Sforzando: A barrage of body-image insults.

[silveradept]

The Junk Science Department, in combination with the Concern Troll Watch, presents to you a commercial website posting claiming that women don't know they're overweight, because their BMIs are too high and they think they're healthy! The response, as best put down by the Curvature, is as follows - get frakked. Start with the fact that BMI has its problems as a measure, that BMI puts people into boxes and encourages shame, instead of actually taking into account body type, that overweight people aren't necessarily unhealthy, and all these other factors that are being discarded in favor of fat shaming in women, and then come back and tell us that you still think this is good research. A different take on it, that still has some problems, but is much less about the moralizing, is the fact that science has not determined whether our obesity epidemics are a result of "moral" choices entirely, or whether we have biological factors that are contributing to them. If we have biological factors, but the insistence is that one can become thin entirely through human decisions, then we lose an important part of actually helping people to become less obese, to supplement their decisions with assistance, much like how smoking cessation patches are supposed to help make the decision stick.

Worst of the lot, though, a rare specimen, indeed - a column that insults everyone that it was trying to provide suggestions for. Mr. Pendry divides his derision into two different places - anyone claiming there is a lack of healthy nutrition available for children is simultaneously a nanny-statist and blind, then that fat kids are socially undesirable, but school systems shouldn't concern themselves with the consequences of that past mandatory physical education classes, because they can't do what they're chartered to do, anyway. His first attack is that the fattening of America is a matter of choice, not of a lack of food options - after all, all those fast food joints that are popular and profitable are right next to your neighborhood Wal-Mart, which has all the healthy food that is supposedly missing from all the neighborhood. We have plenty of food around, and some of it is even the healthy stuff that the nannies want to force us to eat. For all that bluster, however, he doesn't address the two main concerns about food deserts: the fact that healthy food is more expensive, in preparation time and in money, for anyone to have in their house, and that the "desert" part of food desert is a lack of groceries and places that offer healthy options that are around poor neighborhoods and can be reached by foot power (whether a pied or en velo). Poor people do not have cars to drive to the commercial parks where the megamarts are, and people working two jobs do not have the time to drive themselves to the megamarts. Combined with having to choose between eating unhealthy for a whole week and healthy for only half, most people will choose to be able to eat the whole week. And will do so from a place that is convenient to them, on the way to or from work, which does not usually make detours to places where the megamarts are. All of this is predicated, as well, on the neighborhood being somewhere that you want to go out into. If it's a place that's dangerous, the grocery can be close by, and nobody will go there. So while Mr. Pendry can look at the top-down map and say "There's all that food nearby!", unless he's walking the streets to see how it all looks to the people who live there, he doesn't know what he's talking about.

Part two of this concern about children getting fat is that letters of concern going home about the health of the children are unnecessary in two different ways - fat kids know from home that they're fat kids, and should already be receiving their proper dose of social shame from their parents (and probably their peers at school, too), and school should not be concerned about the physical health of the children inside, when they can't even manage to teach them the rudiments of a proper education in maths, sciences, language, and history. If they must, however, Mr. Pendry suggests that we have mandatory physical education, of the getting people sweaty with exercise variety, and that doing that will result in the desired fat-shedding of the children. (Again, most likely with a healthy dose of social shame for the non-athletic children from their more athletically-inclined counterparts.) Mandatory physical education would be a good thing, although I'm inclined to say that we could find as much place for yoga and tai chi as much as contact sports, marching band, or weight training. Healthy body, healthy mind, as they say. Big kids need recess, too, after all. I'm kind of surprised that he didn't make any mention of the school lunch program or nutritional requirements for student lunches. That would have been more in character with the first part. Instead, he seems rather okay with the idea that body-image stress should be constantly applied to young people, whether from parents or peers, despite the evidence and the anecdotes of how body-image stress often results in worse health. Or perhaps he's just dismissive of public schooling in general, and he can't be arsed to have a constructive thought about them. That brings the line of how the schools should be focused on the mental subjects and forget about the physical ones into context, at least. I wonder, though, if he'd be in favor of removing shackles like No Child Left Behind and other standardized-test driven measures from the schools and funding them enough to do the job of actually educating the children.

In any case, rather than provide possible solutions, he seems more than happy to just provide mockery, ending with his lament about the lack of a good chili dog, just to go for one last tweak.

Comments

[woodburner.livejournal.com]

"people working two jobs do not have the time to drive themselves to the megamarts."

Much less to actually make the food. Even a simple meal often takes a good hour to make, and then there's the extra dishes you'll have to wash, etc., etc. And let's not forget those that already have health problems that make standing around in a kitchen for ages impractical at best. If you have health problems you're likely going to have trouble making money, and thus you're not going to be able to pay someone to cook for you, either.