Katsyuri sent in this Newsweek article, discussing how intestinal bacteria may affect the number of calories the body is able to absorb. More efficient bacteria = more calories absorbed = more “calories in” than average.

The calories that count are those extracted by your digestive enzymes and—as more and more research is showing—the trillions of bacteria in your intestine. People whose gut bacteria are better at digesting fats and carbs than their neighbor’s will absorb all 1,500 calories in a Friendly’s Ultimate Grilled Cheese BurgerMelt, while the neighbor will absorb fewer. So even in people with identical metabolisms, the effects of eating identical foods can be different.

The bacteria-made-me-fat idea has been gathering steam since 2006. In that year, Jeffrey Gordon of Washington University and colleagues reported in a paper in Nature that obese mice and slim mice have different populations of gut bacteria. Crucially, they showed that the bacteria caused obesity, rather than obesity producing a specific mix of bacteria.

There’s also a slideshow that touches on the connection between underprivileged communities and the prevalence of fast and processed foods (along with pictures of sad fat people… but they do have heads). Here’s Katsyuri’s disclaimer:

It’s still mainly the same old tripe about exercise and calories and that “Obesity Epidemic”, but at least it doesn’t COMPLETELY blame bigger people for everything.

The article does have some more interesting tidbits:

A study published in April… found that Japanese people harbor gut bacteria that digest nori—the seaweed in sushi—but westerners do not, probably because of the Japanese diet (lots of fish and thus marine bacteria, which digest nori). That suggests that “what you eat is proving to be one of the major determinants of…the community of bacteria living in your intestine.”

I wouldn’t be surprised to see people with nefarious motives say to people trying to lose weight, ‘you must have the wrong bacteria; I have something that will help you.’

The idea here is that gut bacteria interact with intestinal cells in a way that causes them to secrete cytokines, molecules that can cause low-grade inflammation. This inflammation can, in turn, trigger insulin resistance (the mark of type 2 diabetes) and increased appetite, which is an effective way to put on weight.

As scientists work out the details by which out gut bacteria make us fat, health mandarins need to look beyond the simplistic calories in/calories out mantra for explanations of the obesity epidemic.

So what do you think: is this kind of science—shifting the blame away from fat people—a step in the right direction? Or is the focus still in the wrong place?

[Note: The title of this post is a play on an Eric Cartman quote.]

Who were these “flabulous” celebrities? Beyonce, Jessica Simpson, Britney, Kirstie Alley, and Snooki. I mean, seriously. Did you doubt they would all be women? Plus, they sent me some accompanying photos showing the offenses, and they all looked like this. Where’s the “love handles” on Beyonce? Not that there’s anything wrong with “love handles,” Jesus. At least they have a cute name.

2. Okay, here’s a link, and it’s a good one: the “obesity stigma” is not actually helpful. Well, no effing duh. Which is basically what The Well-Rounded Mama says:

I suppose I should be grateful that someone is taking time to disprove the kinds of lame claims that more stigma is needed, not less. On the flip side, though, is that while they are concerned about the negative effects of obesity stigma on fat people, the big concern is that this stigma gets in the way of obesity intervention efforts…

But at least they are saying something against obesity stigma and countering the usual nonsense out there. It just amazes me that some idiots can actually believe that obesity stigma is really an effective tool for health improvement.

3. Another good one: obesity ills are “a myth” according to an Ohio State University study, via Big Fat Blog.

“There is a myth going on. Our findings show being overweight is no different from being what we believe is a healthy weight and this is across a person’s entire lifespan. For college-age adults, this should help them realize that they don’t have to worry so much if they have a BMI of 27 or 28. Some young people with these BMIs feel like, ‘I’m going to have all these problems, I need to try 50 different diets.’ And what is all that stress and dieting doing to your body? Probably more damage than the extra 15 pounds is.”

4. I ran across a Listmania list on Amazon today called “Large-size heroines and more.” Leonard Nimoy, The Gossip, and Nikki Blonsky are all represented, as are some projects I’d never heard of, such as an anthology called Such A Pretty Face…

Each tale has a plus-sized heroine or hero, ranging from a mermaid to a fairy-tale princess.

As well as a guide for plus-sized brides, some Fat Studies readers, and a UK series called Fat Friends.

