What's Dawn French Up To?
Weetabix’s recent post about fat characters on television made me go Google Dawn French to see what she’s up to these days. I found this hilarious promo shot from the new French & Saunders, with Dawn French as Amy Winehouse and Jennifer Saunders as Britney Spears. According to Team Sugar:
Dawn French channels her inner Winehouse complete with overdone bee hive in a skit where we will see her pushing a shopping trolley filled with empty booze bottles around along side Jennifer Saunders as Spears, in fake blonde extensions and a spotty face. Both will appear complaining about their troublesome lives, that has got the real life starlets into the international media. This, unfortunately, is rumoured to be the last French and Saunders series.
I also found something not quite so hilarious, but too strange not to share: Dawn French is convinced she’s going to die.
The Vicar of Dibley star said she was “resigned” to the idea, and revealed she intends to move to Cornwall next month because she wants to spend the rest of her life there… French said she was not ill and there was no history of early death in her family…But French revealed she had a long-held belief that it would not be the same for her. She said: “I don’t feel gloomy about it. I’m resigned to it. I don’t know why I feel so sure. I said it to my brother when I was about six.”
The star, who said she is not scared of death, added she had told her husband, comedian and actor Lenny Henry, that she doesn’t think she’ll be around for a long time. And while French said she was a logical person, and there was “not much logic” to her belief, there were just “certain things” she knew.
Of course, the Telegraph agrees with her…because she’s fat.
Unfortunately, in Dawn’s case, there is a logic plain for all to see. The article at the weekend in which she confided her thoughts on early mortality was accompanied by a happy picture of Dawn, mountainous in black, seated at a table with a plate of chips in front her.
Gorgeous, gorging, death-defying, death-embracing Dawn.
Once she was the voluptuous, self-confident beacon for big women the world over, the role model who gave them permission to enjoy their comfortable, unfashionable bodies. Now she is something else altogether.
Doesn’t she have just the tiniest inkling that allowing herself to become fat could have some bearing on her life expectancy? It would be insulting, surely, to imagine that she hasn’t acknowledged the proven link between obesity and heart disease. She must know that, statistically, she has a serious chance of dying early…
This isn’t unkind. It is simply the raw truth that confronts anyone who sees her, precariously happy in her own ballooning skin.
Obviously, heart disease is a possibility; but she says she’s in good health and I have no reason not to believe her. A staged photo of her with some french fries proves absolutely nothing. Hopefully Dawn French will live for another 50 years and prove everybody wrong.
Posted by mo pie
Filed under: Celebrities, Dawn French, International, TV
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So, if she were right and got run down by a car tomorrow, that’d be her fault because she’s fat? Mmmm ‘kay. Oh, and btw: I come from a family of fat people (on my maternal grandmother’s side) and guess what? On average, my great-uncles, great-aunts and grandmother lived on average about 75 years. Not bad, eh?
Obviously, heart disease is a possibility
But let’s not forget that if she did have a heart attack, she’d be more likely to survive it than a thin person.
This is unbelievable.
That’s just so… nasty. It’s like the writer just couldn’t stand to write an article about a fat woman without going off into a tirade about how unhealthy fat is. Bleh.
Uh, did I miss something where Dawn French suddenly got fatter? This writer is acting like she’s unexpectedly doubled in size. “Ballooning skin”? “Once she was voluptuous, now she’s something else altogether”? Newsflash: Dawn French is and always has been fat. She’s also incredibly awesome, brilliant, and has no chronic health problems (or any genetic history of them), according to Wikipedia anyway. She’s just a woman with a superstition about her lifespan.
Uh, my dad had the same belief, saying he was going to die at 50 ever since I was a little girl. I am happy to report that he’s alive and kickin’ at the age of 53.
I figured someone would blame the death notion on her weight. After everything she’s accomplished, we have nothing left to put her down, so we’ll go with a jab at her weight.
Oh well, doesn’t change how much we, and most of the world, love her! I hope she’s stickin’ around for many years to come!
Uh, did I miss something where Dawn French suddenly got fatter?
To be fair, Fillyjonk, you might have. I just did a Google image search, and she’s definitely bigger in recent pictures. But still awesome.
I wasn’t seeing it, but then I realized I was thinking Vicar of Dibley vs. right now, not French & Saunders vs. Vicar of Dibley. So okay, maybe the author has some weird threshold for acceptability and Dawn French crossed over it. GUESS THAT’S FATAL NOW
I LOVE French & Saunders! They are hilarious. My favorite skit is their send up of America’s Next Top Model. I’ll also hold my hand up as adoring her and hoping she’s wrong about going early!
