Raising Suspicion

Less than a week until I'm in L.A.! Can't wait.

On another note, I've been reading a book called The Obesity Myth which I found by accident when I was in the library looking for a book I could use as a mousepad while I was online (their tabletops for some reason render my laser-mouse ineffective). I glanced at it, and it seemed an interesting read, so I checked it out.

The main premise of the book is that people's level of fatness is not really something that affects health as much as we are led to believe. Rather, that people's activity levels and fitness levels are much more important in being healthy. This obviously flies in the face of everything we hear in the media on a daily basis, which is that "obesity" will kill you, and if anyone wants to live a healthy life, they have to be thin. There are some interesting points the book makes to contradict this claim, and while I don't just read a book and buy everything it says--it definitely makes me more skeptical about the way scientific studies are presented in the media, and about how the research is done and who it's done by (and funded by).

Here's the thing that really got me thinking: The weight loss industry is a $50 billion industry...so if it turned out that what really mattered to health was that people lived more active lives (and tried to eat healthfully, without having to be psychotic about it), whether or not this led to any kind of dramatic weight loss for everyone, well, a lot of people would lose a lot of money.

Or, at the very least, people would have to admit that the reason they want to lose weight is not actually about health (if it is indeed true that fitness and healthy living matter far more than weight) but about aesthetics--about wanting to get certain jobs, have certain friends, and fit a certain image. People use the guise of "health" to talk about weight, when that often isn't really what they're talking about at all. Yes, by all means, exercise and eat healthfully--but that doesn't guarantee a slender physique.

Anyway, this is just a friendly reminder for everyone not to believe everything you read or hear in the news. That's not really a new lesson any of us, right? But then, I don't know why I never applied that same hermeneutic of suspicion to the media coverage of America's fatness and the "obesity epidemic." I'm not at all saying everything they say in the media is totally wrong, but when a 50 billion dollar industry is invested in certain beliefs being propagated, I think it's worth being a little skeptical, and trying to hear more than one side of the debate. (It was news to me that there even was a debate.)