on line, so you'll just have to go with the title and its context on that cover. And the subtitle: "The high-fliers 'killing it' at work." And I'd put that in the context of this NYT article, "How to Retire in Your 30s With $1 Million in the Bank/Fed up with their high-pressure jobs, some millennials are quitting and embracing the FIRE movement. (It stands for financial independence, retire early)":

Carl Jensen experienced what he calls “the awakening” sometime around 2012. He was a software engineer in a suburb of Denver, writing code for a medical device. The job was high-pressure.... Mr. Jensen was making about $110,000 a year and had benefits, but the stress hardly seemed worth it. He couldn’t unwind with his family after work; he spent days huddled over the toilet. He lost 10 pounds.

He was losing weight. He figured out how to retire at 43. No word on his current weight. Hey, this is a great article on a subject I love and it does mention the old book I would have called it remiss not to mention. So I'll do a new post about this article. Please save you comments on the precise topic of retirement and concentrate on the fat cover model and what it means. (My tag for the subject has always been "fat," and I've been criticized for it, but I believe that calling fat "fat" has been the right word ever since the 1970s, when I picked up the book "Fat Is A Feminist Issue" at a friend's house and read it straight through while she was cooking dinner. And I note that Holliday said "fat" — "someone like me, an actual fat body.")

Here's Cosmo's own story about Holliday. Her Instagram hashtag campaign is #effyourbeautystandards. From the Cosmo article:

The five-foot-three model explained: "I was a US size 16 to 18 my entire life before I had Rylee [her first son, who she had at 20]. I look back on those photos now and I don’t wish I was that size, but what I wish is that I loved myself 120 pounds ago.... I’m at the heaviest I’ve ever been in my life now and it took me being the heaviest to finally love myself... I have had people say to me: 'Shut up already with your diversity. You’ve already made it.' But I’m not talking about me and my career. I’m talking about the tonne of models out there who don’t have the opportunity because they don’t have three million followers on social media."

Tonne? Is it just British Cosmopolitan? Yes. At American Cosmopolitan, I'm reading "Can You Tell None of These Balmain Models Are Real?/Take a closer look":

I confess to staring at the picture long enough to muse about getting my haircut like the one on the right. It didn't occur to me that these weren't real people until I read the headline. That's how ruined my mind is! Despite reading "Fat Is a Feminist Issue" in the 1970s.

The idea and the visual images of making soap from liposuctioned human fat is already there in the book and movie "Fight Club," so...

... is it anything at all for an artist to actually do it — make the soap and even sell what is actually usable soap?

Vice tells us that the artist, Julian Hetzel, is Dutch and got his human fat from plastic surgeons in the Netherlands and that the final soap product only has 10% human fat. The artist clumsily instructs us about the intended meaning of his product (which is called Schuldfabrik):

"We decided to work with fat as a material that represents guilt or that contains guilt and to understand, can this be used as a resource?... Can we use guilt as something productive? Can we profit from our own guilt? How to make money with guilt."

Is it guilt or shame that drives people to liposuction? I would have said shame. Maybe it's a bad translation from the Dutch. According to Wikipedia:

Guilt is a cognitive or an emotional experience that occurs when a person believes or realizes—accurately or not—that they have compromised their own standards of conduct or have violated a universal moral standard and bear significant responsibility for that violation.

Wikipedia illustrates the concept with this image:



That's "Soul in Bondage" by Elihu Vedder, a painting from the 1890s. Is that more helpful in understanding guilt than Hetzel's soap made from liposuctioned fat? Vedder's soul doesn't seem to have any ideas about how to use guilt as something productive or how to make money at all.

If you choose to respond to the artist's prompt and analyze the meaning of his making soap from human fat, please take into account the historical antecedents. Here's the Wikipedia article, "Soap made from human corpses." Excerpts:

"Trump doesn’t look fastidiously tailored, which is probably one of the many reasons why the average voter can listen to him pound his chest and still relate."

"Trump may have his name plastered on assorted buildings, but he looks more like an ordinary, angry middle-management guy," writes Robin Givhan, criticizing Donald Trump's looks after criticizing Donald Trump for criticizing somebody else's looks.

