Minnesota Starvation StudyII

Yesterday I talked about the Minnesota Starvation Study done in the 1940s by Ancel Benjamin Keys, Ph.D., which examined the results of starvation on a group of 40 healthy young men, as discussed by Sandy Szwarc, of Junkfood Science in her post, How we've come to believe that obesity is caused by overeating. In that post, I looked at some of the physical effects of starvation/dieting and examined my own dieting experience with what Dr. Keys discovered. Today I want to look at the psychological effects.

But the psychological changes that were brought on by dieting, even among these robust men with only moderate calorie restrictions, were the most profound and unexpected. So much so that Dr. Keys called it “semistarvation neurosis.” The men became nervous, anxious, apathetic, withdrawn, impatient, self-critical with distorted body images and even feeling overweight, moody, emotional and depressed. A few even mutilated themselves, one chopping off three fingers in stress. They lost their ambition and feelings of adequacy, and their cultural and academic interests narrowed. They neglected their appearance, became loners and their social and family relationships suffered. They lost their senses of humor, love and compassion. Instead, they became obsessed with food, thinking, talking and reading about it constantly; developed weird eating rituals; began hoarding things; consumed vast amounts of coffee and tea; and chewed gum incessantly (as many as 40 packages a day). Binge eating episodes also became a problem as some of the men were unable to continue to restrict their eating in their hunger.

The act of restricting food and the constant hunger “made food the most important thing in one’s life,” said one of the participants. “Food became the one central and only thing really in one’s life. And life is pretty dull if that’s the only thing. I mean, if you went to a movie, you weren’t particularly interested in the love scenes, but you noticed every time they ate and what they ate.”

These experiences are familiar to those who’ve spent their lives dieting. In fact, many of the symptoms once thought to be primary features of anorexia nervosa are actually normal biological responses of undernutrition and restrictive eating, said David M. Garner, PhD., director of River Centre Clinic in Sylvania, Ohio, in Psychoeducational principles in the treatment of eating disorders (NY: Guilford Press, 1997). It was actually Dr. Keys’ research that first evidenced the role of dieting in increasing risks for eating disorders.

The extreme physical and mental effects Dr. Keys observed led to his famous quote: “Starved people cannot be taught democracy. To talk about the will of the people when you aren’t feeding them is perfect hogwash.” This was also what led early feminist activists to see dieting and weight concerns as a way to keep women preoccupied with food, filled with guilt and self-hatred, more easily influenced by others, and too mentally and physically exhausted to succeed professionally and politically.

Think about these results for a moment. And then think about them again. And then think about the degree to which the government is involved in promoting the idea that we are in the midst of an "obesity epidemic." And the concern of governments all over the world with childhood obesity.

Today's political landscape requires that we be informed and capable of critical thinking. Remembering that the subjects Dr. Keys worked with were on 1,600 calories a day and that most reducing diets are 1,200 calories or less a day. That once the calorie restriction part of the study was complete, the subjects naturally ate 4,000 calories a day and that when dieters find themselves eating over 2,000 calories a day they panic about the "binge" eating they are doing and try to put themselves back on their diets. That the Minnesota study subjects wanted to regain the weight they had lost and dieters do NOT. How many dieters ever get back to a state of psychological health? How many are ever really capable of their best critical thinking and deepest thought? How many are in a state to pay close attention to what the government is doing?

At the very least, this national obsession with weight is reducing not our waistlines but our vigilance. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, and I don't think that anyone is purposely seeing if they can get us to starve ourselves into a state of apathy about the direction our government is going. But isn't it convenient for them?

And I do believe that the diet industry, which brings in over $66 billion a year, lobbies strongly for obesity measures from the government to increase their profits. And I also believe that if anyone is aware of the rest of this, if they know just how uncritical dieting makes the populace, it doesn't bother them in the least.

Recruitment poster courtesy Sandy Szwarc, Junkfood Science

Minnesota Starvation Study I

Sandy Szwarc at Junkfood Science posted How we've come to believe that obesity is caused by overeating on February 7. This is a review of the historic Minnesota Starvation Study by Ancel Benjamin Keys, Ph.D., of starvation and its aftereffects. During World War II, it was evident that the millions of people in Europe who were being starved would need knowledgeable care when the war was over. Dr. Keys recruited young men who were conscientious objectors, healthy both physically and psychologically, to undergo three months of starvation on 1600 calories a day (substantially more than most dieters live on) meant to reproduce the diets of people in war-torn countries, for three months. Out of the hundreds of volunteers, he chose 40. Healthy young men, who were willing to starve so that others could be fed. The men were followed through a full year of recovery.