I can’t vouch for level of empowerment each thing on the list has–for instance, I know Queen Sized was problematic, and there’s a weight loss memoir on there from someone named Michelle McManus, who won Pop Idol in the UK–but there were enough interesting things listed that I figured I’d pass it along.

5. Finally, 340 (and counting) blogs have been added to the comprehensive Fierce Freethinking Fatties Feed, and there are sub-feeds like Fat Acceptance, Fatshion, and Political Allies. (And other sub-feeds that do allow diet talk, so click those with caution.) If you want to find some new reading material or to add your blog to one of those feeds, check it out. Thanks for the heads up, Shannon!

Many [psychiatric drugs], which are used to treat emotional problems including depression and anxiety, cause weight gain — often of the rapid and massive sort — as one of their “side effects,” that brilliant marketing term for what are simply negative effects of a drug. It is striking that the weight of many Americans has ballooned just as the prescribing of psychiatric drugs has surged.

And from the “holy shit” file:

Another disturbing link could be on the way. The fifth edition of the major psychiatric diagnostic manual, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V), is expected to be released in 2013. One proposal under consideration: listing obesity as a mental illness. That would be a mistake, since obesity can be caused by metabolic and other physical problems that are often undiagnosed. And because obesity can also result from psychiatric drugs, calling it a mental illness would create a vicious cycle: Someone is troubled, put them on drugs, they become obese, therefore diagnose them as mentally ill, give them more drugs.

This post at Big Fat Delicious discusses the article at greater length.

What do you want to bet that studies have never been done to determine how many fat people are taking those drugs? What do you want to bet that the reason those studies have never been done is because pharmaceutical companies don’t want anyone to know how many people went from average-size to “overweight” or “overweight” to “obese” because of those psychiatric drugs? After all, if those numbers were known, pharma just might have to figure out how to come up with drugs without those nasty “side effects” of weight gain (not to mention that they then couldn’t push their weight loss drugs, with all their nasty “side effects”, on fat people).

The whole post is worth reading. Pretty scary, actually.

Recent studies have found, if you are an overweight woman you:

• May have a harder time getting health insurance or have to pay higher premiums
• Are at higher risk of being misdiagnosed or receiving inaccurate dosages of drugs
• Are less likely to find a fertility doctor who will help you get pregnant
• Are less likely to have cancer detected early and get effective treatment for it

What’s going on here? Fat discrimination is part of the problem. A recent Yale study suggested that weight bias can start when a woman is as little as 13 pounds over her highest healthy weight.

“Our culture has enormous negativity toward overweight people, and doctors aren’t immune,” says Harvard Medical School professor Dr. Jerome Groopman, M.D., author of “How Doctors Think.” “If doctors have negative feelings toward patients, they’re more dismissive, they’re less patient, and it can cloud their judgment, making them prone to diagnostic errors.”

With nearly 70 million American women who are considered overweight, the implications of this new information is disturbing, to say the least.

Indeed. Very unsettling.

Via @TheFWord Twitter feed.

Overweight and obese individuals whose TVs were fitted with an electronic “lock-out” device to cut their viewing by half ended up burning more calories than they consumed, researchers found…

The 20 volunteers whose TV-watching was electronically rationed burned 244 more calories than they consumed each day. In contrast, 16 similarly overweight individuals who did not have a limit imposed on their TV viewing consumed 57 more calories than they burned each day. The findings were not statistically significant, but suggest that cutting down on TV time can increase activity and improve the body’s energy balance.

I look forward to losing weight now that Glee, Mad Men, Top Chef, and Project Runway are all off the air. Of course, American Idol comes back on in January, and it airs like six nights a week, so my diet will soon be over.

“This so-called epidemic is not made up of theoretical fucking people who are just as fat as you can possibly imagine. It’s made up of people you see every day AND WHO YOU PROBABLY THINK ARE “NOT FAT.”

It is also, of course, made up of the very fat people held up as “freaks,” and plenty of people in between, but the fact remains that in the U.K., as with the U.S., the majority of obese people have a BMI between 30 and 35. Which means that if they don’t know they’re clinically obese, it’s probably because they’ve never calculated their BMI, they look nothing like the media’s image of obesity, and they’ve constantly got people telling them they’re not even fucking fat.