Kate Harding, that is a fascinating article! Perhaps journalists at the Telegraph, and elsewhere should consider researching their articles, rather than just basing their reporting on ignorance and hate alone.
Unfortunately, that Junkfood Science post only tells part of the story (which is sadly typical of that blog, I’m afraid). The author dismisses out of hand what is widely considered to be the most likely explanation for the finding that obese and overweight patients were more likely to survive treatments for heart disease, which is that they are more likely to be diagnosed with heart disease early and to receive treatment for it. Early stage heart disease can be difficult to detect, and obesity is a known risk for heart disease, so if a lean person comes into the ER with chest pains, for example, doctors may be less aggressive in their followup than they would be with an obese person. In a similar vein, nonsmokers who get lung cancer are more likely to die from that disease than smokers, possibly for the same reasons. The author of the blog post dismisses this hypothesis based on lack of evidence, however, her contrary claim that obese people receive less aggressive treatment for heart disease is also not supported by any evidence (she provides two links to research papers, but neither of them actually addresses that point).
La Wade, you dismiss Junkfood Science but fail to provide any studies to back up your claims. Care to share?
Besides, being “obese” only increases a person’s chance of heart disease by 1-5%, according to research done by Paul Campos for his book “The Obesity Myth.” He also points out that death by heart disease has fallen at a steady rate since the 1960’s, even with all the fatties around.
It’s also amazing that all these health “professionals” that harp on fat people forget that thin people suffer from the same diseases too. But I guess fat people are easier to pick on.
These studies showing the lower rates of death in obese heart disease patients are epidemiologic studies. They don’t provide an explanation for the phenomenon they study, they just look at outcomes, and the interpretation is a matter for further study. Unfortunately, further studies have not yet been done to follow up and definitively explain why obese and overweight patients have better outcomes. Junkfood Science dismisses the most popular explanation in the medical community for lack of evidence, but her own alternative explanation not only lacks evidence, it is contrary to what has been found in most studies.
While the results of epidemiologic studies looking at the link between heart disease and obesity have been varied, overall, they do show a strong correlation between the two, at least among Caucasians. Junkfood Science and Paul Campos (neither of whom, by the way, are scientific researchers. Junkfood Science is at least a nurse, but Paul Campos is a lawyer) have cherry-picked the studies they present in order to bolster the argument they want to sell to the public.
Junkfood Science’s explanation of these findings is that overweight and heart disease are simply not strongly linked. In addition to the two epidemiologic studies, she cites two others, one from 1989 and the other from 1957. That right there tells you something…if you type “obesity heart disease” into PubMed, you pull up 8341 articles on the subject, 5787 of which were published more recently than 1989. And actually, the 1989 paper Junkfood Science cites is not among them, nor is it in PubMed at all, nor in the archive on JAMA’s website. Because it doesn’t exist. Paul Ernsberger has published two papers in JAMA in his career, one in 1993 and one in 1995. Anyway, this was probably an honest mistake, but the thing is, of those 8341 articles, the vast majority show a strong link between heart disease and obesity. It would be silly to pick one or two studies to cite here when there are thousands. And in addition to these epidemiologic studies, there are many studies looking at the mechanisms of linkage between heart disease and obesity, including invasion of cardiac and other tissues by fat, pro-inflammatory cytokines secreted by fat tissue, changes in sympathetic nervous system activity associated with accumulation of fat tissue, and altered renal function in obesity.
I haven’t read Paul Campos’s book, but the 1-5% increased risk factor is not in line with the vast majority of the published literature. And yes, death from heart disease has fallen since the 1960s, but the number of inpatient procedures for cardiovascular disease increased 470% from 1979 to 2003, which would suggest that improvements in medical technology and increased vigilance in treating heart disease were well sufficient to offset increasing risk in the population. And of course, smoking prevalence has also gone down dramatically since the 1960s.
I’m not trying to pick on anyone. And of course, heart disease is the #1 cause of death in this country and we are all, thin or fat, at risk. But this is all the more reason why we should try to objectively analyze the science and not try to twist it to suit a particular agenda.
I’m actually sitting here with the 80-page article written by Dr. Ernsberger and Paul Haskew — a seminal and well-known classic work among obesity researchers, complete with 404 references. Too bad you didn’t even bother to read the post to even get the name of the journal correct before you made accusations. And to expect a single blog post to make a complete dissertation on the evidence (which I’ve been studying for more than a decade and working in research and medicine about as long as you’ve been alive) is simply nonsensical; the evidence is overwhelming and consistent showing obesity doesn’t cause heart disease. Trouble with tallying PubMed “hits” as evidence, all studies are not created equal and research requires actually reading them.