Among the things discovered when the men were allowed to eat as their bodies dictated after the starvation segment of the study:

• It was not possible for them to recover on 2,000 calories a day.
• For up to six months, they ate up to 4,000 calories a day.
• They regained every pound lost, plus 10%.
• The regained weight was more fat and less muscle than the weight they had lost.
• Eventually, they stopped gaining and naturally returned to their original weight.
• "Overeating" was evident only as long as the men were below their normal weight.

Considering these facts puts the diets I've been on and the rebound eating I've done in an entirely different light. In the first place, I don't think that a single one of the over 35 diets I've been on was as high as 1600 calories a day! The first diet my mother put me on was 900 a day. Of course it was only for 9 days, but still -- 900 calories. I was once put on an herb tea fast by a doctor, that had no calories a day for whatever length of time it took to lose 60 pounds. It was rare for a diet to be as much as 1,000 calories a day. Eventually my metabolism had adjusted to dieting starvation to such an extent that I couldn't lose weight on anything more than 800.

Until I totally stopped dieting, I only twice went more than six months without going back to dieting to re-lose the weight I was regaining. The first time was when I was 16 and went to live with my great-aunt, and spent two years eating normally; the second was for eight years in my late 30s and early 40s. In both cases, my weight stayed steady. I ate what I wanted and did not gain anything in that time. Those were the only times between the age of 12, when I began to diet, and the age of 58, when I gave it up for good, when my weight wasn't yo-yoing. The only times when whatever I took out of the closet and put on would fit the way it had the last time I'd worn it. I did not balloon out of sight.

I never allowed myself to eat 4,000 calories a day on a constant basis. Rebounding did include what I considered "binges" of about 3,000 calories a day, but the part I thought of as the diet was usually followed by gritting my teeth and holding my eating to about 2,000 calories a day. Once, a doctor "helped" me to diet and maintain my weight loss by adding 100 calories a day each week until I reached the point where I was beginning to gain weight, at which point I was supposed to have discovered my life-long maintenance calorie needs. I don't remember what that was, I don't think I ever got to that point before I lost my will power and broke out, and then, of course, went on another diet.

Although I knew that my first diet was only for nine days, before too many years had passed, I was dieting toward a goal weight, and had no idea how long it was going to take. And, each diet took longer. Three months was as nothing.

Every time I ate more than I thought I should, or gained any weight back, I felt guilty. I hated my lack of will power. I cursed the raging health of my body that was trying to get me out of starvation and get me safe. The normal, healthy need for calories to rebuild what I had starved off was seen as perverse and proof that I was a bad person. By me and by others, like my mother, my doctor, and society at large. The fact that my body fought for health and put that weight back on me was seen by all of us as proof that I was a bad person.

By the time I had stopped dieting, I was twice the weight that I had been when I started. My body has probably lost any hope of ever figuring out what I would have weighed had I not dieted and getting me back there.

And, of course, the world and I believed that I had been overeating. Hell, when I ate more than 1,200 calories a day I thought I had been overeating. That there was something fundamentally wrong with my moral fiber.

If you have ever dieted, how do these facts add up in light of your experience? If you have ever known anyone who has dieted, how do you see their experience now?

Recruitment poster courtesy Sandy Szwarc, Junkfood Science

Sushi

Sandy Szwarc, over at Junkfood Science, posted Fishy sushi scares on Friday. In it she discusses the latest fear-du-jour, the "study" by the New York Times on the mercury levels in fish. In a scenario that will surprise no one who reads Sandy's breath of fresh air blog, the story that was published by the Times bears little resemblance to the actual meaning of the results.

In fact, there has never been a case of an American eating so much fish as to be harmful. The only cases in the scientific literature of mercury poisoning from fish and subsequent neurological problems — a fact confirmed by Dr. Thomas Clarkson, a toxicologist at the University of Rochester School of Medicine — were the result of an industrial mercury spill in Minamata Bay, Japan in the 1950s, which resulted in fish with methylmercury levels 40 to 1,000 times higher than the fish Americans, and most people around the globe, eat. These tragic poisonings first pointed out that at extremely high exposures, mercury was a neurotoxin and might affect the developing fetus.

In other words, we don't have to be afraid of eating fish. Glad to hear it. Living in Southeast Alaska, where the regional cuisine is fresh from the sea, I not only enjoy eating salmon, halibut, and crabs of all types, but friends make their living by fishing. I would hate to have to worry the next time I get the urge for Dungeness almost as much as I would hate my friends to have to go out of business. Commercial fishing is one of the most dangerous professions in the world. The reward for risking your life on a continual basis shouldn't be that some study is incorrectly reported so that people are afraid of what you take those chances to bring to their tables.

