Consider This: Maybe Our Increasing "Fatness" Isn't *Entirely* Bad

Great Debates
1

In reading through yet another “fat people” thread, (If you’re too fat to fit in your seat and you can’t pay for two, then don’t fly!!!) I had to give some consideration to an idea.

No two human beings are alike. No two bodies are alike – not in their needs or in their shortcomings or their points at which they are healthy or unhealthy.

And while I’m certainly not suggesting that someone at 300 pounds or more is healthy, I’m also struck as we’re told just this month that statistically, and judging by the current standards, 2/3 of Americans are overweight and a full 1/3 of Americans are classified as obese. Somehow, that doesn’t seem quite true, especially since this is based on Body Mass Index, which treats muscle as equivalent to fat in its narrowly constructed ratio based standard.

I think that we should consider this – in the modernized parts of the world, people are getting larger. This is true. But it may well be that the previous “set points” and strictures of weight and body mass are becoming outdated – and more quickly than we are willing to revise them – because they are based on modes of life which no longer apply. We are no longer living in an industrial or agrarian age, this is a technological age unlike any other. Our roles in the world have changed dramatically in just the last generation.

We have vehicles which take us where we want to go, we don’t have to hunt our own food or build our own shelter, and the majority of us are doing work which requires far more by way of mental agility than physical and those who are doing physical labor continue to have their jobs made progressively easier by new technologies. Even the most mundane tasks have been made considerably easier – compare the weight of a vacuum cleaner circa 1970 to today, for instance, or the number of homes without microwaves or dishwashers. Our physical loads are vastly different and continue to become lighter.

So it seems to make sense that our body types have and will continue to evolve accordingly. Part of that, it seems, is to be heavier. Instead of continuing to work from a more weight = absolutely unhealthy mindset, perhaps we need to work from a natural weight = healthy mindset.

A part of that, obviously, will be rethinking design to accomodate our technological age bodies. Whether that means making things stronger or larger or simply more comfortable – as our technological age bodies also seem to be more tired more often, not because we’re doing hard work but because we’re doing so much work – why is it important for us to cling to our almost puritanical notion that larger is bad and cannot be budged for even the tiniest bit. (Even beyond the 17.2" airline seat - a width smaller than my Apple Pro computer keyboard.)

What say you, Dopers?

2

I say you should go read David H. Keller’s short story, “The Revolt of the Pedestrians.”

3

Keen! You mean we’re just evolving to a higher level of fatness, and we should all relax and allow Evolution to do its thing? Cool!

<< opens second bag of chips >>

Hey, it’s Darwinian selection at work here, I’m not gonna argue…

4

I weigh 298 pounds and my doctor tells me I am healthy. I am also likely to live longer than the average American. My fat great-grandmothers all lived until they were 89 and my slightly chubby great-great-grandmother lived until she was 99.

I am likely fatter than I would other wise be due to nearly starving a few times. I am active, at least I was until I got pregnant. Now I am less active and losing weight.

I noticed that in the early films that many people are overweight. They don’t seem much thinner than the people are now. It makes me wonder if this getting heavier trend is not as real as the health industry fears.

I think that we have not been in a technological age long enough to see the effects of selection pressures yet.

5

Not at all. What I mean is that perhaps we need to rethink what is and isn’t “unhealthy” with regard to weight. Especially when the issue is viewed with regard to current lifestyles, environmental factors and yes, evolutionary changes in metabolism and body shape. Clearly there are personal responsibilities in play as well, but I’m suggesting that they’re not the entire picture.

6

The great leap in cases of adult-onsent diabetes (80% of which are related to obestiy) would seem to indicate that this weight is not doing us good.

7

This is not evolution. There’s no change in gene frequencies that has caused people to become more overweight (unless you can demonstrate one). A change in lifestyle is the culprit, and there’s absolutely no reason to believe that it’s a good thing. Look at the physical and social problems suffered by the majority of the obese, and tell me those are a good thing.

While many people in the early films were overweight, I don’t think any of them were what you’d call obese, which was much less common back then. The statistics are out there–overweightness, obesity, and morbid obesity really are on the rise. Search for obesity in this forum, GQ, or the pit for the stats.

8

I’m a young cookie, and I know I’m not overweight, and I certainly do believe that being overweight is a problem, if someone really is overweight in an unhealthy way. But, I have friends who think they’re overweight and really are not, and I believe that this is ridiculous and should be stopped imediately. I have two points to make. 1.) the standards have risen, so of course fewer people are going to fit the perfect ideal. and 2.) for those of you who quote numbers, unless they’re percentages, they prove nothing, because the number of people have gone up also, so therefore you need to make a comparison using equal standards.

9

Of course increasing fatness isn’t entirely bad. If people are choosing to live lifestyles that contribute to greater obesity, then there is a good prima facie case that there are obvious benefits of this lifestyle (more great food, less tedious exercise, more great, non-exhausting, entertainment). If there weren’t, why would people do it in the first place? Now, obviously, there are increased costs too, but the story there is complicated: if people know about the costs and take them anyway, is it really a cost? How much to people know?

10

I think BMI is misleading. Even if i were at 6% BF i would still qualify as obese.

I think alot of it is just cultural. Hypertension is dangerous, but realistically there are alot of drugs that can cut it down. Same with cholesterol. When they first invented birth control pills they decided not to work them so women never got periods anymore. Now, after 40 years of that we are working on birth control pills that cut down on the number of periods a woman gets. It was just an example of the knee jerk mindset that ‘if it isn’t biologically natural, it must be dangerous’.