The somebody else is an unnamed "guy" who "went crazy" about something Trump said about food stamps. Said guy was "seriously overweight." Givhan takes Trump to task for "fat-shaming" this man:

[M]ocking someone’s weight cuts at the core of personal appearance, societal prejudices and a fraught sense of insecurity that by all rights should not exist but stubbornly does. 

By all rights? Really? Isn't there at least a smidgen of justification for observing that the federal government spends our money on a program that feeds people who are, demonstrably, eating too much? Trump used a fairly respectful expression. He said:

You know, it’s amazing. I mentioned food stamps and that guy who is seriously overweight went crazy. He went crazy. . .  That’s an amazing sight.

It's not like he said I mentioned food stamps and that fat pig — huuuge pig — went crazy....

Givhan says "It is a fashion insult — of the pettiest sort," before proceeding to criticize the fit of Trump's suits, the color and length of his tie, and the strategy of the combover. She's not taking a 2-wrongs-make-a-right/tit-for-tat position. Trump's insult of the "seriously overweight" "guy" was "a visceral, intimate insult.... So Trump’s fat-shaming of a protester begs one to consider Trump’s own appearance." He was asking for it.

But does Givhan really need justification to launch into an analysis of how some politician looks? That's her beat as a columnist and has been for years. Since when does she need to build a foundation for her fashion critiques by demonstrating that her target has done fashion insults that cut to the core?

I had to think for a few seconds about that, and what I came up with was that she wanted to criticize Trump for talking about how a guy looks, but that risked hypocrisy, since she continually writes about how people look, and she's criticized for that. How to attack Trump without exposing herself to the same attack? And I think her first reaction to Trump's pointing out that some guy is fat was probably that Trump himself is fat. But it's not her taste level to write that somebody's fat.

So Givhan processed the temptation to say that Trump is fat into the assertion Trump worries about whether he looks fat. There's this anecdote from 1999, in which Trump comically exclaimed that some photo made him look "like I weighed 500 pounds!" But I think that little story displays Trump as openly expressive, feeling free to talk about weight, and not a shame-oriented kind of person.

But Givhan places a sound bet that Washington Post readers are shame-oriented and ready to loathe Trump for prodding them where it hurts and where liberals are telling them they're entitled not to hurt. And of course they're entitled to food stamps even if they're fat. That's not even an issue to discuss. But it's what Trump was discussing.

"[Seventy-eight percent] of hospitalizations due to COVID are Obese and Overweight people. Is there an underlying problem that perhaps we have not given enough attention to?"

"We cannot run away from it and no vaccine nor mask will save us (in full disclosure I am vaccinated and support others to get vaccinated).... Our best bet is to learn how to best live with it and focus on overall health [vs.] preventing infection..... We clearly have no problem with government overreach on how we live our lives all in the name of 'health.' What if we made the food that is making us sick illegal? What if we taxed processed food and refined sugar to pay for the impact of the pandemic? What if we incentivized health?" 

Wrote Jonathan Neman wrote, the Sweetgreen CEO, quoted in "Sweetgreen CEO criticized after connecting the pandemic to unhealthy eating: ‘Incredibly fat-phobic'" (MSN).

Obviously, he deserves extra scrutiny for promoting a government policy that would benefit his business. He sells salad. 

But does the criticism "fat-shaming" fit? Another way to put that is: Does broad use of the term "fat-shaming" dilute its effectiveness? I'm going to say yes. Here's my point. 

The narrow use of "fat-shaming" works very well to restrain people who, without social pressure, would express the opinion that people who are overweight look bad or have negative personality traits. It's good to whip out the easy 3-syllables — fat-shaming! — to push back louts who are insulting fat people. They are ugly and stupid, those louts.

But if the term "fat-shaming" gets bigger and bigger — out of control — it's going to lose its effectiveness. If it's used to intimidate anyone who wants to talk about obesity and health — chilling speech on an immensely important matter of personal and public concern — then those who are using the term may seem like truth-averse bullies. 

