Related To: The Unfinished Mystery of the Shangri-La Diet and Missed Distinctions
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.
Being fat is unhealthy because it does leave you more susceptible to disease. The American health care system wastes billions of dollars each year on diseases and conditions that are a direct cause of obesity. Diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, and cardiovascular disease are just a few of the conditions that could be completely avoided by millions of Americans if they just ate/exercised better. It seems that easy access to high calorie junk food and absolutely no exercise (never taking the stairs) is just too much of a temptation for many people... and in evolutionary speak, is a good indicator of that person's genes.
Obesity rarely occurs in nature because obese animals are targeted quickly by predators and quickly dispatched. The fat rabbit cannot escape the lean, muscular leopard chasing after it. In the event of a massive human starvation scenario I would argue that the fat people would be killed off first (possibly by the lean/muscular humans or predators) as the lean humans would require less resources and would be more capable of gathering food for the tribe. What good are obese/severely obese people in the hunter/gatherer world?
Think about all the benefits staying fit yields. It is easier to sit down, get up, row a boat, hunt for food, have sex, run, participate in sports, attract mates (good genes), defend your tribe, etc.
I would love to see evidence of this. I was under the impression that obesity is uncommon in the natural world because vast supplies of food are uncommon in the natural world.