Obesity Myths From The New York Times
Recently, a reader sent along Gina Kolata’s article from the New York Times discussing some obesity myths that are not news to us, exactly, but good to see in print nevertheless. I think I read it before, but really, it was worth reading again.
Many of the so-called facts about obesity… amount to speculation or oversimplification of the medical evidence. Diet and exercise do matter… but these environmental influences alone do not determine an individual’s weight. Body composition also is dictated by DNA and monitored by the brain. Bypassing these physical systems is not just a matter of willpower.
What has really stuck with me from this article is the misconception that it is our modern diet that is to blame for the increase in obesity; when in reality, our modern diet might not be all that bad in comparison with the diets from the Mad Men years.
“The meals we romanticize in the past somehow leave out the reality of what people were eating,” [Dr. Barry Glassner] said. “The average meal had whole milk and ended with pie…. The typical meal had plenty of fat and calories. Nostalgia is going to get us nowhere.”
Emphasis mine. The article goes on to discuss the imprecise nature of calorie counting and of course, the idea of the set point:
The body’s determination to maintain its composition is why a person can skip a meal, or even fast for short periods, without losing weight. It’s also why burning an extra 100 calories a day will not alter the verdict on the bathroom scales. Struggling against the brain’s innate calorie counters, even strong-willed dieters make up for calories lost on one day with a few extra bites on the next. And they never realize it. “The system operates with 99.6 percent precision.”
I think this article is a great starting point for people who don’t quite understand why “eat less and move more” is an oversimplification. (The headless fatty and chocolate chip cookie pictures at the top notwithstanding.)
Thanks to Meredith for the link!
Posted by mo pie
Filed under: Advocacy, Fat Positive, Media, Science, TV
I second the thanks to Meredith. I read the NY Times every day but must have missed that article.
Oh, I didn’t miss it. It’s an older article, dating back to Aug. ’07. But I agree, it’s worth the reread.
“The system operates with 99.6 percent precision.”
I’m kinda confused how they figured that out. It seems like the body has so many variables it would be difficult. Did they lock at bunch of people in rooms and monitor exactly what the eat and how many calories they burned?
Can someone science-y explain how they could come up such an accurate figure?
So, if we’re fat we’re doomed to be fat forever? Charming.
Lisa-Marie, if your body’s natural set point weight is “fat,” then, yes, I think that your body will do all it can to settle at that weight. You can try and circumvent that weight, but your body will probably win in the long run. If you consider that being “doomed to be fat forever,” well, that’s your perspective. I prefer the term “healthy” myself.
Don’t think of it as being doomed to fatness, lisa-marie. Think of it as freed from the futile diet mentality. Your body is no longer a defective thin body, but simply a body. Your choice to eat a cupcake is no longer a hideous sin that makes you weak-willed and bad, but just a sweet treat once in a while.
Spending a lot of energy, both physical and mental, on trying to fix something that isn’t broken is a chump’s game. Instead, channel that same energy into your job, your hobbies, your family, or just enjoying the hell out of life. You may be amazed at just how much happier you are as a person who happens to be fat than you were as a person who has failed through her own (in)actions to be thin.
I think we as a society sorely need the attitude shift that it’s not some awful thing to be fat. I don’t think being “doomed to be fat forever” is something to sit around and mope or despair over. Being fat is not a “doom”.
Well if I’m “doomed” then this is my themesong and how happily I plan to sing it: Doom Song
If you’re going to approach your body and any of its perceived inperfections as leading you towards doom-dom; then perhaps you might say we’re all completely doomed anyways by that pesky mortality thing…but you know, whatever…doom doom doom dooooom! ;)
This was a fascinating little tidbit tucked away at the end of the article:
According to several animal studies, conditions during pregnancy, including the mother’s diet, may determine how fat the offspring are as adults. Human studies have shown that women who eat little in pregnancy, surprisingly, more often have children who grow into fat adults.
Just curious- for how long have mothers been encouraged to restrict their diet for the sake of minimizing weight gain during pregnancy, as I was. How does that look on a timeline of the “obesity crisis”?
I may be extremely late to the party with FatFu’s Twins post but I challenge anyone to look at all those pics of identical twins and then claim that body composition has nothing to do with genetics.
I dunno about the 99.6% thing, it seems to me that something like that would be pretty much impossible to measure, but I do think that when it comes to fatness (and most other things) genetics are 9/10ths of the law (and no, I didn’t measure that! :P)
I challenge anyone to look at all those pics of identical twins and then claim that body composition has nothing to do with genetics.
I deal with the same concept at every family gathering that includes my siblings and my mom’s side of the family. Mom and her siblings all tend to be thin-to-normal and tallish. Mom married a guy from a pudgy family; her brother and next sister married people built the way they are; youngest sister married a scrawny guy (son #1) and then a pudgy guy (son #2). Siblings and I are all built like dad’s side (although siblings got height from mom’s side I lost out on somehow *sigh*); all other cousins except youngest aunt’s younger son are built just like their parents, tallish and thin-to-(so-called)normal weight. Youngest aunt’s youngest son is the only other pudge.
Identical twins separated at birth generally end up the same weight as adults, even if they’re raised totally differently – those studies may be where the “99.6” idea comes from, although I didn’t remember it was quite that high (I would have guessed they indicated numbers closer to 90-95% – heck, 80% is plenty high enough for me, and that’s the lowest guesstimate I’ve seen).
I loved the way there’s a picture of a cookie, a headless fattie, and a headline next to the article about baking cookies with your family. Hmm.