And yet, there's little use of "fat-shaming" to intimidate those who want to talk about obesity and Covid. The intimidation was so easy it happened with almost no discussion. All you need is the occasional "fat-shaming!" hurled at somebody like that Sweetgreen CEO, and you've squelched that whole branch of the conversation. Now, let's get back to talking about how people who don't get vaccines and wear masks are stupid and evil.

"We have a fat population, so why don’t we have a community?"

"We want to be a resource for people to feel loved and welcomed. We knew there was a need, and we knew that if we did something like this, people would show up," said Elizabeth Chinn, a founder  of Fat Babes Club of Columbus, quoted in "Hulu’s ‘Shrill’ popularized the body-positive pool party. These women threw their own/On a recent Saturday night, the Fat Babes Club of Columbus welcomed attendees with pool floaties and Lizzo tunes" at The Lily (the women's section of WaPo).

While “Shrill” normalized a body-positive pool party for streaming audiences, the goal of the Fat Babes Club pool party was to change perceptions through social media. “Since social media is a huge thing, we can construct a counter-narrative outside the mainstream,” said 28-year-old co-founder Krystal Orr. “We’re able to create a community.”

Here's the trailer for "Shrill" (with a "fat babes pool party" at 0:54):



Here's the Instagram announcement for the Fat Babes Club of Columbus pool party:

View this post on Instagram

Our first Body Positive Pool Party went so well that we are hosting another one ! 💦 MARK YOUR CALENDARS ! Aug 10th 8-11PM 💦 Thanks @tykoe for this amazing design ! We will be announcing ticket sales soon, multiple times, before they go live on @eventbrite 💕

A post shared by Fat Babes Club of Columbus (@fatbabesclubofcolumbus) on Jul 12, 2019 at 11:54am PDT

One more Instagram pic from the Columbus fat babes:

View this post on Instagram

Making BIG moves this morning 😉❤️

A post shared by Fat Babes Club of Columbus (@fatbabesclubofcolumbus) on Jul 2, 2019 at 8:13am PDT

"There was talk, at one point, of calling Aidy Bryant's show 'fat bitch'... the studio and network were like, 'Uh, no'...."

"But being fat is part of what the series is about. 'Shrill' is based on Lindy West’s memoir, sparked by her viral 2011 column, 'Hello, I Am Fat'... West’s story resonated with Bryant.... 'It is a descriptor and, like, I am fat,' says Bryant, 33. 'To me, it’s like taking the power out of it. It doesn’t have to be so loaded. It’s just true, and sitting with that, it makes it easier for me. It just feels a little less frightening.'... Will 'Shrill' leave a lasting impact on how fat people are treated in comedy? [Producer Lorne] Michaels was reminded of several popular, old SNL bits, including John Belushi gnawing on a chicken breast while playing Elizabeth Taylor and Chris Farley’s shirtless Chippendales dance. The late Farley’s sad description of his style was often 'fatty falls down.' 'How things change is really who’s doing the talking,' Michaels says. 'If it’s someone they trust as much as they trust Aidy, I think they’re much more willing to take what she says seriously. And that’s a good use of a comedy platform.'"

From a WaPo article about Bryant's TV show "Shrill." 

As I've said for many years, "fat" should not be treated as a bad word. We call people "skinny" — often as a compliment — and "fat" is the corresponding word on the other side of "normal." I know, you can attack "normal," but I'm thinking of those BMI charts that show a range called "normal," meaning that's what you ought to shoot for if you want your best health. 

Anyway... there's a long history to the comedy of fatness. There's good reason to have characters who just  happen to be fat and don't do much if anything comical with their bodies. But the body is an instrument that can be deployed comically, and there are special things that can be done with a fat body. Here's Fatty Arbuckle: 

(To comment, you can email me here, and I might publish what you write in an update to this post. Pithy, interesting comments that add something new to the conversation are most likely to make it.)

"It’s worth recalling that the very idea of 'fat' is a fairly recent creation."

