The Associated Press is reporting on a study that will appear in tomorrow’s Journal of the American Medical Association which shows that obesity is relatively rare in the foreign born until they have lived in the United States for more than 10 years.  The AP headline reads “If You Move to America, You May Get Fat.”

I haven’t seen the study, but it sounds like it’s reasonably good science.  Researchers studied data supplied by 32,374 participants in a 2000 national health survey.  14 percent of the participants were immigrants.  They found a clear link between obesity and numbers of years in the United States.

What I found distasteful about the article, beyond the sensationalist headline, was the tendency to characterize the problem as one of culture, rather than of personal responsibility.  The article quotes the study:

Trends in obesity among immigrants may reflect acculturation and adoption of the U.S. lifestyle, such as increased sedentary behavior and poor dietary patterns.  They may also be a response to the physical environment of the United States, with increased availability of calorically dense foods and higher reliance on labor-saving technologies.

Most of the article makes it sound like immigrants are forced to be obese, or at least not encouraged to be healthy.  Only the last paragraph of the article makes any real mention of the possibility that individuals can prevent themselves from getting fat.

I’d sure like to see one of these articles place the responsibility where it belongs.

There appears to be a minor backlash movement in response to all the noise about Fat America.  Whereas people appear to be getting the idea that they have to start paying attention to their weight, they’re not about to give up completely on their favorite foods.  Two items:

In November, Hardee’s rolled out their Monster Thickburger: two 1/3 slabs of Angus beef, four strips of bacon, three slices of cheese and mayonnaise on a buttered sesame seed bun.  1,420 calories and 107 grams of fat.  Activist organizations who would like to place the blame for our nation’s obesity problem on the fast food industry were quick to condemn Hardee’s.  The Center for Science in the Public Interest (which is neither scientific nor operating in the public interest, but that’s a subject for another day) dubbed it “food porn” and “the fast-food equivalent of a snuff film.”  But Hardee’s is apparently doing a brisk business.  There’s room for indulgences like this, even in a reasonably healthy diet. If I can find a Hardee’s nearby (the last one turned into a Hooter’s, where neither the food nor the waitresses are anything to write home about), I’ll give the Monster Thickburger a try.

I’ve had a weakness for Wienerschnitzel chili cheese dogs for over 20 years, although  I don’t eat them as often now as I used to.  I couldn’t even get them here until about three years ago when Wienerschnitzel finally opened a store in the Austin area.  I stopped by there on Saturday and got a good laugh when I saw their napkin:  “Join the chili dog diet!  A diet you just can’t lose on.”

I don’t know yet whether people are actually watching what they eat and are using fast food as a “treat,” or if they’re visiting fast food restaurants more frequently in protest.

The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance, according to their web site, “is a non-profit human rights organization dedicated to improving the quality of life for fat people.”  Their Information Index page goes into much detail about what the organization does and how.  Their primary goal appears to be “to eliminate discrimination based on body size and provide fat people with the tools for self-empowerment.”

That’s fine as far as a stated goal, but I question some of their methods.  In particular, I disagree with their dismissal of the large body of evidence indicating that being grossly overweight is unhealthy.  The correlation or weight with medical problems is very strong, and for the NAAFA to dismiss it with a couple of feel-good paragraphs is just short of criminal.  Research has shown that being “healthy” (i.e. exercising regularly and eating a sensible diet) is more important than being thin, but research also indicates that people of average weight have fewer health problems.

I’m always suspicious of “activist” organizations, but I do like their stand on dieting, stomach stapling and similar crash weight loss schemes, and the diet industry in general.  I’m also impressed that they came out against Medicare’s recent decision to have fatness declared a disease.  I am disappointed, though, in their stated position on weight reduction dieting, which they strongly discourage.

The NAAFA has some good points and I think what they’re trying to do is, in balance, good.  They have many decades of social prejudice to overcome, though, and turning a blind eye to studies that disagree with their stated positions is not a good way to do it.

There’s a lot we still don’t know about how the body works.  In my May 13 entry I mentioned some recent research about the biology of fat.  In a nutshell, too many fat cells will cause toxic levels of chemicals in the body, leading to problems with heart, liver, kidneys, etc.  You’d think, then, that if you got rid of a significant number of fat cells, those chemical levels in the blood would go down.  Makes sense, right?  Researchers thought so, too, but according to this article, it doesn’t work that way.

Researchers checked  the blood pressure and blood chemistry for 15 women who went in for cosmetic liposuction.  Readings were taken before they had the surgery, and again three months after.  No change.  Losing the fat didn’t change the metabolic brew in the blood.  One possible explanation is that the type of fat removed by liposuction is not the primary culprit.  Liposuction doesn’t remove visceral fat, which some researchers think is the real culprit.  Others think that you have to change the fat cells’ size through diet and exercise, or put the body into energy deficit, again through diet and exercise, to switch on healthier fat chemistry.