This is the quote I read copied and pasted from your blog:
“Dr. Paul Ernsberger, of Case Western Reserve School of Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio, led a review of nearly 100 studies that was published in JAMA in 1989 which corroborated these results.”
By JAMA, I assume you mean the Journal of the American Medical Association. That is the standard abbreviation for that journal. I don’t know of any other with those initials. There is no entry in PubMed for Ernsberger in JAMA in 1989. There is nothing on the JAMA website’s archives for Ernsberger in that year. As I mentioned, Ernsberger did have papers in that journal in 1993 and 1995, but the other author on those papers is Koletsky. Ernsberger and Haskew seem to have published together only once, a NEJM article in 1986.
But really, that is a trivial error on your part. The more important problem is your misrepresentation of the body of research on this subject.
What disturbs me most about the Telegraph comment is that if someone who is in good health says they are going to die young, I’d assume that they either have weird premonition-y powers, or that they are suffering from some kind of depression or similar condition. Gloating that she’ll die young because she’s fat is in extremely poor taste.
I don’t think Sandy’s planning to come back and mention this, but last night I guess she did go back and double check her sources, because she’s edited her blog entry to correct the reference (making no mention of her original error). As it turns out, this “seminal and well-known classic work among obesity researchers” was not published in the well-known JAMA, but instead appeared in the obscure Journal of Obesity and Weight Regulation, which was only in print from 1983 until 1990, and which is not widely available even in medical school libraries. Again, if there is “overwhelming and consistent” evidence showing no link between obesity and heart disease, I question why Sandy would choose to cite the two papers she did (and I’m actually not sure what other paper she was referring to since she didn’t give a journal name or even a year). The answer of course is that it is simply not true, and she has to resort to citing esoteric and widely unavailable (or nonexistent) sources to back herself up.
Unbelieveable…except actually totally believeable now that I’ve started digging a little into Sandy’s “sources”: the citation is still wrong. It seemed a little too convenient to me that she was citing a journal so obscure it had virtually no record online…no website, and it’s not even indexed by PubMed, the google of the biology world. So on a hunch, I just stopped in at the library. The Journal of Obesity and Weight Regulation published only two issues in 1989 (Volume 8, issues 1 and 2). Neither contained an article by Ernsberger. What’s more, each of these issues was less than 80 pages long total, shorter than she claims the review is itself.
Too bad her site, which claims to be “for readers not afraid to question and think critically,” doesn’t allow comments.
OK, I did find the article. It’s from 1987, not 1989. And to be fair, Sandy is correct that it is a review paper looking at multiple epidemiologic studies and arguing that there is no correlation between obesity and heart disease. However, even in the preface to the article, the editors of the journal remark that this conclusion is controversial and not in accord with many previous findings. Or indeed, with most subsequent ones.
LaWade wrote:
if you type “obesity heart disease” into PubMed, you pull up 8341 articles on the subject
…
the thing is, of those 8341 articles, the vast majority show a strong link between heart disease and obesity. It would be silly to pick one or two studies to cite here when there are thousands.
Please tell me you’re not serious. Please tell me you don’t think a valid analysis technique when it comes to medical journal articles is to count the search term hits, and then just ASSERT that the vast majority show a strong link.
Otherwise, you must be trying to say that you didn’t just assert this, you PERSONALLY went round a vast majority of all those 8431 studies looking at them. Which I certainly do not believe.
Ok, here we go.
I ASSERT that there is a strong link between being Caucasian and heart disease!!! I do so because I went and did a search for “caucasian heart disease” and it came up with 2533 articles!! That’s a lot of articles! It must be true that there’s a link!!!
So no, it’s not silly to suggest you cite one or two pertinent epidemiological articles (which you haven’t done, you just take potshots at other people and find typos). It’s also not silly to suggest you refrain from making the “appeal to search engine hits” argument.
Oh, and please note, a LINK is not a CAUSE.
Also, I note that you’re not providing any evidence that
…the most likely explanation for the finding that obese and overweight patients were more likely to survive treatments for heart disease, which is that they are more likely to be diagnosed with heart disease early and to receive treatment for it
Given the appalling way which doctors treat fat patients and the way that fat people thus tend to avoid doctors, that assertion you make does not stand without evidence to back it up.
Sharon, you’re right, I haven’t read the majority of those 8341 articles, but since the nature of biological research is that papers refer to one another and build upon one another, it’s not necessary to read an entire body of literature, or even the majority of it, to gain an understanding of what the general consensus is in a given field. I have read a lot of those papers, though. I’m an obesity researcher, and have been for the last 12 years, so I do have a pretty good familiarity with the literature.
