The Taboo That Kills

Via Professor B., Brutal Women has a terrific post, commenting on a Paul Campos article. It is, in fact, quite remarkable that in the wall-to-wall coverage on the Schiavo affair, the fact that her brain has largely turned to liquid because of an eating disorder is not attracting a lot of attention. I actually discussed Campos’s terrific book in one of my first posts here. (The book is summarized here.) The reason why the cause of Schiavo’s tragic dilemma is generating little relative comment can be found in the fact that many people interpreted the lesson of Supersize Me to be that fast food is bad because it will make you fat, when in fact after a month Spurlock wasn’t fat (although he had put on weight) but was extremely unhealthy anyway. As Campos has noted, however, the independent effects of being overweight on health–except in extreme cases–are trivial. People should, of course, be encouraged to eat relatively balanced diets and exercise. But that has nothing to do with the stigmatization of people perceived as overweight, which has nothing to do with health and everything to do with people think that it’s icky.

There is a utilitarian justification for this prejudice, which is that even if it causes some pain, it encourages people to be healthier. This can be reflected in the new idea of putting BFIs on report cards; I’m sure supporters of this idea know full well this will lead to overweight kids receiving even more abuse, but it’s for the greater good. However, this argument is almost certainly wrong. The problem is that it leaves out the many counterproductive side effects. First of all, emphasizing fat is at the ultimate problem (rather than as a symptom) provides no incentive for kids with unhealthy lifestyles who don’t put on weight (hardly uncommon in young people.) Second, focusing on fat encourages yo-yo dieting, taking speed, and other practices that compound unhealthy practices rather than alleviating them. Third, particularly (although not exclusively) for women the range of body types considered “overweight” is so broad–and has so little connection to health, even at the level of mere correlation–that incentives become truly perverse. Many perfectly healthy young people are encouraged to engage in behaviors that are truly destructive, up to and including the development of fatal eating disorders. Schools should forget about telling parents that their kids what their BFIs are and focus instead on providing decent meals in cafeterias, providing good phys. ed. programs and health instruction, and other things that are relevant to the problem and might actually work. That the social prejudices that have contributed to the death of many people like Terri Schiavo are often celebrated as being good for public health is one of the great achievements of Orwellian discourse of our time.