"For most of human history, as Amy Farrell, a professor of women’s and gender studies at Dickinson College, notes in 'Fat Shame,' only the wealthy could have extra fat on their bodies. Most people worked too hard, had too little food, and were often too sick. Then came the Industrial Revolution: mass food production and more sedentary jobs meant that the new middle class, and not just the wealthy, became heavier. Once 'average' fat people came on the scene, Farrell writes, 'fat denigration' became more common: fat jokes proliferated in nineteenth-century magazines."

From Lizzie Widdicombe's "The Plus Side/Full-figured fashion gets a new look" in The New Yorker, which notes, among many other things, the "reclaim[ing of] the word 'fat.'"

I've always used the word "fat" as my tag on this blog, "fat" and "thinness." They're parallel words, and there's no reason why one straightforward, factual descriptive embodies more shame or disapproval than the other. Euphemisms imply the need for one.

"What has this social experiment taught us? All races hate fat musicians."

Oh, you're just including "musicians" to keep from facing the reality of prejudice against the fat. How unsettling that must be to the folks at home watching the show. We've seen two episodes the new racially divided season of "Survivor," and each time the losing team has ousted the fat guy. Oh, all right, the fat musician guy. And in the case of the second ousted fat musician, Billy, the team deliberately lost so they could rid themselves of him as soon as possible. They weren't just ready to vote him off if they lost, they despised him so much they planned to lose and dawdled through the contest as they made sure even the slowest team got way ahead.

What was the point of staying on to watch the tribal council? (And, I've got to say, I feel silly typing out "tribal council," just as I'd feel silly typing out the tribe names and even the word "tribe," but, whatever....) Actually, the rest of the show turned out to be quite fun. Yul, exiled, read his clue and deftly discerned exactly where to dig for the idol. (And I feel silly typing "idol.") And then at the council, where the outcome was obvious, we're all surprised -- and dissolved in hilarity -- when Billy announces that he's found love, with a woman on another team, whom he delusionally believes is in love with him.

I haven't been watching "Survivor" over the years, so I didn't know whether it had been established in the past that throwing a challenge is an effective strategy. Tung Yin seems to think it's better to keep your bad tribe member around so you'll have him to eliminate when someone must be eliminated, but it made some sense to me. Billy was getting on everyone's nerves and ruining the team spirit. They need to cohere and figure out how to work together. You have to overcome a big dysfunction, and then he'll be gone and there you are, evolved into a style of doing things that was adapted to a problem that doesn't exist anymore.

Anyway, each of the four teams began with three women and two men. [CORRECTION: Actually, only the blacks and whites had three women and two men.] Each losing team got rid of one of the men. We've focused on the racial division, but there's something interesting about the gender division. Not only was each team structured with women outnumbering men, but, I suspect, each team was given one man who was supposed to present special problems. Two teams got a fat guy, and not just a fat guy, but a fat guy who was much less athletic and energetic than everyone else. The other two teams don't have a fat guy, but they have a guy who was probably intended to make it hard for the team to form a solid group. On the Asian team, Cao Boi is not just older, but he's seems wacky. His real identity group, he tells us, is hippies. But his skill at curing headaches by smooshing your head about and leaving a red mark between the eyes is helpful. On the white team, it's less obvious that there's an odd man out, since all the tribe members seem rather lame and since the odd one is -- unlike the other team's odd man -- quite good looking. (It's Adam, the guy who doesn't think a floor is worth the bother.)

"The American way of eating has become the elephant in the room in the debate over health care."

Ha ha. Get it? The elephant? That's you, reader. You're fat, says Michael Pollan. And you are a big — a huuuuge — part of the problem the government needs to solve. Pollan links to a study that supposedly shows that the reason we spend twice as much on health care as Europeans is because we are so grotesquely tubby. How can the government come between you and your food?

Cheap food is going to be popular as long as the social and environmental costs of that food are charged to the future. There’s lots of money to be made selling fast food and then treating the diseases that fast food causes. One of the leading products of the American food industry has become patients for the American health care industry.

Greedy corporations are making you fat and costing the health care system money. They are so greedy that — how awful! — they are selling food cheap. Expensive food also makes you fat, of course, but it's less obvious who's making money selling expensive food and thus harder to blame the evil corporations. 