But the reason why I mentioned the number of articles in PubMed on this subject is not to validate my opinion on the issue, but instead to point out how selective Sandy is in citing the literature. My point is that there are thousands of studies out there on this subject, many of which are published in prestigious and widely available journals that anyone can read online. But these are not the studies Sandy chooses to cite, because she has to pick and choose the small number of studies that support her viewpoint out of those thousands that don’t. I strongly encourage you to check this out for yourself. The PubMed database is available to anyone on the internet. Google it, and then type in “heart disease obesity” for yourself. Some of the articles in the database are only available to subscribers, but you’ll probably be able to read about half of the recent ones. I could cite specific ones for you, but you’d have no way of knowing then that I’m not cherry picking the literature.
I’m not an obesity researcher, but I am an epidemiologist, and I wouldn’t rely on an 18-year-old review or meta-analysis for my evidence in a fast-moving field like metabolics or cardiovascular disease. Just for example – we didn’t even know leptin existed in 1989.
Might we agree that, as far as science can prove things that relate to human behavior, visceral adiposity has been shown as a principal risk factor for cardiovascular disease, other factors being held constant? That finding has been replicated in hundreds of studies of different designs published in peer-reviewed journals in the past five years.
That sounds pretty reasonable to me, Ginger. But I guess different people have different ideas about what constitutes “science.” Like, for example, someone who works for a “think tank” that claims that humans are not responsible for global warming, and that the EPA’s standards regulating industrial pollution are “a tragic failure of public policy” (because they’re too strict), and who has written multiple articles about how the FDA’s and EPA’s concerns about methylmercury contamination of our waterways and of the fish we eat are overblown.
LaWade wrote:
but since the nature of biological research is that papers refer to one another and build upon one another, it’s not necessary to read an entire body of literature, or even the majority of it, to gain an understanding of what the general consensus is in a given field.
Ye-es, but there’s a problem with this, because mistakes can proliferate. Imagine if at the beginning of a field emerging there’s an error. Maybe not a big one, but an error nevertheless, and it happens that it doesn’t get noticed early on. Then, it can become part of the general consensus of that field, because everyone repeats it because “everyone knows”. If there is a flaw in a hypothesis, then someone finding the truth can have a very difficult job exposing the truth because the consensus is so strongly against it, even though the origin of the error may be very small.
The PubMed database is available to anyone on the internet. Google it, and then type in “heart disease obesity” for yourself. Some of the articles in the database are only available to subscribers, but you’ll probably be able to read about half of the recent ones. I could cite specific ones for you, but you’d have no way of knowing then that I’m not cherry picking the literature.
I don’t think you’re being reasonable in the way you’re making the arguments here. When you’re saying things like
the thing is, of those 8341 articles, the vast majority show a strong link between heart disease and obesity
you’re not saying you’ve read the studies, as you said above, you’re arguing for the large number of search results on topics A and B being indicative of a strong link between the two conditions. That’s not a valid argument. I can find 635 search results on obesity and osteoporosis and those two things are negatively correlated. And of those 8431 articles you found, a lot of them won’t be on obesity and heart disease at all, they will just have tangential reference to the topics. What matters is still the results of big well-designed studies on such topics. And yes, I would be quite keen for you to cherry pick the strongest studies that support your opinion on the subject.
What matters to me is truth and evidence, and cherry picked studies from both sides of an argument are very useful starting points for me as a third party to sift through the evidence and see what I think.
Huh. I wonder where she stands on “intelligent design.”
Man, that cardiac article has some problems. Lumping low-BMI with average-BMI patients as baseline; insufficient description of age distribution within groups; claiming p-values of 0.000. (That’s a pet peeve of mine. Dude, if your statistical program doesn’t do p-values lower than 1 in a thousand, then say it that way: p
Sharon said:
“Please tell me you’re not serious. Please tell me you don’t think a valid analysis technique when it comes to medical journal articles is to count the search term hits, and then just ASSERT that the vast majority show a strong link.”
I remember someone else who used to do that too… Michael Fumento. “Using hits as analysis” came up in several of his posts taunting Sandy and others back in the day.
La Wade, what is your point? That we should all be dieting, voluntarily going hungry, exercising every spare moment we have available in order to become as thin as possible? That we should make reducing our weight our life’s work, even if that means we have no other life? And that if we say we have tried and tried and tried to the point of aneurysm to get thin for decades upon decades and it’s just not happening for us, that we are liars and sleazebuckets and freaks who deserve whatever pestilence and plague falls upon us? Doesn’t sound very size-accepting to me. I don’t need to visit a SA blog to get that message, I can go frigging anywhere and get an orifice full of of Fumentoism. Anywhere. At all.
