The Obesity Myth

Matt_Simpson

Megan McArdles blogs an interview with Paul Campos, author of The Obesity Myth. I'll let anyone who is interest read the whole thing, but here's some interesting excerpts:

I mean, there's no better established empirical proposition in medical science that we don't know how to make people thinner. But apparently this proposition is too disturbing to consider, even though it's about as well established as that cigarettes cause lung cancer. So all these proposals about improving public health by making people thinner are completely crazy. They are as non-sensical as anything being proposed by public officials in our culture right now, which is saying something.

It's conceivable that through some massive policy interventions you might be able to reduce the population's average BMI from 27 to 25 or something like that. But what would be the point? There aren't any health differences to speak of for people between BMIs of about 20 and 35, so undertaking the public health equivalent of the Apollo program to reduce the populace's average BMI by a unit or two (and again I will emphasize that we don't actually know if we could do even that) is an incredible waste of public health resources

and

Megan: An economist recently pointed out that we don't encourage people to move to the country, even though rural people live more than three years longer than urban people, and the diffefence in their healthy life expectancy is even more outsized. Nor do we encourage people to find Jesus or get married. We target "unhealthy" behaviors that are already stigmatized.

Paul: Right, as Mary Douglas the anthropologist has pointed out, we focus on risks not on the basis of "rational" cost-benefit analysis, but because of the symbolic work focusing on those risks does -- most particularly signalling disapproval of certain groups and behaviors. In this culture fatness is a metaphor for poverty, lack of self-control, and other stuff that freaks out the new Puritans all across the ideological spectrum, which is why the war on fat is so ferocious -- it appeals very strongly to both the right and the left, for related if different reasons.

Megan McArdles blogs an interview with Paul Campos, author of The Obesity Myth. I'll let anyone who is interest read the whole thing, but here's some interesting excerpts:

I mean, there's no better established empirical proposition in medical science that we don't know how to make people thinner. But apparently this proposition is too disturbing to consider, even though it's about as well established as that cigarettes cause lung cancer. So all these proposals about improving public health by making people thinner are completely crazy. They are as non-sensical as anything being proposed by public officials in our culture right now, which is saying something.

It's conceivable that through some massive policy interventions you might be able to reduce the population's average BMI from 27 to 25 or something like that. But what would be the point? There aren't any health differences to speak of for people between BMIs of about 20 and 35, so undertaking the public health equivalent of the Apollo program to reduce the populace's average BMI by a unit or two (and again I will emphasize that we don't actually know if we could do even that) is an incredible waste of public health resources

and

Megan: An economist recently pointed out that we don't encourage people to move to the country, even though rural people live more than three years longer than urban people, and the diffefence in their healthy life expectancy is even more outsized. Nor do we encourage people to find Jesus or get married. We target "unhealthy" behaviors that are already stigmatized.

Paul: Right, as Mary Douglas the anthropologist has pointed out, we focus on risks not on the basis of "rational" cost-benefit analysis, but because of the symbolic work focusing on those risks does -- most particularly signalling disapproval of certain groups and behaviors. In this culture fatness is a metaphor for poverty, lack of self-control, and other stuff that freaks out the new Puritans all across the ideological spectrum, which is why the war on fat is so ferocious -- it appeals very strongly to both the right and the left, for related if different reasons.

Also, if obesity lowers life expectancy and causes serious health problems, I would expect people who are genetically more prone to obesity to have fewer descendants.

This is a fun theory, but I don't think it, y'know, works. Not being in the African savanna anymore, "pregnancy can be complicated by obesity" seems unlikely to have a powerful long-term effect. The effect is small enough in the aggregate population that it will easily be washed out.

Basically, yes, the obese would have slightly fewer children, ceteris paribus, but in dealing with complex social factors, ceteris is almost never paribus.

The attractiveness idea is fascinating, but probably wrong. People tend to anchor. My google-fu is not refined enough to find the study, but, in speed dating, the number of callbacks remains fairly constant even as group composition varies. If, on a given night, men are shorter or women are heavier, the opposite gender changes their standards accordingly. Traits that reduce sexual attractiveness are bad for the individual, holding else constant. But if those traits affect a large number of individuals, they're largely irrelevant. Indeed, standards of attractiveness may even change a little; we're already seeing some backlash against the idea that super-skinny is sexy.

The main thing that determines how many kids people have is... get ready... how many kids they want to have and/or how careful they are to avoid having more than this number. The strongest macroscopic determinant of this is culture/class, which happens to also correlate with obesity.

Obese women 'significantly more likely to have children with birth defects' .

Women are getting more beautiful. "Beautiful women have more children than their plainer counterparts."

Taller men... are more likely to father children. Tall men are less likely to be obese. Not a direct correlation though. Tall men also tend to earn more.

Just some results that may help shed more light on this. Without better data I don't want to make any definitive statements, though.

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The Obesity Myth

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