[Tina],
Here are some notes I’ve taken from that “Big Fat Lies” book by Glenn A. Gaesser, Ph. D. that we were talking about last night. Hopefully, these better explain what I was trying to relate.
In my mind after reading this book, the case that thinness is unequivocally better is not as clear cut as it used to be. The book raises some big questions about how it was determined in the 20th century that thinness is the healthiest way to live over all.
Thinner Not Always Better
1. The act of losing weight itself can place the person at increased health risk. That is, you may be at greater risk of premature death if you lose fifty pounds than if you were to keep that weight on.
2. Ninety percent of the people who lose weight gain it back in five years. Often they gain more weight than they lost initially.
3. Not necessarily a strong association between the state of being overweight and hardening of the arteries. My mom’s arteries are clear even though she is close to 100 pounds overweight.
4. “Fat in the arteries and fat on the body are different and not necessarily related.” From “Big Fat Lies” book.
5. You can have lots of body fat and still be fit.
6. Yo Yo dieting can be fatal. Heavier people tend to do this more than thin people and so this may inflate the risk of premature death among the overweight population.
7. Yo Yo dieting — or weight cycling — over time usually results in weight gain. So dieting promotes rather than cures obecity.
8. Ponder: Do fat people who become thin end up attracting more people than they did when they were fat? I’m not convinced of this. I’ve seen many cases to the contrary. I know lots of heavy people who enjoy happy relationships.
9. The mere presence of body fat does not necessarily indicate that the person carrying it is unhealthy.
10. Weight and cholesterol levels are not necessarily related. Shown through sever studies.
11. Healthy bodies come in many shapes and sizes.
12. Fatness and obesity appear to be dangerous only when they are the result of diets rich in junk foods, and a daily regimen deficient in physical exercise.
13. Perhaps the insurance companies invented the height weight tables so they could charge customers higher premiums. If they declared that weights should be very low for a person’s height in order for the customer to pay the least amount of money in premiums, then over two thirds of the people in the US would be considered overweight, and therefore, subject to the higher premiums. There’s a profit motive here, for publishing skewed height weight tables. Are the insurance companies interested in promoting good health or raising their profits?
14. The fitness and fashion industries stand to benefit from skewed height weight tables that favor the very thin. How? People buy exercise equipment and enroll in weight loss and exercise programs, spending billions of dollars on weight reduction. Usually, they gain the weight back and repeat the process several times over a lifetime, ensuring a bumper and sustained income for these industries. The clothing industry benefits as well, because people lose weight, then buy close to fit their new figure. Then, they gain weight again and so much purchase bigger clothes to fit them.
15. Diet drug companies also benefit from the public belief that thinner is better because people buy more drugs to lose weight when they believe that they should lose it, than they would if they stayed heavy.
16. The medical industry keeps its income flowing in because they are called upon to treat all the health problems that result from yo yo dieting.
17. Body weights associated with the lowest mortality rates increases with age. However, typical weight height tables don’t account for this, claiming that a 5’4’’ woman should weigh roughly 120 pounds regardless of how old she is.
18. Most people with type two or non insulin dependent diabetes can so substantially improve their condition through diet changes and exercise that, even when they have lost little or no weight, and remain at weights that are considered clinically obese, they can discontinue their medications. They don’t necessarily have to lose their excess weight to cure their diabetes.
19. A government study from 1976 through 1980 of over twenty thousand people showed that excessive amounts of lean body tissue is more strongly linked to high blood pressure than is excess body fat.
20. With weight loss, in addition to decreases in body fat also comes decreases in lean body mass. Any time someone loses weight, they lose some of their muscle tissue as well as the fat tissue. Several studies show that the reduction in blood pressure traditionally associated with weight loss is more closely related to loss in the lean body tissue than it is to the loss of body fat. So concluding that actually body fat loss promotes good health is not supported by the evidence.
21. Yo Yo dieting causes high blood pressure in some people. It may be the presence of yo yo dieting rather than fat itself that causes this elevated blood pressure.
22. Obese people may tend to have high blood pressure more than thin folks because they tend to do more yo yo dieting.
23. Studies in the mid eighties show that there are no more fatty deposits in the blood vessels of fat and thin people of the same age.
24. One study done at the university of Tennessee showed that for every eleven pounds of additional weight, that there is a ten to forty percent lower chance of having fatty deposits in the arteries. The fattest people tended to have the cleanest arteries.
25. Dietary changes, but not necessarily the actual carrying of excess weight can influence morality rates and fat deposits in the arteries.
26. Behaviors that lead to obesity may be the real culprits as far as raising death tolls in this country, not necessarily the obesity itself.
27. This book claims that we have a “natural” weight and suggests that we may be at greater health risk if we’re over that weight. For some people, this natural weight would make them thin. Thus, for these, they’d begin experiencing problems commonly associated with overweight at a much lower weight than others. Some tend to be most healthy at an average weight. And still others are healthiest when they are overweight according to the insurance companies’ height weight tables. These people would tend to suffer health problems when they’re too thin. However, this guy offered no direct empirical evidence of the existence of this natural weight. So I’m skeptical about this claim. But he says that each person’s natural weight is not simply an arbitrary decree by the medical and insurance industries.
28. Oftentimes, people dismiss books that say fatter is better, claiming that they were written by a fat person and that that fat person is just interested in promoting fatness. But this problem would also affect thin people writing books that support the thin-is-better idea. Most of us think that the way we are is the best way to be. So there would tend to be a bias in the writings of thin authors toward thinness in books that support thinness, as well as a bias toward fatness by fat authors writing books that support fatness. I don’t see where this would be any more or less true among the fat and the thin. Why would the book for thinness be any more or less credible than the one supporting fatness? They’d both be subject to authorial bias and it’s not clear that one would be any more subject to this bias than the other.
29. A person can be physically fit, regardless of whether they’re fat or thin. Some fat people have better endurance in aerobics than the thin.
Tom
Good night.