In her post, Sandy provided a link to Sushi Etiquette

(Fingers)
When you eat by your fingers, pick up a piece of nigiri at the both side with your two fingers, thumb and middle, and simultaneously lift up the far side top to this side by the index finger, and turn it upside down. Then dip the fish side to soy sauce, and next, twist your wrist to turn the fish side up and face to you. Alternatively do as the same way as by chopsticks. To eat, bring the nigiri to your mouth, throw it into your mouth in a way that the fish side touches on your tongue, and this is a recommendable direction in nigiri-eating.

Notice that one is recommended to throw the entire piece of sushi into one's mouth. This is where I have a problem. I don't have a very big mouth. I seek out dentists with small hands. And I have always bitten the sushi in half. Now I discover this is rude.

What to do, what to do. Shall I continue to be rude? Shall I fill my mouth to my eardrums when I eat sushi in a mannerly manner? Should I explain to the waiter that I'm not being rude on purpose and I'm not ignorant, I just can't eat the thing whole? Will it taste as good if my mouth is so full my taste buds are shoved down? I was better off before I knew this little tidbit. When I thought that the only reason the other people in the restaurant were eating their sushi in one bite because they had bigger mouths.

Sushi pictograph and photo, courtesy Sushi Encyclopedism. Crab dkimages.com

What A Lovely Christmas Present

Sandy Szwarc at Junkfood Science has awarded me A Roar for Powerful Words. This is a project launched at The Shameless Lions Writing Circle, that celebrates the best and most powerful writing in the blogosphere. Being totally lacking in modesty, I am quoting Sandy both on what the rules are, and what she said about me when she awarded it. Not only would this make me blush if I were the blushing type, but it also sort of identifies what kind of a blog this is, which I've never been exactly sure of.

As part of this honor, I’m to name three things that I believe most important to powerful writing and then pass on the award to five blogs I believe deserve recognition.***Maya’s Granny — Joycelyn Ward writes the most heartwarming, comforting and cozy blog that makes you feel like you’ve been invited into the folds of her family. It’s a lovely-written family historical diary sprinkled with sage and inspiring insights to life.

Three things that I believe are most important to powerful writing are:

1. Accuracy. There is nothing more upsetting than being convinced by a powerful statement and then discovering that it was based on lies. That doesn't mean that a writer doesn't sometimes make a mistake -- that is sometimes unavoidable. But it does mean that those mistakes made are not due to sloppy research or outright twisting of data or facts. The bloggers I have chosen all fact-check carefully. I know I can trust that they are telling me the facts to the best of their ability to find them out.

2. Carefully considered. The writer has done the work necessary to take the facts and show me how s/he got to the conclusion presented. I don't have to agree with that conclusion. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. But I do have to see clearly how the writer got there.

3. Honesty. Two of the bloggers I've awarded write from a depth of personal experience with such honesty that it sometimes takes my breath away. Being willing to stand naked and say, "This is me. This is what I am feeling and thinking and how I sometimes come short of the ideal."

&c. I also like passion, humor, and creative word play.

Six blogs I believe deserve recognition (yes, I know it is supposed to be five, but I already cut the original list twice and I just can't cut it any more. The one good thing is that since Sandy recognized me, I can't recognize her, and so I'm not listing seven.):

Sharf-fu at Angry Black Bitch who has passion and humor. She writes in the vernacular, in the tradition of Mark Twain. Shark-fu lives her beliefs. She volunteers at the women's shelter, teaches sex education, is a mentor, cares for an autistic older brother, and still has time to write for us, to tell us not only what she thinks but give us "yummified" recipes and enjoy vodka crans.

Blue Girl, Red State, whose sidebar reads "Deal in facts and check the sources." This is a "twit free zone." In covering political issues, you know she comes from a liberal perspective, and you quickly learn that her opinions are backed with facts and understanding.

Jill at Brilliant at Breakfast is one of the first political blogs I discovered and I read her daily. She covers a wide range of mostly political topics, always well written and thought out. I have linked to her posts on a number of occasions, because once Jill has said it, I can't improve upon it.

Echidne of the Snakes is the other political blog I discovered when I first started reading blogs. Echidne writes five days a week, and her friend olvlzl on the weekends. Both do excellent research, have well considered opinions, and write well. My day doesn't feel complete if I haven't visited Echidne.

Laura at I Promise Not To Laugh During The Seance, who writes powerful words because of the honesty of them. Laura is a recent widow with two children, one of whom is in the hospital at the moment. Her willingness to share her pain and despair, to pour out the doubts and fears she experiences, as well as the moments of joy, demand respect.