The market for prescription drugs and medical devices to manage Type 2 diabetes, which the Centers for Disease Control estimates will afflict one in three Americans born after 2000, is one of the brighter spots in the American economy. As things stand, the health care industry finds it more profitable to treat chronic diseases than to prevent them. There’s more money in amputating the limbs of diabetics than in counseling them on diet and exercise.

Oh, here are the money-mad limb-hackers Obama was warning us about. Now, what I want to know is what is so terrible about the fact that most of the health-care money is spent treating diseases? Why should healthy people be consuming a bigger portion of the money? It's a good thing that people are left alone to take care of themselves and that health care professionals are used to do the things we can't do for ourselves. Of course, it would be nice if people didn't get diseases, and maybe a lot more of us could have long, disease-free lives, with little consumption of health-care resources if only we did more prevention. But would it change anything to give people ample free sessions with professionals who tell us to do what we already know we ought to do? The doctors actually don't have a clue how to get us to stop overeating (or — as if it would help — push us into a vigorous exercise program).

Pollan gets an economic theory going. He says health insurance companies drop customers after they get diseases, but if new law prevents this and requires them to charge all customers the same rates, then, they will have a strong new interest in preserving health and, allied with government, will stimulate the creation of government programs, policies, and laws aimed at stopping us from eating so damned much.

When health insurers can no longer evade much of the cost of treating the collateral damage of the American diet, the movement to reform the food system — everything from farm policy to food marketing and school lunches — will acquire a powerful and wealthy ally, something it hasn’t really ever had before....

In the same way much of the health insurance industry threw its weight behind the campaign against smoking, we can expect it to support, and perhaps even help pay for, public education efforts like New York City’s bold new ad campaign against drinking soda. At the moment, a federal campaign to discourage the consumption of sweetened soft drinks is a political nonstarter, but few things could do more to slow the rise of Type 2 diabetes among adolescents than to reduce their soda consumption, which represents 15 percent of their caloric intake.

"Bold new ad campaign"? Nicely, the NYT includes a link. Here's the ad:

It's a run-of-the-mill public service ad? What is bold about it? Picking on one product? Using tax money to pay for it? Oh, I see, it "graphically depicts globs of human fat gushing from a sideways drink bottle." I couldn't tell by looking at it. So shoving disgusting images in our face is bold. How admirably edgy of New York City. What's next? Pictures of ugly fat people slobbering over hamburgers? Something like this?



Throw all the taxpayer money you want into preventive care and raise the price on our too-cheap food. Blare nauseating ads at us. But we will still eat. We already care and we already don't want to be fat. We're not fat because corporations are greedy or because you can't get a free appointment with a nutritionist. We're fat because of the deep, innate appetite that saved our ancestors from famine and motivated them to eat whatever they could find to survive. We are here thanks to those profound desires, and life is all too easy these days. The unfortunate consequence of the beautiful amplitude of modern life is that we grow too big.

IN THE COMMENTS: Bissage said:

It’s funny that some people look at that ad and see “globs of human fat gushing from a sideways drink bottle.”

Not me.

I see a dog’s head with a dagger in it, a penis, and the word “sex."

Makes me want to consume alcohol, but I don’t know why.

"Brown fat is 'a specialized fat, whose primary role is to generate heat'.... A gram of brown fat produces 300 times more heat than any other tissue in the body...."

"The proportional amount of brown fat a person has decreases as they get older.... You can build up your brown fat by spending more time in the cold. A study of Finnish lumberjacks was the first to find that outdoor workers who spend time in the cold have more brown fat than office workers, and [there is]  research that shows sleeping in cooler temperatures (66 degrees, in his study) may also increase your levels of brown fat."

From "Why Your Kid Wears Shorts in Winter/While you freeze in cold weather, they have a secret weapon" by Jessica Grose (NYT).