And Rachel’s post on Dear Abby’s hypocritical advice:

A fat woman marries a man who prefers larger women and when she loses weight, Abby counsels her that it isn’t her fault and that her meanie husband is just punishing her. A thin woman marries a man who prefers thin women and when she gains weight, is told by Abby that her husband has given her an “important message” and is accused of singlehandedly and deliberately destroying her marriage and then saddled with the onus of losing weight in order to save the relationship. The biased moralization here can’t be more explicit.

Even Dan Savage wouldn’t offer advice that out-and-out hypocritical.

So, in case you don’t know, I have an insane work schedule this semester, and my time reading blogs has been severely cut down, since I’m usually either driving, grading, or in the classroom. So I appreciate your tips and e-mails now more than ever! Anything else you think I should blog about, link to, or recommend?

People who have agonised over their fat thighs might be able to relax a bit — Danish doctors said on Thursday they found patients with the thinnest thighs died sooner than the more endowed.

Obesity, age, smoking and other factors did not reduce the effect, the researchers reported in the British Medical Journal. “Our results suggest that there might be an increased risk of premature death related to thigh size.”

One study of something that is “unlikely to be clinically useful” so, not very scientific, really. And you guys with thin thighs probably don’t need to worry too much. And there is plenty in there about how large waist size and abdominal fat are both harbingers of doom. But it’s nice to see an alarmist headline about thin-thighed people for a change!

Thanks to Ian for the link, and to H for this link with the e-mail message “Tiny thigh? You might die!”

This first one, I think it was the exclamation point that sucked me in. But I took the text from Yahoo! (there’s that exclamation point again).

1. Obese U.S. Man Hides Gun Between Rolls of Fat!

Twenty-five-year-old George Vera was charged with possession of a firearm in a correctional facility…Vera was originally arrested on charges of selling illegal copies of compact discs. The 500-pound man was searched during his arrest and again at a city jail and the county jail, but officers never found the weapon in his rolls of skin. Vera admitted having the gun during a shower break at the county jail.

2. Brits Too Lazy To Have Sex, Let Alone Run For A Bus

People need to get fitter, not just for their own sake, but for the sake of their families, friends, and evidently their pets, too. If we don’t start to take control of this problem, a whole generation will become too unfit to perform even the most rudimentary of tasks.’

Doctors blamed chubby celebrities for adding to the obesity crisis by showing that it is possible to be fat and famous.

From, “we are fat and lazy because of e.g. Ricky Gervais” to “WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE”:

3. Obesity-Cancer Link Is Growing

In the 1980s, researchers focused on the amount of fat people ate as a probable cause of cancer, but studies did not strongly support that. Later they turned to diets high in fruits and vegetables as a way to reduce cancer, but again, Willett said, they struggled to find convincing evidence in studies.

Now attention has turned to obesity, and more and more research is providing evidence that indict that as a cancer cause.

I remember Rachel Twittered about this one:

4. Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin

“In general, for weight loss, exercise is pretty useless,” says Eric Ravussin, chair in diabetes and metabolism at Louisiana State University and a prominent exercise researcher. Many recent studies have found that exercise isn’t as important in helping people lose weight as you hear so regularly in gym advertisements or on shows like The Biggest Loser — or, for that matter, from magazines like this one.

The basic problem is that while it’s true that exercise burns calories and that you must burn calories to lose weight, exercise has another effect: it can stimulate hunger. That causes us to eat more, which in turn can negate the weight-loss benefits we just accrued. Exercise, in other words, isn’t necessarily helping us lose weight. It may even be making it harder.

And the last one is just embarrassing (also, it’s a three-paragraph article with like 87 typos, my god):

5. Ashlee’s Secret To Post Baby Weight Loss

Ashlee, who gave birth to her son Bronx Mowgli with rocker hubby Pete eight months ago, said that reducing weight after the delivery was much easier than she had thought. Ashlee told People’s Celebrity Baby Blog : “After I had Bronx I lucked out…I mean, I’m 24-years-old. I have the genes from my mother and I did work out for three months, ” reports the Sun .

The singer-actress, who is all set to return to the world of television in Melrosde Place, said she and Pete manage their time with son Brionx easily.

Um, [sic].

Any thoughts about 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5? Please share!