Just curious- for how long have mothers been encouraged to restrict their diet for the sake of minimizing weight gain during pregnancy, as I was.
Hmm, I don’t think that’s the norm these days. When my mother was pregnant with me, 40 years ago, she was told not to gain any more than 25 pounds, with 15 being the ideal, but I have about the same body type and when I was pregnant in 2007 I was mostly told not to worry about it and in fact was encouraged to eat more. (Well, one doctor told me to lay off the soda, which I was not drinking, but that was about edema and not overall weight gain.) I gained almost 40 pounds and everybody seemed to think that was about right.
But the idea that some of this is determined in utero as well as by genetics makes sense to me. My mother’s group had mostly exclusively breast fed kids and a full range of maternal body types, and the kids almost all matched their parents. If mom was big, the kid was roly poly. The skinny kids had skinny parents. We were all feeding them the same stuff with about the same frequency. The only mismatched sets were skinny moms who were formula feeding — formula fed kids gain at a different rate than breast fed kids (which is not a slam on formula, just that the kids gain at different times).
The in utero thing makes sense…why hasn’t this come out before?
When my mother was pregnant with me (and she didn’t know for sure that she WAS pregnant – I kid you not – until 26 DAYS before I showed up) she’d been trying to lose 10 pounds. She dieted for months & just could NOT get rid of that last ten. I must have been hungry as a bear when I popped out. Add to that my father’s side of the family (they take after his mom, a statuesque woman), a herd of broad-shoulder, full-bosomed folk…yeah, I was DOOMED to be tallish (5’6″), and at 60, to weigh in at 180 pounds. Know what? “Doomed” is the last thing I’d call it. It’s just the way I’m put together, and I’m reminded of the plaques & cards sold in Christian gift shops bearing the legend “God made me, and He doesn’t make mistakes”.
Let’s carve that in stone somewhere!
I feel like this article right here explains why the diet/weight loss industry is such a money maker. Those subtle differences in body composition are what make one diet so successful for one person but not at all for the next, so the whole business just self-propagates as frustrated people try one fad diet after another. Hard to know who/what to trust when trying to lose weight, short of seeing a doctor or nutritionist!
If being fat were in our DNA that means that ancient peoples should have had a high rate of obesity as well. And they didn’t. We all know the size of the average American has risen. It has a great deal to do with our diet and our more sedentary lifestyle…
Stephanie –
Except that our body composition is determined very MUCH by our DNA.
I’m really interested by the suggestion that ancient peoples didn’t have a high rate of obesity. Have you got a source for that, Stephanie?
As an historian I can say that Stephanie is full of crap. People of all ages in the past were variously fat and lean as is clear by looking at writings and artwork. What is probably true is that the fatties of yesteryear were slightly leaner and had more muscle than (some of) the fatties of today just because they had to do more physical work in order to get through a standard day in Renaissance Florence or Nineteenth century London or Seventeenth century New England. If they were of the poorer classes they also routinely had to eat bad food and got not enough of it. They still tended to be fatter than similar people with lean builds but as a consequence of poor and inadequate food they tended to die much younger than do the fatties of today. Yeh. Let’s all go back to that.
Aside from the whole “everybody knows it” being offered instead of sources, I’d like to know how Stephanie explains ancient peoples’ veneration of the fat female form.
Stephanie, I’ve got a photo of my great-great grandmother hanging on my wall. It was taken in the era of the bustle and she is corseted pretty tightly. Even with that, she’s fatter in that photo than I am right now in all my ungirdled glory.
In fact, I have five generations of fat relatives represented on my walls, along with a few thinner ones. I also have a full brother who was adopted at birth into another family. Yep, he’s kind of fat, too, unlike the people who raised him.
From the Venus of Willendorf on down the years, there have been plenty of fat folk and plenty of loving – and sexually enticing – images of them in art.
Sometimes what ‘everybody knows’ is pure, unmitigated horse hockey.
Unfortunately, my weight is such that I cannot be this heavy AND be healthy. The only skinny adult among my siblings was my sister, before she was diagnosed with a thyroid disorder! For me, having someone tell me that my current unhealthy morbid obesity does NOT have an “off” switch…? That *would* be dooming me. Dawn French I could live with – Jabba the Hutt, not so much.
hey im fat so what shut the fuck up you skinny bastards. im so fat my son who works for the council irons my jockss in the drive way with his cement roller i shit u not. Yeah so thats howfat i am get over itif you dont like it give me your address and ill eat you for a snack cunt
Stephanie, your point seems willfully ignorant. Those replying are right in pointing out the different body types existing throughout history. But you also seem to have a simplistic idea of what it means to have DNA that predispose toward obesity. It means our early ancestors had genes adapted for an environment of starvation – to store fat. You need to read this:
http://www.rockefeller.edu/pubinfo/news_notes/rus_051305_f.php
“As a species, we carry the genetic legacy of two environments. One is passed down from hunter-gatherers, who had only sporadic access to food. In such an environment, genes that predispose to obesity increase energy stores and provide a survival advantage in times of famine. The second, passed down from more recent societies, is the result of a decreased risk of starvation but a higher risk of obesity related health problems. In this environment, genes that resist obesity and its complications would have a selective advantage. It may be that it is the obese who carry the hunter-gatherer genes and the lean that carry the Western genes, an idea supported by the observation that populations that were historically more prone to starvation (Pima Indians, Pacific Islanders and others) become the most obese when exposed to a Western diet and lifestyle.”