It's absurd to think that sleeping — and only sleeping — in a room heated to 66° is comparable to working all day outdoors in Finland. And what temperature do you think Finnish lumberjacks keep their houses? I'm no Finnish lumberjack, but I do live in Wisconsin, and I go out when the temperature is, say, 8° but I don't artificially heat the house up to 66°. We keep it at 62° in the daytime and let it drop to 50° when we're sleeping. Occasionally, when I feel chilly, I bump it up to 64°, but never 66°, which would generate complaints that it's stifling in here. People who think they're sleeping in a cool room when they've got it at 66° are baffling. 

So, yeah, build up your brown fat. That sounds great, but overheating your house to the point where you think it's hardy to endure 66° when you're under the covers shows seriously distorted thinking. Also, there's no discussion of carbon footprints and climate change here. Where did that all-important concern go?

By the way, the article is padded out with material about children's birthday parties (though, strangely, given that headline, nothing at all about shorts).

Bill Maher complains about being criticized as a "bad person" for saying that fat people need to take responsibility for the health problem they, in fact, have.

Here's the image from 1988 of Oprah, newly thin and openly leading a celebration of herself for the achievement. Maher and Rogan say you can't do that today. It would be socially unacceptable fat-shaming.

The singer Adele recently lost a lot of weight, and Maher and Rogan talk about how people are actually criticizing her for quitting serving as a role model for people who want to feel good about being fat.

Oprah Magazine instructs its readers on the proper reaction to Adele's weight loss: "On Adele’s Weight Loss: Let's Stop Criticizing Her Body, No Matter How She Looks/Why can't we focus on how happy she looks on the beach, instead of how she looks on the beach?"

At a time when body positivity is (finally) being more widely celebrated, some folks are apparently disappointed that she changed what many women saw as a valuable representation of their own plus-size figures.... The core of the [body positivity] movement stands behind the radical idea that your worth has nothing to do with the size of your body.... So who are we to criticize Adele’s frame...? Her body belongs to her—not us.

Maher was repeating a point he'd made a while back on his show — that 40,000 people a month die from fat-related illness and that it's not about how people look but the terrible health problem. He talks about the criticism he took from James Corden, and I found this background in Variety:

Maher, host of HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher,” joked about obesity on his show last week, saying “Fat isn’t a birth defect” and “Nobody comes out of the womb needing to buy two seats on the airplane.” He advocated: “Fat-shaming doesn’t need to end, it needs to make a comeback.”...

In the podcast, Maher claims that he didn't make any jokes about fatness! Obviously, he did, even if he also has a serious purpose.

“There’s a common and insulting misconception that fat people are stupid and lazy, and we’re not,” Corden said. “We get it, we know. We know that being overweight isn’t good for us and I’ve struggled my entire life trying to manage my weight and I suck at it. I’ve had good days and bad months. I’ve basically been off and on diets since as long as I can remember and, well, this is how it’s going...".

Now that I'm reading this, I think Maher, in the podcast, is quite dishonest about his own statements and Corden's. Maher may have something of a good point about the costs of fat-related health problems in a system in which we're all more or less paying for each other's health care, but he's not doing straight health policy analysis. In fact, if you did hard-nosed, truth-telling policy analysis, you wouldn't stress the 40,000-a-month death toll. Early deaths save money.

ADDED: Here's the "Real Time" routine that I think Maher was dishonest about:

"Metz-Caporusso, who uses they/she pronouns and describes themselves as 'unapologetically fat and queer,' came up with the idea for roll flowers after hearing clients wistfully talk..."

"... about the tattoos they wanted to get -- but only once they had lost weight. The tattooist could empathize -- they had also once felt pressure to reach 'whatever weight I thought I needed to be at' before getting a stomach tattoo.... Metz-Caporusso noted there was a 'lot of fat shaming in tattooing,' and 'a lot of turning people down' for being above a certain size.... 'I knew when I designed the roll flowers, the first thing people would think was, "But what happens when you lose weight?" So, I was trying to challenge that thought... A fat person isn't a failing thin person. A fat person is just a person, and they should be made to feel as good as anyone else should be made to feel.'"

From "The tattooist creating body-positive 'roll flowers'" (CNN).

