I have a piece in Salon about how the concepts of “homosexuality” and “obesity” are examples of how deviance from social ideals gets medicalized, and how recognizing this requires recognizing that definitions of health and disease often have an unavoidably political component. Update :Responding to a couple of comments: (1) LP2 suggests that food is […]
Tag: the obesity myth
I have some thoughts at the Daily Beast about what Casey Heynes’ response to being informed that he’s fat might tell us about Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign. Casey’
“Some” (researchers who have tested the proposition) have found that injecting yourself with a hormone derived from the urine of pregnant women while eating a starvation diet of 500 calori
I have a piece in The Daily Beast on the Kevin Smith Southwest Airlines incident. What happened to Smith, who was apparently aribtrarily thrown off a flight for being too fat, is the kind of humiliating incident to which bigger than average people are subjected to constantly. Some day they’re going to start getting mad. […]
This column is a few months old, but it’s a particularly good example of something illustrated by any number of Thomas Friedman columns, or indeed any amount of free-wheeling high-profile pundit
Having spent the better part of a decade now listening to people patiently explain why it’s a good thing to pathologize the bodies of 71% of the American population in order to improve their hea
Thoughts on Michelle Obama’s dream of a nation with no fat kids. I’m going to be on the Diane Rehm show on NPR at 10 AM eastern to talk about this. Update: Shorter Diane Rehm Show Me: The things Michelle Obama is advocating have been tried a bunch of times in large well-designed studies. They […]
Union-busting, health care reform-opposing, global-warming denying John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods, has come up with a super idea for cutting his health insurance costs: giving his employees extra dis
I’m doing a talk on this topic at UCLA tomorrow. The price is right for any LA LGMers looking to stretch their entertainment dollar. I’m staying at a guest house on campus tonight and ther
Ask your doctor if cultural hysteria is right for you. Couple of notes: (1) “Obesity” among infants is currently defined by the CDC by taking what was the 95th percentile of height-weight among infants 30 years ago and treating anything above that as “obese.” (2) This definition is based on no data regarding any correlation […]
I’m still not sure why, exactly, but I’ve been assured repeatedly that it just is. The American Psychological Association declared Wednesday that mental health professionals [obesity resea
Reading through the comments here and here and here I’m reminded of the many suggestive parallels between arguments about body diversity and those regarding sexual orientation. To simplify a gre