Letters to the Editor

• Yeah, let's do it, because all the other attempts we have made to control people's weight have worked so well!

  [Read the article: Bring on the runts]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  Other posts have said it better than I ever could, but my two cents anyhow: I come from a family with a long, long history of weight problems, diabetes, heart disease and so on, so I am acutely conscious of these matters. My long-gone elderly aunts, uncles, grandparents, etc. who were almost all overweight did not get so by eating fast food (didn't exist) or because they were fed on baby formula (in the 1880s? in rural Czechoslovakia? don't think so). Also, they had to walk most everywhere, didn't own cars or drive (until well into the late 1950s), did massive amounts of hard physical labor and so forth.

  They were still overweight.

  I have an interesting collection of vintage diet books, from the 30s and 40s. Despite years of inventions and research, the basic diets and the advice (eat less, exercise more) are identical. They also are PROVEN FAILURES -- they simply do not work for the vast majority of human beings. Yes you can lose SOME weight this way, but over the long haul, you cannot keep it off....not with thousands of temporarily shrunken fat cells screaming for you to eat.

  What does stand out in my mind is the continual uselessness of ridiculing and baiting and preaching to heavy people, the mountains of books, the piles of contradictory advice (Eat protein! Don't eat protein! Eat carbs! -- no wait! don't eat carbs!), and in the end, about 97% of all heavy people end up....heavy.

  Now the brilliant idea to take infants off breast milk (and I am nuts, or hasn't this been a mainstay of Broadsheeters, the incredible benefits of natural breast milk?) and put them on a special formula to make them thin as adults. How do you determine which infant gets the magic formula? My brother weighed 13 lbs at birth, the biggest baby ever born in that particular hospital. I weighed 8 lbs. Guess who is proportionately heavier as an adult? We were raised identically, same parents, same food, same genetics. Why? Obviously nobody knows, but if this stuff had been around back in the 50s, I guess it would have been HIM who would have put on experimental formula -- unnecessarily.

  Can anything really be worth taking a baby off breast milk (assuming his mom wants to nurse) and putting him on formula for no other reason than to manipulate his adult weight? What does this say about our deeply ingrained hatred of fat people and the lengths we are willing to go to in order to manipulate our children into being thin, no matter what their genetic predisposition?

  Keep in mind that most of what you read about weight and obesity is tainted by the prejudices of the culture, magazines, TV, the writers. (I recommend anyone interested in this check out the outstanding website, junkscience.com.) There is no quantifiable "obesity epidemic" amongst school children. People live longer than ever before in human history, and are healthier overall. Most of the self-righteous indignation towards the obese -- couched in terms like "healthiness" -- are really about lookism, the fact that we dislike looking at people who are heavy, but it isn't politically correct to say "I find you ugly", but it IS politically correct to say "I find you UNHEALTHY, and therefore I have to right to try and force you to change by any means possible, including humiliation".

  What really does stand out glariingly after decades of diet failures and crazy-shit theories (carbs are bad! no, good! no -- wait, bad!) is that shaming and nagging are guaranteed not to work, that forcing children and teens to diet has always been a colossal failure resulting in MORE and not less weight gain and that the MORE you intervene, the WORSE the results.

  Permalink Tuesday, April 24, 2007 01:30 PM