Politics & Current Events
tosababy
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Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Don't Blame the Overweight/Obese Person
I didn't see a post discussing this follow up to/extension of the NY Times magazine piece about obesity a few months ago.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/17/opinion/bruni-and-love-handles-for-all.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120417
What if we have it backward? What if the 310-pound man trying to jam into the middle seat and the 225-pound woman breaking into a sweat only halfway up the stairs aren?t the undisciplined miscreants of modern American life but the very emblems of it?
What if fatness, even obesity, is less a lurking danger than a likely destiny, and the surprise isn?t how many seriously overweight people are out there but how few?
Those are among the unsettling questions raised, at least implicitly, by ?The Weight of the Nation,? an ambitious multiplatform project that takes the full measure of our girth, its genesis and its toll.
A book with that title will be published next week by St. Martin?s Press, and it boils down information from a more sweeping, ambitious, four-part documentary to be shown next month on HBO, which produced it with input from the Institute of Medicine, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. HBO will also make the documentary available on many Web sites, including the network?s own.
Distilling many decades of research, ?Weight? chronicles how we?ve eaten our way into disease and sometimes despair. About two-thirds of American adults now qualify as overweight or obese, according to the C.D.C.
But here?s the scariest (and trickiest) part, which deserves much more attention than it has received and must be factored into our response: we may be doing nothing more or less than what comes naturally to us. Our current circumstances and our current circumferences may in fact be a toxically perfect fit.
Following in the heavy footsteps of ?The Omnivore?s Dilemma,? ?The End of Overeating,? ?The End of Food? and much else, ?The Weight of the Nation? makes an especially persuasive case that gluttony isn?t Americans? problem. Agriculture and abundance are.
Over the last century, we became expert at the mass production of crops like corn, soybeans and wheat ? a positive development, for the most part.
We also became expert at feedlots for livestock and at processing those crops into salty, sweet, fatty, cheap and addictive seductions. This has downsides.
Densely caloric and all too convenient food now envelops us, and many of us do what we?re chromosomally hard-wired to, thanks to millenniums of feast-and-famine cycles. We devour it, creating plump savings accounts of excess energy, sometimes known as love handles, for an imagined future shortage that, in America today, doesn?t come.
?We?re simply not genetically programmed to refuse calories when they?re within arm?s reach,? said Thomas A. Farley, New York City?s health commissioner, when I spoke to him recently. He is one of dozens of leading physicians, academicians and public-health experts who appear in ?The Weight of the Nation.?
John Hoffman, an executive producer of the documentary, told me: ?Evolutionarily, there was no condition that existed when we were living with too much fat storage. We?ve only known a world of plenty for maybe 100 years. Our biological systems haven?t adapted to it.?
This is probably summed up best by Michael L. Power and Jay Schulkin in their book ?The Evolution of Obesity.? ?We evolved on the savannahs of Africa,? they write. ?We now live in Candyland.?
Our systems aren?t just rigged to gorge. They?re also rigged in many cases to rebound from weight loss and put pounds back on, as Tara Parker-Pope explained in a cover story for The Times?s Sunday magazine last year. So we?re fighting against that bit of nature, too.
Then there?s this: the battle is perpetual and maddeningly nuanced. ?When it comes to smoking or drinking, people generally have to go cold turkey,? notes David Altshuler, an endocrinologist and geneticist, in the documentary. ?But fundamentally we have to eat.?
Every meal is a surrender that can be only partial, a feat of calibration. ?We underestimate how hard it is to change your behavior not
once ? not for a week or a month until you?re cured ? but to change it every day for the rest of your life,? says Altshuler.
If we?re going to wage a successful war against unhealthy weight gain and obesity, we need to understand all of that. We need to stop vilifying obese people, who aren?t likely to be helped by it.
And we need to rethink and remake our environment much more thoroughly than we seem poised to do.
The kind of consciousness-raising and corporate prodding being done by Michelle Obama ? laudable as it is ? won?t be nearly enough. Neither will the extra green space for exercise that cities like Nashville have commendably created, or New York City officials? admirable exile of sugary sodas from public school vending machines.
These important steps, plus others under consideration, are just the start. Let?s move, yes. But let?s do it a whole lot faster, because what we may be trying to hold back is a near inevitable tide.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/17/opinion/bruni-and-love-handles-for-all.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120417
What if we have it backward? What if the 310-pound man trying to jam into the middle seat and the 225-pound woman breaking into a sweat only halfway up the stairs aren?t the undisciplined miscreants of modern American life but the very emblems of it?
What if fatness, even obesity, is less a lurking danger than a likely destiny, and the surprise isn?t how many seriously overweight people are out there but how few?
Those are among the unsettling questions raised, at least implicitly, by ?The Weight of the Nation,? an ambitious multiplatform project that takes the full measure of our girth, its genesis and its toll.
A book with that title will be published next week by St. Martin?s Press, and it boils down information from a more sweeping, ambitious, four-part documentary to be shown next month on HBO, which produced it with input from the Institute of Medicine, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. HBO will also make the documentary available on many Web sites, including the network?s own.
Distilling many decades of research, ?Weight? chronicles how we?ve eaten our way into disease and sometimes despair. About two-thirds of American adults now qualify as overweight or obese, according to the C.D.C.
But here?s the scariest (and trickiest) part, which deserves much more attention than it has received and must be factored into our response: we may be doing nothing more or less than what comes naturally to us. Our current circumstances and our current circumferences may in fact be a toxically perfect fit.
Following in the heavy footsteps of ?The Omnivore?s Dilemma,? ?The End of Overeating,? ?The End of Food? and much else, ?The Weight of the Nation? makes an especially persuasive case that gluttony isn?t Americans? problem. Agriculture and abundance are.