Go to the link for photographs. The "roll flowers" work with the rolls of fat on the body. I'd never thought about the problem of tattooing and fat rolls. You don't want the image to disappear inside the roll. Metz-Caporusso makes the roll part of the design and has plant shapes emerging from the rolls in a natural way. It's an interesting solution, though it does make it clear why many tattooists would want to reject a client with fat rolls. Is it "fat shaming" not to want to work on a pleated surface?

"Gandolfini’s death prompts rampant fat-shaming."

Says Salon, displaying lots of tweets. I question whether that stuff ought to be called "shaming." What I'm seeing looks more like This should be a wake-up call to anyone who's fat.

[Fill in the blank]-shaming is a meme, and it includes defining shame downward. I get that. But let's think about whether we want "shaming" to be a commodious category or a narrow one. I'm inclined to recommend narrow, but I'm highly influenced by the time I spent at the Wisconsin protests, amongst angry people chanting "Shame, shame, shame."

In this "fat-shaming" example, we might say the death of a respected actor ought to be an occasion to praise him, and not to offer up ideas about what he might have done to avert his fate. But I don't hear shaming in that. I hear this wish to avoid death: If only he'd lost weight, he might not have died. And: Fat people need to lose weight, or they might die too. That's more fear than shame.

The person who calls the response "shame"... what's his motivation? He might think "fat-shaming" is a funny, trendy way to refer to any statement about anyone being fat. But I think it's more like: Don't you dare talk about how anyone is fat, because fat people now have a way to bounce what we hear as an insult right back at you.

"Being overweight but not obese was associated only with excess mortality from diabetes and kidney disease..."

"Excess mortality"... what a weird phrase. I prefer the locution "insufficient immortality." But I suspect, reading this WaPo article on new research showing it's not that unhealthy to be fat, that all of us — fat, skinny, or just right — have exactly the same mortality and whether it's "excess" is a matter of opinion.

But the article is not about whether it would be good to live forever. It's about whether we're going to die sooner if we're fat.

The researchers calculated that in 2004, obesity was associated with as many as 112,000 excess deaths from heart disease and more than 45,000 deaths from diabetes and kidney disease. Obesity was not, however, associated with an overall excess in cancer deaths, though it was linked to as many as 19,000 excess deaths from malignancies commonly blamed on fat, including breast, uterine, ovarian, kidney, colon, esophageal and pancreatic cancer.

The most surprising finding was that being overweight but not obese was associated only with excess mortality from diabetes and kidney disease -- not from cancer or heart disease. Moreover, the researchers found an apparent protective effect against all other causes of death, such as tuberculosis, emphysema, pneumonia, Alzheimer's disease and injuries. An association between excess weight and nearly 16,000 deaths from diabetes and kidney disease was overshadowed by a reduction of as many as 133,000 deaths from all other deaths unrelated to cancer or heart disease. Even moderately obese people appeared less likely to die of those causes.

Although the study did not examine why being overweight might guard against dying from some diseases, [Katherine M. Flegal, a senior research scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta] said other research has suggested that extra heft might supply the body with vital reserves to draw upon to fight illness and aid recovery.

"You may not just have more fat. You may also have more lean mass -- more bone and muscle," Flegal said. "If you are in an adverse situation, that could be good for you."

This is similar to those studies that show a moderate amount of drinking is good for you (though heavy drinking isn't). People who disapprove of drinkers or fat people want to believe it's also very unhealthy. They are collecting more arguments for what they already think. Those who are modern and liberal don't want to express old-fashioned moral disapproval, so they won't say drinking or eating too much is self-indulgent and gluttonous. Pleasure-seeking is quite all right these days. And they want to be able to think of themselves as good people, so they can't just say they hate the way you look if you're fat. They have to believe they're actually concerned for your well-being.

But we all know we'd look better at our ideal weight. Each of us needs to make a personal decision about how much pleasure in eating we'll give up for the pleasure of looking our best. The anorexics love the dictum: Nothing tastes as good as thin feels. But that's a matter of opinion. Some chocolates and pasta dishes and deep-fried things taste as good as thin feels. But maybe no oversized portion of anything feels good enough to outweigh how bad fat feels. Make up your own mind.