And, finally I am adding a sixth roar, because I can't not. Never That Easy, a young woman who has been wheel chair bound for a long time now and writes with grace, humor, and truth about her experience with a "condition" for which there seems to be no cure and little alleviation of the constant pain.

Attacking Fat Kids

I was not a fat kid. Until I was 12, when my mother decided that since we were the same height we should be the same weight and put me on a diet to lose three pounds, I never thought about my weight. Well, when I was ten and 5 feet even and 100 pounds even, I thought that was kind of cool and tidy, not because of how slim I was but because the numbers made such a fine pattern -- age, height, weight all at the tipping point. Actually, in those halcyon days, I was rather pleased with how I looked. Except for the freckles. There was a time there when I wanted to get rid of the freckles. But, mostly, I really liked how I looked. I had auburn hair and brown eyes and enough sense to know that was freaking great. There might have been moments when I would have liked to be glamorous, but mostly I was content with my Girl Scout looks. I was, after all, a tomboy, and so glamour would not have suited me very well. Even if I had it, the scabs on my knees, the sunburn on my nose, and the snarls in my hair would have moved me out of that category.

So, I have no personal experience with being teased for being a fat kid. Actually, I have no personal experience with being teased about my looks at all and never while I was in school, up through graduate level, did any of my classmates or teachers mention my size or act like I should be any different than I was. But I remember how fat kids were teased, even back in the 40s when I started school and the "obesity epidemic" was far in the future, even in the days before there was a weight loss industry to sell us all on the idea that there is something wrong with our bodies and they have the magic cure that we only have to pay them for to enjoy. Even then, fat kids had it tough.

Today, fat kids have a much harder row to hoe. Preschoolers, shown pictures of various children which include children of all races, some handicapped, and asked which child they would like for a friend don't choose the fat kid. Even preschoolers are so afraid of being fat that some of them are putting themselves on diets. Four year olds, instead of beaming with delight when they see themselves in the mirror, have started sucking in their guts.

The other thing that my personal history and the reading I've done in the last ten years have taught me is that once you become obsessed with your weight you are in for hell. Eating is a self-conscious act. You hesitate to be the first one who admits to hunger, because as a fat person you aren't entitled to be hungry. You don't go to the pool because people will see just how fat you are. You try everything you can think of to get rid of the "extra" weight. And, since our body sizes are pretty well determined by our genes (want to be thin? have four thin grandparents.), if the weight comes off, it comes back on again. Eventually, you gain back more than you lost. There is one study UC Berkeley, 2004 that suggests that the younger you start to diet, the fatter you will become. The same study found that the more diets you've been on, the fatter you become.

Now, if you were a weight loss corporation and if you had no ethics beyond the bottom line, what would be the best way to build yourself a permanent customer base? Yep, get the kids to start dieting at younger and younger ages. Since it doesn't work, convince them rebound weight is their fault until they have messed up their metabolisims beyond hope and they are caught.

Personally, I'm just enough of a skeptic to think that there is no accident that the focus has been aimed at childhood obesity. First, you set the level so low that only the truly frail don't qualify, and then you hype it all over the place.

Sandy Szwarc, at Junkfood Science has recently posted a number of articles dealing with this subject.

In Such a deal, or is it? Sandy talks about a workplace wellness initiative that targets not just the weight and life style choices of the employees, but also of their children.

IBM has teamed up with Weight Watchers, a fellow member of the National Business Group on Health. It’s easy to see how Weight Watchers will benefit by such compulsory participation of 128,000 IBM employees in a Weight Watchers’ branded program...one that will simultaneously bring up an entire generation of weight-absorbed future customers. But IBM has not disclosed what’s in the deal for them. Even if such a program worked, by the time any health benefits might materialize, the children will long since be off on their own and no longer on their parents’ insurance plan.

The money may be enough to coerce some workers let their employer decide what their family eats, where and when they eat, and how often they exercise and what type of exercise they do. But using children is especially insidious, because what isn’t being said is that this childhood obesity program is an experimental pilot project with absolutely no evidence that it will prevent child obesity, let alone improve their children’s health. In fact, all of the evidence to date has shown similar programs to be ineffective for improving children’s health — such as changing their blood pressures, glucose tolerance, fitness, ‘cholesterol’ levels or rates of childhood illnesses — or change long-term obesity rates. But they do leave young people vulnerable to body-image problems and life-long dysfunctional relationships with food and eating.

Sandy looks at the results of two long-range studies on obesity programs for children at One size childern.

Although both studies found null results, the authors suggested that more intense and continuous interventions might be necessary.