Over the last century, we became expert at the mass production of crops like corn, soybeans and wheat ? a positive development, for the most part.
We also became expert at feedlots for livestock and at processing those crops into salty, sweet, fatty, cheap and addictive seductions. This has downsides.
Densely caloric and all too convenient food now envelops us, and many of us do what we?re chromosomally hard-wired to, thanks to millenniums of feast-and-famine cycles. We devour it, creating plump savings accounts of excess energy, sometimes known as love handles, for an imagined future shortage that, in America today, doesn?t come.
?We?re simply not genetically programmed to refuse calories when they?re within arm?s reach,? said Thomas A. Farley, New York City?s health commissioner, when I spoke to him recently. He is one of dozens of leading physicians, academicians and public-health experts who appear in ?The Weight of the Nation.?
John Hoffman, an executive producer of the documentary, told me: ?Evolutionarily, there was no condition that existed when we were living with too much fat storage. We?ve only known a world of plenty for maybe 100 years. Our biological systems haven?t adapted to it.?
This is probably summed up best by Michael L. Power and Jay Schulkin in their book ?The Evolution of Obesity.? ?We evolved on the savannahs of Africa,? they write. ?We now live in Candyland.?
Our systems aren?t just rigged to gorge. They?re also rigged in many cases to rebound from weight loss and put pounds back on, as Tara Parker-Pope explained in a cover story for The Times?s Sunday magazine last year. So we?re fighting against that bit of nature, too.
Then there?s this: the battle is perpetual and maddeningly nuanced. ?When it comes to smoking or drinking, people generally have to go cold turkey,? notes David Altshuler, an endocrinologist and geneticist, in the documentary. ?But fundamentally we have to eat.?
Every meal is a surrender that can be only partial, a feat of calibration. ?We underestimate how hard it is to change your behavior not
once ? not for a week or a month until you?re cured ? but to change it every day for the rest of your life,? says Altshuler.
If we?re going to wage a successful war against unhealthy weight gain and obesity, we need to understand all of that. We need to stop vilifying obese people, who aren?t likely to be helped by it.
And we need to rethink and remake our environment much more thoroughly than we seem poised to do.
The kind of consciousness-raising and corporate prodding being done by Michelle Obama ? laudable as it is ? won?t be nearly enough. Neither will the extra green space for exercise that cities like Nashville have commendably created, or New York City officials? admirable exile of sugary sodas from public school vending machines.
These important steps, plus others under consideration, are just the start. Let?s move, yes. But let?s do it a whole lot faster, because what we may be trying to hold back is a near inevitable tide.
Re: Don't Blame the Overweight/Obese Person
isn't there just a remote island somewhere we can send all the fatties to and then just forget about it?
excuses excuses
We do have to eat but that's where the second part of the quote comes in. We have to go thoroughly upstream against our current food culture and environment to remake an environment that's naturally conducive to good health so that we're not constantly spending mental energy on counting and exercising "will power" against multi-billion dollar marketing and chemical engineering efforts designed to fatten profits at the expense of our health.
I'd be interested in seeing this. I hope it comes out on DVD or on iTunes - does HBO do that with documentaries/series like this?
LOL! WTF?
If we?re going to wage a successful war against unhealthy weight gain and obesity, we need to understand all of that. We need to stop vilifying obese people, who aren?t likely to be helped by it.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Trains Across America
Would you like to buy my condo in Salem?
ANECDOTE ALERT - Welcome to my life.
This is why I have to have healthy snacks on me at all times. I'm a grazer and I need to eat something every 2-3 hours. If I didn't have an apple with me or whatever, I'd keep grabbing those damn cupcakes people keep bringing to work (and while 1 cupcake is fine, I'm the type that could and would eat a handful). I had enough willpower to shed the excess weight but the willpower to refuse food when it's staring me right in the face and there's nothing else for me to eat? Not so much.
<a href="http://www.thenest.com/?utm_source=ticker&utm_medium=HTML&utm_campaign=tickers" title="Home DDAMN YOU, WOMAN!!
I was all prepared to have a reasonable conversation about this and now I'm hiding in a corner rocking back and forth wishing I'd stayed in the prostitutes thread.
You a hateful woman, mere. A HATEFUL WOMAN!
Click me, click me!
I maintain the theory that its a no 2 pencil....
that haunts me.
no! it's clearly an evil banana. a superspy evil banana of doom.
OMG, Mere - I am CRYING. This is my favorite thread of the week, and it's all due to that damn potassium stick with the psychotic grin.
#WINNING
I have seen this before, but for some reason, its making me laugh so hard today.
One of so many reasons I love you.
Thank you.
If Jesus Christ himself appeared to provide a rebuttal it would still result in an ugly 10+ page thread. By the time we reached page 6 folks would start converting from Christianity and the atheists would start believing in religion. Weight threads on here end about as well as circumcision threads. Trust.
Chile Please. I'm plopping down in this thread with my bowl of Hershey's Kisses with Almonds.
Carry on people!
Whew. Made it just in time.
*Hawkeye was here*
Lol. This is where I'm at. In fact, I thought it was really tame and was disappointed even before MerE's comment.
DEAD
<a href="http://www.thenest.com/?utm_source=ticker&utm_medium=HTML&utm_campaign=tickers" title="Home DBWAHAHAHAHA!
And again, why do you hate...
And come on, there's no way I would approve of discontinuing Fat Tuesday threads. Or Fat Wednesday, Fat Thursday, etc. They are always the gifts that keep on giving, and they're always a good read - unlike religion threads where I fall asleep after the first page.
<a href="http://www.thenest.com/?utm_source=ticker&utm_medium=HTML&utm_campaign=tickers" title="Home D