Let’s just assume, for a moment, that you are correct that every word Sandy Szwarc has ever written is total bunkum. Is she our only defender? I don’t think so. I don’t agree with her position on a lot of things, but she is one of the few people who has gone into exquisite detail in a public way about exactly why so many of the media stories about fat are brain-frying nonsense. But if she wasn’t doing it, no doubt someone else would, because all many of us — yeah, even people with a lot more education, writing skill and patience than I’ll ever have — can do when reading that stuff is go, “Yeah, what she said.”
And yes, yes, yes, it needs to be said, even by someone with less-than-perfectly-PC credentials. How much money do you really think Sandy makes from her blog? I can tell you that Fumento probably makes more in a day from his oil-company gig than she gets in a whole year from Junkfood Science. If you want to make real money off fat people, you write diet books, not articles telling us we’re fine the way we are and people are panicking over virtually nothing.
It’s incredible anyone is taking LaWade seriously. Consensus of opinions does not make for truth. The fact that someone as daring as Sandy is attempting to get people to question popularized fat prejudices and is daring to take on the establishment should be supported. None of us would even be aware of studies disproving fat prejudices in medicine, and why they are the stronger and more credible studies, to boot, if she hadn’t been sticking her neck out to write about them. Good grief. The fat community does love to eat its own, it seems.
La Wade, what is your point? That we should all be dieting, voluntarily going hungry, exercising every spare moment we have available in order to become as thin as possible? That we should make reducing our weight our life’s work, even if that means we have no other life?
I’m really glad you asked this, because the answer is, absolutely not. Losing weight and keeping it off is extraordinarily difficult, and typically requires draconian lifestyle changes or major surgery. That’s a choice everyone needs to make for his or her self. But I also think it’s a choice that should be based on an accurate view of what the scientific literature has shown in terms of the risks of obesity, which is where I object to what Sandy is doing.
I have no idea how much Sandy makes from her blog or Michael Fumento does from his. Clearly, there are profit motives on both sides, and as a scientist, it makes me really angry that it’s so easy for these “biostitutes” to use their scientific background to mislead people. Not only are they doing the public a huge disservice, it’s also undermining the efforts of legitimate scientists like myself who are supported by the public to do research for the public good.
I can tell you how much Sandy makes from her blog–ZERO, NADA, ZILCH! Except for a few very small donations on rare occasions from individuals who have found the information she provides literally lifesaving (and no, I have never contributed to her blog myself, I can’t afford to), she is not getting PAID anything to do this work, nor is she sponsored by any organization, business, group or corporation, unlike many of her detractors. She does this work because of her undying committment to people who she knows are not being well-served by the biased media fare and perversions of sound science force-fed to us from all sources, unfortunately including this blog. I wish to goddess she was able to make a living from her blog, but the idea that she is making *anything* from it is a really sick joke.
Sandy is the first real voice for scientific truth about food, health, our bodies, and “obesity” since the ground-breaking work done by the Fat Underground in the early 1970’s, and the exposes she writes are extremely threatening to the powers that be, so I’m not surprised at the venom being aimed her way by those with a vested interest in the billions and billions of dollars being made at the expense of fat people’s health, our very lives, and our children’s futures.
I only wish that every fat person, and every non-fat person with the ability to think for him/herself, would read Sandy’s blog and heed what she says. If they did, the fat community might have a fighting chance against all the resources being massed against us.
I, for one, am hardly likely to take the word of
someone who claims to be a “legitimate scientist” and “researcher” yet won’t even reveal their real name or credentials, against someone like Sandy whose name and credentials are right on her blog for anyone to examine. Leveling personal attacks and using junk science to score points and destroy the credibility of someone whose ethics are beyond reproach is hardly the way any real scientist would conduct him/herself.
My identity and credentials are no secret to anyone who wants to take a few minutes to poke around my website, but I’m not trumpeting them here since I’m not representing my employer in the blog comments. But I don’t think that really matters since I’m not asking anyone to take MY word for anything. I’m asking them to look at the scientific literature, where names, credentials, and funding sources are all required to be disclosed. Sandy, in contrast, wants you to believe what she says and not what’s in the scientific literature.
Given Sandy’s demonstrated past working for organizations funded by the food industry (and the fact that several of the links on her current blog go to websites for food industry websites), I find it doubtful that she now does this sort of work for free out of the goodness of her heart. But unfortunately, because blogs aren’t required to divulge funding sources, we’ll never know.
Everyone is so focused on heart disease but I see disability. When you become so obese that your legs will no longer carry you, there is a serious problem that has nothing to do with bigotry or prejudice toward weight.