But, of course, doing more of the same won’t work, either. Nor is it surprising that no obesity prevention or weight intervention program to date has been able to demonstrate effectiveness in changing obesity rates among children or teens long-term. That’s because, as we know, the science has shown for decades that the natural diversity of sizes among kids, as in adults, isn’t about what they eat or the exercise they get. Thin kids may eat like horses, while fat kids like birds and it doesn't much change their natural sizes in the end. As a group, fat and thin eat the same. No dietary or activity factor among children explains the differences in their sizes.

In Fat camps for tots, which looks at the new British idea of sending toddlers and babies to fat camp to learn good eating habits, and perhaps take off a little weight while they are there,

Let’s look at the evidence in support of such claims and interventions for babies and toddlers:


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Remember the Scholastic magazine? The one we got in school that was full of grade appropriate information and just for us? The one we still see in the doctor's waiting room? Well, it ain't our Scholastic anymore, folks. Sandy looks at the shameful use to which this once benign icon of childhood is being put in This is scholastic achievement?

From the “What are they teaching our children?” file comes another school-based childhood obesity initiative with no sound basis in science. Worse, it teaches children to fear healthful foods they need and teaches prejudices against their heavier classmates.***Many parents and grandparents remember Scholastic publications as educational, inspiring and fun ways for kids to learn about the world. This is not the Scholastic they remember.***The Food Detective game invites kids to click on the “AFD Case Files” of various “Suspects:” children who are supposedly behaving badly. The fat little 10-year old girl is Emily. The game tells kids that Emily is fat because “she eats too much and needs to learn portion control.” The food detective sets up a security cam in her house “to catch the culprit in the act” and she is shown gobbling nonstop a table of fattening foods and a chart shows her eating a whopping 4,550 [kilo]calories.

We could stop right there, of course, as the evidence has shown time and again that fat children eat no differently than thin children to explain the natural differences in their sizes. This game does nothing but teach children to condemn fat children for gluttony, while instilling the harmful false message in fat children that they must be eating “too much.” But the calories being ascribed to the 10 year old fat girl are beyond absurd and illustrate just how uncredible these lessons are. According to NHANES, 6-11 year old girls eat an average of 1,889 kilocalories a day (plus or minus 43 kcal) and the “educational message” in this game bears no resemblance to the facts.

Other children’s “Case Files” promote equally unsound and prejudicial messages. A heavy little boy named Michael is called a “sofa loafer” and his fatness is blamed on spending too much time on the computer and playing video games and eating bad foods. Another popular myth of fat children. And a little boy, Cole, is supposedly a weakling because he eats junk food. You get the idea.

And finally, You're fine just how you are. and read her touching post on trying to be what you are not. The Allan Faustino T-shirt graphic, left, is enough to break your heart.

Signposts to Sanity

An occasional feature where your ever lovin' Granny points you to other people's really good stuff. And, as you can tell from our fat little signpost, today we are dealing with weight.

I wasn't going to say any more about this study, having posted If You Can Catch It, giving a light hearted take at the nonsense involved (because when I tried to address it seriously I couldn't keep my language decent and Maya reads this blog on occasion and has excellent reading skills), and linking you to Shark-fu's equally light hearted take on it. However, like Sandy Szwarc, below, I find that this study is turning up everywhere. The fact that it should be laughed out the door doesn't seem to be occurring to anyone who isn't a fat-activist. I'm finding that the more I think about it, the hotter I get. I don't like being the target of bias, and the fact that for so many years I bought into it myself just makes it that much worse. It isn't enough that I'm fat, unhealthy, gluttonous, slothful, and a bad person, now I'm also responsible for both a collapsing health-care system and the weight gain of my friends. If I bought into this stuff (or as much of it as was around at the time) when I was younger, how are fat children going to react? Are they going to be shunned even more than they are today? Will they stop getting invitations to birthday parties because their little friends and the parents of their little friends don't want fat being spread to them? Will their parents, in the hope of helping them to have a social life, be even more driven to put them on the diets that science says will eventually make them fatter? Too much. So, I am linking you here to three recent posts which really examine it in depth.

Kate at Shapely Prose has looked at it in two posts. The first, Fat Is Contagious

2) Obesity, according to this study, is more socially transmissible from one man to another than one woman to another.

Does this jibe with other research that suggests women are much more invested in social networks, more communicative with their friends about personal issues and, not for nuthin’, more susceptible to mirroring their friends’ eating behaviors when they do eat together?

***4) As I understand it, spouses did not “affect” each other as strongly as even geographically distant friends.

This goes back to point 1. Are we really meant to believe that people in one of the most intimate possible relationships, who communicate daily, eat together, and share umpteen “lifestyle” factors, are less likely to “transmit” obesity to one another than friends who live on opposite coasts? What is it that makes you fat, then? If we believe it’s diet and exercise, how is it conceivable that people who live together do not affect each other’s diet and exercise habits as strongly as pals who rarely see each other? And regardless of what they’re claiming the direct cause of obesity is here, do we really believe that people are more susceptible to the opinions of distant friends than their own spouses?

