Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Meta-fat

There's some great stuff in the fatosphere lately.

JoGeek uses math to show that the "cost of obesity" is really the "cost of the war on obesity". Also, the "Quotes from the fatosphere" on her left sidebar is a wonderful distillation of wisdom from size positive blogging. And I'm not just saying that because I'm quoted :)

Dr. Stacey gives me a reason to like Penn & Teller as she reviews their Bullshit! episode about the O Epidemic, which they start off by saying it is, as you might have guessed, "Bullshit!" I will admit that I'm not completely impressed with every episode in the series, as they seem to have a clear agenda to begin with, and I disagree with a few of their episodes (like the one where they claim secondhand smoke isn't harmful--tell it to an asthmatic, boys--or their views on the environment and animal rights).

Vesta of Big Fat Delicious shows us how the Mississippi Bill's ridiculousness can be manipulated to make less insane but still crazy legislation seem to be a "compromise", by making it "for the children". In another post, she shows us a really idiotic list of ways to differentiate dieting from disordered eating.

Rachel at The F-Word has some good Valentine's Day advice. Strangely, it does not involve telling your significant other that he or she needs to lose weight--how can you show you care without pointing out your partner's adipose tissue and telling them to get rid of it? Thank god we have Rachel to set us straight!

Sandy at Junkfood Science spotlights a Swedish researcher who thinks that fighting obesity is misguided, considering that malnutrition is a greater burden on healthcare costs--a real, measurable one, not just a correlation--especially among the elderly. Hospital patients and people living in residential care facilities are most at risk, which generally means that the elderly are starving, many times starving to death. By "malnutrition", it is meant that people are not getting enough food to eat, not that they are eating too many white foods or liquid calories.

Sandy also made me choke on my iced tea with her suggestion that the correlation between heart attacks and the Superbowl means that we need to ban professional sports immediately. Before you get all wiggy over it, it's satire.

Harriet at Feed Me! reminds us that there are no bad foods, and, "The more we try to micromanage our metabolisms, the more badly we fuck them up." I've been looking for that statement all along, without realizing it. Thank you, Harriet.

Linsay at BABble takes on some common myths about Fat Acceptance, including "but you hate thin people" and "you just want to force everyone to find fat people attractive". I wish I'd thought of this post! Good on ya, Lindsay, for using logic and truth!

Hoyden About Town reminds us that having strong pelvic floor muscles to make women more sexually valuable is a good trade-off for malformed feet, stress fractures, and abnormally contracted leg muscles, so slide into those stiletto heels, ladies!

Finally, Exceptionally Fat points out that having a "good food, bad food" mindset can prevent people from ingesting the energy they need for getting through a long day. I love the way it was expressed, and it came right from a nutrition class!

There's probably plenty more good stuff out there (Shapely Prose, for example, has so many good entries that I just link to them and leave it at that), but I'm tired, and this is long enough. Enjoy!

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