Somehow I don’t find this terribly surprising.  If there’s a quick and easy way to lose weight and become healthy, I haven’t yet found it.  But I know the slow and steady route works:  reasonable diet and moderate exercise.  Call me a relic.  I’ll stick with the tried and true on this one.

Obesity Kills.  We’ve long known that people who are very fat typically have many more health problems than the less corpulent.  Doctors and others have been telling us for decades that being overweight can cause heart problems, diabetes, high blood pressure, and any number of other illnesses.  The long-accepted explanation was that all the extra weight put too much strain on the heart and other organs.

According to the Associated Press article linked above, that obvious and very plausible answer is dead wrong.  Although the extra weight does contribute to some conditions like arthritis and sleep apnea, the real killers are the fat cells themselves.  Apparently, fat cells are little chemical factories that churn out all manner of hormones and such to help regulate the body.  But when there’s an overabundance of fat cells, chemical levels become toxic.  I suspect we’ll be hearing a lot about the biology of fat over the next few years.

North Carolina is going to spend $10 million on programs to educate adults and children about better eating habits and the benefits of exercise.  The CDC has released its list of the states with the worst obesity epidemics, with Mississippi, Louisiana, and West Virginia topping the list.  As a reward, 25 Mississippi schools will get $40,000 to be used in staving off the epidemic.  A study in London shows (depending on who you believe) that efforts to cut children’s soft drink consumption will reduce the number of overweight children.  A Chicago Sun-Times editorial suggests that parents (perish the thought!) should serve as role models for their children in establishing good eating and exercise habits.  News stories abound about the increasing incidence of obesity in the U.S. and the increasing strain that our bulging waistlines are putting on an already overburdened health care system.  Everybody’s talking about it and everybody has an idea that will solve the problem.  Unfortunately, most of those ideas involve throwing money at the problem, which we should know by now won’t do a damned thing except make some fat slob rich.

There are even some naysayers out there who dispute the correlation between obesity and long-term health consequences like heart disease and diabetes.  I’m not sure what they’re trying to accomplish, but their voices are becoming increasingly shrill.  One of their biggest arguments is that the Body Mass Index (BMI) standard is biased toward an unrealistically thin ideal, and with that I’ll agree.  At my current weight, according to the BMI standard, I’m just at the edge of obese, which is laughable.  That’s the only one of their arguments that holds water.  Granted, there’s no proof that being 200 lbs overweight is the cause, but the correlation sure makes one think.  Or should.

I’m convinced that the only reason the Bush Administration hasn’t declared a “War on Fat” is that they’re afraid they’d piss off too many people who would then switch their votes.  It’d be kind of funny, come to think of it, to watch John Kerry’s reaction to an announced War on Fat.  I can’t say whether he’d try to out-exercise the President (a tough thing to do, by all reports) or gain 50 lbs just to differentiate himself.  Either way, it’d be amusing.

I made the mistake today of posting to the Plastic thread discussing the Personal Responsibility in Food Consumption Act that is making its way through Congress.  One of my posts was marked “irrelevant,” which I find somewhat amusing considering the contents of other posts, and the other has not (yet?) been moderated.  Both were throwaway comments, but I should know better than to post to a place like Plastic.  Especially in an offhand manner.  The worst thing about it is that once I invest enough mental and emotional energy to read and post on a thread, I find it difficult to let the conversation go without trying to have the last word.  That poor decision aside…

The PRFCA is one of the silliest pieces of proposed legislation I’ve seen in a while.  Well, okay, perhaps the proposed Federal Marriage Amendment is sillier, but we’ll leave that for another day.  The PRFCA, in its present form, proposes to prevent food and non-alcoholic beverage companies from being subject to civil liabilities unless it can be shown that the product in question was not in compliance with statutory and regulatory requirements at the time of the sale.   That somebody (several somebodies, from the looks of it) thought this needed to be specifically stated in a law says volumes about the state of our courts and our legislators’ priorities.  If courts are screwed up enough to allow the kinds of lawsuits this bill is intended to prevent (i.e. “McDonald’s made me fat”), what makes the authors think that the courts won’t just overturn their piddling little law?  If enacted, this law would be just an insignificant speed bump in a road that should never have been paved.  Heck, it shouldn’t even be a footpath.

Debra and I had some friends over for dinner this evening.  We got to talking about my bicycle training and I mentioned that I’d lost over 10 pounds since October.  It seems like whenever somebody mentions losing weight, somebody else will say something to the effect of “You didn’t lose it.  You gave it to me!”  As always, my brain analyzed that comment from several viewpoints and came up with an odd idea:  the aggregate weight of the Earth’s human population is constant.  I know it’s absurd.  But it was fun to toss around for a bit.