***
So the whole premise that justified this review of another study’s data — that we, as a country, are SO MUCH FATTER than we used to be — is basically horseshit. There’s that.

Finally, it sounds like what they’re really afraid of is people telling their friends it’s okay not to diet. If that’s what’s actually happening here? I hope it becomes a goddamned epidemic.

The second post of Kate's I want to direct you to is Warning: If You Read This, You Might Get Fat

Now, I do stand by what I wrote, which was that we don’t know how to make a naturally thin person fat. I was thinking specifically of the prisoner study, where a bunch of men ate ridiculous amounts of food and stopped exercising in order to deliberately gain weight, but the weight gain didn’t last; as soon as they went back to eating normally, they went back to right around their original weights.***What that study does point to is the existence of a stubborn natural weight range in every individual. Anyone who’s dieted and gained it back (i.e., pretty much everyone more than 5 years out from the last diet) will recognize an incredibly familiar pattern in the prisoner study — it’s the reverse of what we’ve lived out, but the elements are all the same. They tried to push their bodies beyond their natural weight ranges, and their bodies resisted mightily. Their metabolisms changed to account for the changes in diet and exercise and try to force them back into their natural weight ranges. And as soon as they stopped the unnatural diet, their bodies returned to what was normal for them.

That’s exactly what happens to dieters.

But because it’s a weight range we’re talking about, and because dieting is akin to starvation as far as the body’s concerned, when dieters go back to normal, they often end up fatter than they were — presumably at the top of their natural weight ranges. Dieting, as a rule, not only doesn’t make you permanently thin — it makes you fatter.

***Now back to the important point here: this fact that I overlooked offers one simple, plausible explanation for the “fat is contagious” findings: friends recommend diets to each other. And diets ultimately make people fatter. And if those people started out at the top of the “overweight” BMI category, dieting could very easily have pushed them into the “obese” one.

It’s unlikely that that fully explains the correlation they found — but frankly, it’s a much more plausible theory than the one that has fat people calling each other up and saying, “Hey, you know what? I overeat and never exercise, and I feel great! You should try it!”

Sandy Szwarc, at Junkfood Science has also addressed this "study" in her post Oh, What A Tangled Web We Weave.

I wasn’t even going to write on this “study” because it elicited nothing more than thinly veiled hate speech and was such junk science I was certain no one would take it seriously.

I was wrong.

Within hours of the press releases, a massive, well-orchestrated marketing campaign was off and running. By dinnertime yesterday, Google noted 300 nearly identical articles had been published about it and there were 500 by this morning. Television and radio reporters have been gushing over it, with MSNBC reporting that having a fat friend can make you fat and be downright dangerous for your health.

***Let’s not beat around the bush. The key message of this study was to justify and promote the social shunning and discrimination of fat people.

Not one health or medical writer, even at the most prestigious consumer or medical publications, has critically reported on this study or even appears to have read it. Not one has made a critical examination and pointed out its unorthodox methods, its findings that conflict with known science and known biological mechanisms, or the flawed and contradictory findings within the study itself. Not one.

*** We are to believe, it seems, the media images that we’ve all gained gargantuan amounts of weight, rather than the average 7 - 10 pounds actually evidenced over recent decades among our increasingly diverse population, as reported by Dr. Jeffrey Friedman, head of the Laboratory of Molecular Genetics at Rockefeller University in New York.

***Medical writers at publications such as MedPageToday were equally credulous, giving physicians the action point: “Explain to patients who ask that this observational study found that the likelihood of a person becoming obese is heavily influenced by obesity in their friends, siblings, and spouse.” ***No need to go on, as you’ve heard all of this, too. But what you haven’t heard was that this paper wasn’t actually a study, researching people using recognized, proven sound medical research methodology.***They made no efforts to give any physiological explanations for these implausible findings or how long-distance relationships might be more associated with obesity than genetics. Nor, did they have any data on the closeness of the friendships or how often people were in contact with their supposedly fattening friends

Forgetting that their study was a data dredge looking for correlations, which is unable to ever demonstrate causation,

***This study illustrates the difference between politics and good science. The reporting and responses from media and medical professionals have illustrated the difference between prejudice versus knowledge, understanding and compassion. There is absolutely no credible science to support stigma against any group. You cannot “catch” fat from associating with a fat person anymore than you can catch “black” from a black person.

