No sympathy for the stuffed and stocky

One of the benefits, if that is the correct term, of going into retirement is that one is free to express opinions which, if uttered when one still had a job, may have caused one to lose it.

John Birkbeck, a professor of human nutrition at Massey University in New Zealand, did both of those things — hang up his academic robes, and speak his piece — and as a result, you could make a good living just selling torches and pitchforks to all the overweight folk who would like to march to Mr. Birkbeck’s residence and brandish them angrily.

In essence, Professor B. stated his belief that, while granting there’s a genetic cause in some individuals, most “over-fatness” is the fault of the overweight persons themselves, and is a burden that they inflict on the rest of society, especially the members thereof who pay taxes. Moreover, he declared that the only cure for the obesity epidemic would be for society to refuse to put up with it, or with those who are greatly overweight, any longer.

It’s not just Birkbeck’s point of view that has people so riled — he did teach in this field for 50 years, and earned the right to be heard — it’s the fact that he expresses his opinion using language that you might expect from, say, Rush Limbaugh, if Rush himself wasn’t a ringer for the Poppin’ Fresh Doughboy. For example:

“You can’t get over-fat without eating more calories than you expend. You do not see fat people in concentration camps. Why? Because they get hardly anything to eat and they have to do a lot of work.”

And: “In a dictatorship, you say ‘everybody that comes back in a year’s time with a Body Mass Index (BMI) of more than 30 will be shot’ — and you’ll find hardly anyone has a BMI over 30. But you can’t do that in society, so what we have to do is find a way to cajole and coerce.”

On the one hand, the good professor does the cause of weight reduction and healthy living no favor with such harshly alienating and divisive declarations, other than to make overweight souls extremely glad that he is not the country’s Weight Reduction Czar. On the other hand, there are probably droves of his former students who wish his lectures had been as colorful and thought provoking.

Everything we know is wrong. Wait, it turns out that’s incorrect.

If you go online to a site called Fark.com and scroll down the chronologically-ordered list of news items almost but not quite to June 23, 2009, you will find two items in a row, the first one consisting of an icon link to the CBC with the subject line, “Being overweight will make you live longer,” and the second consisting of a similar link to Reuters with the subject line, “Being overweight will give you cancer.”

The first item is about research that found people who are moderately overweight run a slightly lower risk of death than the normal-weighted, and the second is about statistical links between obesity and higher rates of pancreatic cancer.

But what’s important is the juxtaposition of the two, placed just so by the folk at Fark to underscore a reality that we’re all aware of: There is so much “information” on the subject of weight gain and control, coming so thick and so fast, and so much of it fragmentary or contradictory, that the easiest thing for many overweight people to do is simply throw up their hands with hopelessness and dismay, figure “What the hell,” and head for the refrigerator.

We’re from the government, and we’re here to . . . um, could you please stop swearing?

All this confusion could be vastly minimized by establishing some sort of clearinghouse for all the various research results, professional opinion, raw data and other relevant information on the subject of obesity, staffed by experts in the field qualified to weigh and evaluate it all and distill out the demonstrable truths for the general public.

At the risk of sounding like an Obama appointee, such a clearinghouse would probably have to be a government operation, lest it wind up being funded by precisely those industries with the most to lose should the public get serious about healthy living and weight reduction. A host of people will recoil with revulsion at this idea, which strikes them as just one more government make-work project for nanny state bureaucrats, but the fact is that providing for the public good is one of the government’s constitutional marching orders.

There’s probably no money for such an agency in the immediate future, but eventually, a Weight Control Analysis Division in the Department of Health and Human Services? Don’t bet against it.

(By Robert S. Wieder for CalorieLab Calorie Counter News)

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This entry was posted on Monday, June 29th, 2009 and is filed under Foreign stories (non-U.S.), Obesity discrimination, Obesity health dangers, Obesity research and studies. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed. Permalink.