I was watching something on TLC a few weeks ago about the biochemistry of love. Supposedly loneliness is more dangerous to a persons health than obesity, smoking, or a sedentary lifestyle. I see no medical movement to end loneliness.

11

How do you reconcile ‘obvious benefits to this lifestyle’ with the fact that most fat people don’t want to be fat?

12

Our increasing fatness has had some other implications that I would consider negative:
Higher levels of body fat younger in life are causing children to reach sexual maturity earlier (it was linked to body fat percentage in females, I think 16%, I saw it on TLC, a program called “Adolescent species” or something like that)

“I’m all for making this world a better place for our children, but not for our children’s children, because I don’t think kids should be having sex”
-Jack Handey

13

Our increasing fatness has had some other implications that I would consider negative:
Higher levels of body fat younger in life are causing children to reach sexual maturity earlier (it was linked to body fat percentage in females, I think 16%, I saw it on TLC, a program called “Adolescent species” or something like that)

Now, if we want people making rational decisions about when and when not to breed, this is very bad.

“I’m all for making this world a better place for our children, but not for our children’s children, because I don’t think kids should be having sex”
-Jack Handey

14

There is nothing intrinsically ‘bad’ about fat, ask any whale. What is bad is when your proportion of it exceeds that which your body is designed for.

The history of human species overwhelmingly covers periods where putting fat on in times of plenty and working it off in times of want was the norm. That is what your body is designed for.

In comparison, our western diet and propensity to putting on weight year in, year out, is very, very recent. If there any evolutionary benefits to be enjoyed from it (and unless we take back to the sea like whales that’s a big if) then we are at least another 50,000 years off from reaching them.

In the meantime, your body says obesity is a bad thing and very likely to remain that way for some time.

15

There is nothing intrinsically ‘bad’ about fat, ask any whale. What is bad is when your proportion of it exceeds that which your body is designed for.

The history of human species overwhelmingly covers periods where putting fat on in times of plenty and working it off in times of want was the norm. That is what your body is designed for.

In comparison, our western diet and propensity to putting on weight year in, year out, is very, very recent. If there any evolutionary benefits to be enjoyed from it (and unless we take back to the sea like whales that’s a big if) then we are at least another 50,000 years off from reaching them.

In the meantime, your body says obesity is a bad thing and very likely to remain that way for some time.

16

I would suggest that the reason this doesn’t seem quite true is because you’re too close to the issue, being an American living in NYC.

Every time I visit the US, I am continually surprised by the size difference when I cross over the border. Now, the overall percentage of overweight people (including obese people ) is about 50% in Canada-- while in the US it’s more than 60%. The difference is in obesity-- in Canada it’s about 15%, while in the US it’s closer to 30%.
(Obesity figures are part of overweight, kapish?)

Americans aren’t any taller than anywhere else, they’re just wider, and it’s not usually muscle. If the population was becoming larger, muscle-bound folk, then I’d say go ahead and abandon the BMI-- it doesn’t really apply to athletic people anyway.

But when it comes down to what you see among the people waddling through the malls, I find it hard to believe that we need a new set point for a healthy level of body fat.

17

—How do you reconcile ‘obvious benefits to this lifestyle’ with the fact that most fat people don’t want to be fat?—

This is like saying that a person would love to do lots of ectasy without incurring any brain damage. Sure, it’d be great to get all the benefits and none of the costs of something, but it’s not very realistic. If the person then goes and does ectasy, has great fun, gets brain damage, and then wishes they didn’t have brain damage, I’m not exactly sure how to feel. Yes, they have brain damage and that’s bad. But they knew those risks going in: and they CHOSE to undertake them. Now, perhaps they were fooling themselves as to how likely the brain damage was: but that’s quite a different ball of wax.

18

Last I heard (from such heavily-researched scientific sources as, say, one of those body-mass-index calculator webpages), it’s still considered a health risk if you’re obese, but it is no longer considered a health risk if you’re overweight but [n]not** to the point of being obese.

So if 2/3 of Americans are “overweight”, but only 1/3 of Americans are “obese”, then it’s only the 1/3 that are obese that have to worry about their health.

19

You know, one thing I haven’t heard any of you mention, is body TYPE. Think about how much this affects someone who’s only being measured by weight and height. I have a very feminine figure, therebye I have hips. I’m definitely not overweight, however, if being compared to someone who has slimmer hips, I would look fat. I’m speaking about bone structure, of course. It matters a lot, I think. I suppose we should also all be asking the question, where is the information coming from? Does anyone know who was used to figure out what the “healthy, ideal weight” came from? Maybe I just missed the information, but I’d like to meet these people, especially those who think today’s youth is fat, because I am a youth, and out of my old high school, very few of them are fat. But perhaps where I live is a oddball area, I don’t know.

20

A few thoughts:

  1. People you know in a certain geographic region constitute a small, non-random sample. There’s no reason to trust any conclusion drawn from that group.

  2. Variations in body type aren’t sufficient to explain the rates of obesity. Doesn’t matter how big-boned you are; that’s not going to make you be read as obese if you really aren’t.

  3. Overweight and underweight are useless, outdated concepts. Body fat percentage is the measure that should be used to determine a person’s risk for diseases associated with obesity.

  4. Even if you use body fat percentage, Americans are still in trouble, waistline-wise.