What the science knows about obesity “should be sufficient to end the opprobrium of the obese,” said Dr. Friedman. “To end the stigma of obesity, the scientific community must communicate more effectively a growing body of compelling evidence indicating that morbid obesity is the result of differences in biology and not a personal choice.”

The public trusts medical and journalism professionals to give them reliable information to help them. Over the past 24 hours, that trust has proven to be undeserved.

Since Kate and Sandy have said this so well, I hope I won't feel driven to say any more about it myself. I do have to say, though, that this study reminds me of nothing so much as The Bell Curve.

Signposts to SanityThis Scares Me

An occasional feature in which your ever lovin' granny points you at other people's really good stuff. Please note that the signpost chosen for today leads down a green and twisting trail, indicating a need to follow the twists and turns that the money takes.

Yesterday on Junkfood Science, Sandy Szwarc posted an article which frightens me. Doctors — forced into becoming lifestyle police. I am directly quoting her a great deal, because the way the pieces come together is important; since I don't quote her first mention of RWJF, I'll tell those of you who might not know that she is referring to the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the "philanthropic" arm (worth $8.99 billion) of Johnson & Johnson, the health care products company. And while you read this, keep in mind that the current Surgeon General has targeted obesity as a major health problem and has been issuing press releases touting disproven numbers of premature deaths caused by obesity and ignoring the fact that fat people outlive thin ones.

If government agencies and the American Medical Association get their way, doctors and pediatricians will be compelled to police the behaviors of children and families to make sure they comply with the obesity initiatives of the world’s most influential interest groups***As predicted here, they first recommend the definitions be changed so that children are labeled as “obese” and “overweight” using BMI percentiles*, rather than the long-standing recognition that such classifications are inappropriate for growing children and teens***Every well-child visit is now to include a qualitative assessment of eating behaviors, which must include identifying how often the family eats meals away from home, consumption of sweetened beverages, portion sizes, how often and what children and teens eat for breakfast, how much fruit juice is drunk, how many fruits and vegetables and foods high in fat or calories are eaten, and the frequency and types of snacks.***Labwork for these heavier children, even those without risk factors, is to include lipid (“cholesterol”) profile, fasting glucose and a slew of other biomedical tests.*****All children and teens, of “normal” BMI ranges should be assured to be in compliance with the obesity prevention guidelines as it delineated.***

Additionally, all children and teens with BMIs above the 85th percentile must receive special intervention by a primary care provider or healthcare professional trained in weight management**** and behavioral counseling.***But children or teens with any risk factors and who are not successfully losing weight, or all children above the 99th percentile*****, are placed in the “Tertiary care protocol.”

Tertiary care protocol

· Referral to a weight management center to include a multi-disciplinary team to institute diet and exercise counseling, a very low calorie diet, medication and surgery.******<***Not one single clinical practice recommendation is based on credible science on childhood obesity, has anything to do with healthy eating, or has any evidential support. In today’s “pay for performance” world, however, doctors who do not comply with clinical practice guidelines — based on their patients meeting requisite BMIs, behaviors and health risk factor numbers — will see their private and public insurance reimbursements cut.********** The unmistakable aspect of everything RWJF funds, unbeknownst to the public, is that the feel-good reforms are never for programs that actually care for sick people or children, but are always designed to coerce and move towards legislation that governs lifestyle issues, behaviors and societal values; and that increase the power and influence of governmental agencies and managed care, while undermining the choices of individuals and the judgment of doctors, parents and others directly involved in patient care. And with each one, computerized data collection is fundamental.*** It’s interesting that the war on obesity is often compared to that against smoking, because the two targets share surprising similarities, and not just because they’ve both become among the most socially condemned in our culture.***Meanwhile, how many consumers know that Johnson & Johnson is the largest manufacturer of pharmaceutical nicotine products (like Nicoderm, Nicoderm CQ, etc.) in the world, which alone are a $500 million annual business for the company? I didn't and was also surprised to see how squishy the evidence on second-hand smoking being used*** Johnson & Johnson, Inc., with $53.324 billion in annual sales, is also an international giant in weight loss and healthy eating products, selling nutritional supplements (McNeil Nutritionals, LLC), artificial sweeteners (Splenda), diet pills, employer wellness programs (J&J Consumer Companies, Inc. Vida Nuestra), and bariatric surgical devices and lap bands (Ethicon Endo-Surgery, Inc.). And just this past week, the President and CEO of RWJF, Dr. Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, finally stepped down from the Board of Directors of Beckman Coulter, Inc., a company with $2.53 billion in annual sales of biomedical laboratory tests — a position she simultaneously held while at the helm of RWJF, ensuring preventive wellness guidelines calling for excessive screening tests.

