Link: Are fears of a fat planet overblown? - Diet and nutrition- msnbc.com.
Here we go, a compendium of all the issues various skeptics have raised concerning the so-called "obesity epidemic." The first page of the article mainly covers various contrarian opinions and studies, including the infamous "obesity paradox" in which researchers grudgingly admit that fat people actually survive some conditions better than thin people. But it's the second page where things really get down and dirty--where the article starts following the money to see who stands to profit from the war on obesity--and who might even be feuling the war to benefit their own bottom lines:
"Experts on both sides of the obesity debate have often criticized WHO's overweight and obesity measures, saying they are too low. When WHO defined the body mass index scores constituting normal, overweight and obese, they appeared to be the result of an independent expert committee convened by WHO. Yet the 1997 Geneva consultation was held jointly with the International Obesity Task Force, an advocacy group whose self-described mission is "to inform the world about the urgency of the (obesity) problem." According to the task force's most recent available annual report, more than 70 percent of their funding came from Abbott Laboratories and F. Hoffman La-Roche, companies which make top-selling anti-fat pills."
Obviously, there are indeed health benefits to taking off a reasonable amount of weight in a reasonable way--I'm proof of that. But the so-called War on Obesity, as far as I can see, is not about reasonable (let alone inexpensive) approaches to the problem. It's about scare tactics, knee-jerk rejection of data that doesn't fit the official party line, and big profits for the medical, pharmaceutical, and diet industries.
Weekly weigh-in: plateau? bottom? And whither this blog?
First, the numbers:
As regular readers of this blog may have noticed, I've been plateaued at 192 pounds for about a month now. You'll also remember that I had vowed I was going to let my weight find its own natural stopping point, without doing any extraordinary alterations to my routine to force my weight lower.
So I'm wondering now: is this it? Have I reached my body's natural preferred stopping point? Not that I'd be changing my current routine one whit, any more than I planned to change it if I weren't at bottom. In fact, this may well be a moot point from a practical standpoint--I've got a healthy routine, it's working for me, so if it ain't broke don't fix it.
It does, however, make me wonder what I should do with this blog from this point forward. After all, it's no more exciting for me to keep entering essentially the same data week after week than it must be for you folks out there to read it! And the truth be known, I pretty much laid out the bulk of my philosophy about healthy weigh management--and vented the bulk of my angst about the dieting industry--in these first two years of blogging.
So I'm considering expanding the focus of this blog, from a personal weight-management journal to a more wide-ranging blog about my interests in food. This would of course still include my weigh management routine--after all, I'm not going to stop any of my disciplines just because I'm changing the blog's focus. And if something should change about my weight management routine, of course you'll hear about it here right off. And I have occasionally mentioned my other food interests here from time to time. I'd just be bringing those other interests more into the foreground.
I'm not sure exactly how and when these changes will start showing up on this blog, but watch this space, and sooner or later all will be revealed.
March 06, 2008 at 04:59 PM in General commentary, Weekly weigh-in | Permalink | Comments (2)