The Stupidity Epidemic

This reads like a not-very-well-done parody of how the elite media reflect and magnify cultural obsessions with weight through pseudo-scientific musings about the supposed “obesity” epidemic.

(Shorter version: Because individual birds and rats are more or less prone to being startled by their environment, and hormones in the womb affect these proclivities, fat women might end up giving birth to more Republicans. Or Democrats. Or Illuminati. Or something).

Couple of points:

(1) If the thesis here is that the number of fat cells a pregnant woman has will affect her child’s eventual attitude toward teh Terrorists or land sharks or whatever, then Judson is failing to take into account that the number of fat cells a person has is unaffected by whether they’re “obese” or not (people don’t gain or lose fat cells — the percentage of which is genetically determined — as they gain or lose weight).

(2) This is another nice example of how a totally bogus definition — the notion that something magically starts happening when a person has a BMI of 30 or 31 that isn’t happening at a BMI of 28 or 29 — affects the views of educated people who don’t know what they’re talking about when they start speculating about the consequences of “obesity.” The “obesity epidemic” is almost completely an artifact of the statistical circumstance that Americans who had BMIs in the high 20s a generation ago tend to have BMIs in the low 30s today. If one were to ask Judson if she thinks the babies of 185-pound women are going to have significantly different political views than those of 170-pound women as a consequence of the different body weights of the mothers, I assume she would perceive the obvious absurdity of the thesis.