CodeBlueBlog: The War on Obesity: Report From an Embedded Journalist

April 2005

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Obesity Wars: Update from The Alternate Universe

The Long Haul

When the war on obesity was first declared, most of us thought it would be a quick lightning-like strike, we'd obliterate the enemy and come home. But now it looks like we're in for a long, expensive fight. I guess we should have learned from the wars on poverty and drugs. These wars take time. Forever kind of time.

After all, the enemy is smart, strong, and pernicious. It makes money by poisoning our kids with fattening foods through advertising and clever recipes, designed to manipulate genetic tendencies and human foibles.

Goodbye Columbus

As we learned this past weekend in the The New York Times Sunday Magazine (subscription), according to the "thrifty-gene hypothesis" (no, it is not the locus for that inexplicable desire of some women to shop at Target), "situations" are "created" by our "chromosome combinations" which can explain obesity in certain groups of Mexican-Americans:

the theory that some combinations of chromosomes create a situation in which cells are more inclined to store calories efficiently for times of scarcity. Some researchers have speculated that because many Mexican-Americans are descendants of American Indian hunter-gatherers, who evolved to store fat more easily for times of famine, those living a sedentary life in modern westernized societies with access to fast food may be more prone to gain weight

Another nail in the coffin of Columbus's reputation!

Looking Into the Abyss

Then again, The Times' article also blames obesity on the guilt complexes of parents, the concept of fatalismo (live for today) in Hispanic culture, and the "pobrecito syndrome" in which parents over empathize and overcompensate their children.

In the field, most soldiers involved in the war against obesity throw up their hands at such useless and endless omphaloskepsis. They have a dirty job they were sent to do, and it doesn't matter how it got this way...

Once out of the bottle, of course, the war genie can never go back, as social scientists and bureaucrats clamber aboard the obesity juggernaut and the steaks get bigger as the stakes get bigger... In case you weren't aware, there is a lot of the taxpayer's money to spend.

Stop Making Sense

Subversives will stop at nothing to foil the fight against flab. The University of Pennsylvania, yesterday, reported a study citing Weight Watchers as a nutrition plan that works -- while blaming no one.

Unlike the thrifty gene or pobrecito explanations for fleshiness, Weight Watchers skips over the entire game of victim-sorting and just states the facts: Eating plans can be constructed to maintain a weight that falls beneath the Bell Curve distribution for normal. This involves permutations on a simple mathematical proposition:

Calories consumed become fat when they are not burned off or used for building and maintenance.

Weight Watchers will tell you that no matter what your genetic make-up or childhood traumas, if you figure in the food groups appropriately, a healthful and weight-maintaining diet is almost easy to construct.

But it is up to you to actuate it.

It takes a little knowledge, a little discipline, and a little effort.

So much for that. I'm pulling m,y combat boot on and heading back out into the field. I'm embedded with the first fat infantry. Tomorrow we are staking out a McDonald's. That mother is going down!

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health care also health·care (hlthkâr) n. :efforts made to maintain or restore health especially by trained and licensed professionals -- usually hyphenated when used attributively

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	Webster's Online Dictionary The Rosetta Edition™
	English Non-English