In the early nineteen-sixties, a man named David Wallerstein was running a chain of movie theatres in the Midwest and wondering how to boost popcorn sales. Wallerstein had already tried matinée pricing and two-for-one specials, but to no avail. According to Greg Critser… one night the answer came to him: jumbo-sized boxes. Once Wallerstein introduced the bigger boxes, popcorn sales at his theatres soared, and so did those of another high-margin item, soda.

A decade later, Wallerstein had retired from the movie business and was serving on McDonald’s board of directors when the chain confronted a similar problem. Customers were purchasing a burger and perhaps a soft drink or a bag of fries, and then leaving. How could they be persuaded to buy more? Wallerstein’s suggestion—a bigger bag of fries—was greeted skeptically by the company’s founder, Ray Kroc. Kroc pointed out that if people wanted more fries they could always order a second bag.

“But Ray,” Wallerstein is reputed to have said, “they don’t want to eat two bags—they don’t want to look like a glutton.” Eventually, Kroc let himself be convinced; the rest, as they say, is supersizing.

Something called “conditioned hypereating”:

Kessler spends a lot of time meeting with (often anonymous) consultants who describe how they are trying to fashion products that offer what’s become known in the food industry as “eatertainment.” Fat, sugar, and salt turn out to be the crucial elements in this quest: different “eatertaining” items mix these ingredients in different but invariably highly caloric combinations. A food scientist for Frito-Lay relates how the company is seeking to create “a lot of fun in your mouth” with products like Nacho Cheese Doritos, which meld “three different cheese notes” with lots of salt and oil. Another product-development expert talks about how she is trying to “unlock the code of craveability,” and a third about the effort to “cram as much hedonics as you can in one dish.”

Kessler invents his own term—“conditioned hypereating”—to describe how people respond to these laboratory-designed concoctions. Foods like Cinnabons and Starbucks’ Strawberries & Crème Frappuccinos are, he maintains, like drugs: “Conditioned hypereating works the same way as other ‘stimulus response’ disorders in which reward is involved, such as compulsive gambling and substance abuse.” For Kessler, the analogy is not merely rhetorical: research on rats, he maintains, proves that the animals’ brains react to sweet, fatty foods the same way that addicts’ respond to cocaine. A reformed overeater himself—“I have owned suits in every size,” he writes—Kessler advises his readers to eschew dieting in favor of a program that he calls Food Rehab. The principles of Food Rehab owe a lot to those of drug rehab, except that it is not, as Kessler acknowledges, advisable to swear off eating altogether. “The substitute for rewarding food is often other rewarding food,” he writes, though what could compensate for the loss of Nacho Cheese Doritos he never really explains.

And she also addresses the fat acceptance movement:

According to the authors of “The Fat Studies Reader,” the real problem isn’t the sudden surge in obesity in this country but the surge in stories about obesity. Weight, by their account, is, like race or sex or bone structure, a biological trait over which individuals have no—or, in the case of fat, very limited—control. A “societal fat phobia,” Natalie Boero, a sociology professor at San Jose State University, writes, “in part explains why the ‘obesity epidemic’ is only now beginning to be critically deconstructed.”

Undeniably, the fat—the authors of “The Reader” are adamant advocates for the “f” word—are subject to prejudice and even cruelty. A 2008 report by the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, at Yale, noted that teachers consistently hold lower expectations of overweight children, and that three out of five of the heaviest kids have been teased at school. The same people who are repelled by racist or misogynistic humor seem to feel that it is perfectly acceptable to make fat jokes.

But, just because size bias exists it doesn’t follow that putting on weight is a subversive act. In contrast to the field’s claims about itself, fat studies ends up taking some remarkably conservative positions. It effectively allies itself with McDonald’s and the rest of the processed-food industry, while opposing the sorts of groups that advocate better school-lunch programs and more public parks. To claim that some people are just meant to be fat is not quite the same as arguing that some people are just meant to be poor, but it comes uncomfortably close.

It’s all brainy and New Yorker-y and there’s a lot going on and I don’t even know where to begin. You guys are smart, you try!

1. The person who dreamed up the BMI said explicitly that it could not and should not be used to indicate the level of fatness in an individual.

The BMI was introduced in the early 19th century by a Belgian named Lambert Adolphe Jacques Quetelet. He was a mathematician, not a physician. He produced the formula to give a quick and easy way to measure the degree of obesity of the general population to assist the government in allocating resources. In other words, it is a 200-year-old hack.

Thanks to Een for the heads up!