* By these standards, if I'm understanding this correctly , when Maya was four she would have been identified as obese, since she was so tall that she was off the chart for her age group. She was slender and tall.

** Think of the additional time and expense of these evaluations and tests. If this is to occur at each well-child visit, how that adds up over the years. Fasting glucose tests, as those of us who have them can tell you, are blood tests, preceded by no food and minimal water for 12 hours. For young children who happen to be genetically larger? Be hungry, thirsty, and stuck with a needle? Whether your doctor thinks you need it or not? Let's see how fast we can make chubby children hate going to the doctor.

*** Children within the government's definition of normal are also to be subjected to evaluation of their eating and exercise habits? No children, no families, are to be spared the indoctrination that fat is evil? Aren't the five year olds who are dieting today bad enough? Shall we see if we can add more?

**** In other words, these kids, fat or just tall, will be placed on diets. When studies have shown that dieting before physical maturation not only leads to nutritional problems but also almost guarantees a lifetime of weight problems. When the Berkeley Nutritional Study "of women defined as clinically obese shows that nearly two-thirds of them went on their first diet before age 14 and, as adults, were more likely to be heavier than women who started dieting after age 14."

***** That's Maya, the four year-old who was so tall she was off the chart! To be placed in "tertiary care protocol"!

****** Medication. Perhaps another phen-fen that proves fatal? One that leads to "anal leakage"? Surgery. That's weight loss surgery (WLS), they are talking about here. On children. A surgery with a death on the table rate exceeded only by the quadruple bypass. With a death within 90 days of surgery rate of one in 50! A surgery that results in nutrient malabsorption -- on a developing child! That can result in brain damage! So, while we are looking at the prospect of WLS for children, let me tell you about my conversation with my brother about his bout with WLS. Now, Forrest was over 400 pounds and had a severely enlarged heart. His cardiologist told him it was WLS or he would be dead within six months. And, after the first surgery, he told me that he thought he had made the worst mistake of his life. At the time he told me this, he would have already been dead without it. Every bite he ate, he threw up. Since then he has had a second surgery which doubled the 20" of gut that he had still functioning to 40" (out of 28'), and he is doing much better. He still throws up often enough that his pre-WLS perfect teeth are rotting and he is losing them. Teeth that had never had a single cavity! He throws up if he gets post-nasal drip. He throws up if he eats one bite of bacon. The list of food that he has to avoid is incredibly long and, because he has only a one cup stomach capacity and food only has a two hour transit in his body, he has to pretty much avoid fruit, vegetables, and grains because they don't give him a high enough nutrient load for the bulk. He eats mostly meat. But not fatty meat! Not fats. He takes multiple calcium and vitamin tablets a day -- one of each every two hours. Also, since he has ADD, he must take a ritalin capsule every two hours. Any medication he needs, he has to take every two hours. What if something absorbs faster than that and he gets too much? And the cost of 12 pills instead of one! He does say that it's worth it to be alive, to see his grandchild, to live. But, he also says that if it had not been necessary to save his life, in no way would it have been worth it. Not to look better. Not to feel better -- because he doesn't. He just feels miserable in different ways.

******* In other words, doctors will be paid less if they don't follow these guidelines, no matter what their professional opinion of worth or harm they might do patients..

Sandy leads you to an excellent article on ED Bites, a weight site I was previously unaware of and have subsequently linked in my Size Acceptance blog roll.

Signposts to Sanity

Where your lovin' Granny points you at some other folks' really good stuff.

I'm getting a regional training together for the Teens In Action groups in Juneau, Craig, and Sitka this weekend. So, I'm going to direct you to other people and concentrate all my time on last minute arrangements. And trying to figure out why my e-mails to Sitka didn't arrive and didn't get kicked back so that I would know they hadn't arrived.

Over at Junkfood Science, on May 8, Sandy Szwarc discussed how risk factors frighten us in her post The Greatest Myth of Health Risk Factors

Why do studies continue to find that health risk factors don’t actually predict who will succumb to disease or die early? ***The answer comes down to what we’ve been misled to believe about risk factors. These misconceptions are the key to successfully scaring us about our health, food and life; the key to compelling us to do things proactively “for our health” that don’t really make all that much difference; and the key to identifying and blaming “bad” people, foods and lifestyles.***Dr. Malcomb Kendricks, Medical Director of Adelphi Lifelong Learning, Cheshire, UK, estimates that about 1,000 risk factors have now been identified for heart disease. And there are countless numbers for cancer. Just about everything, it seems, can cause cancer. Wearing a bra is a risk factor for breast cancer, wearing boxers a risk factor for prostate cancer, and eating (anything!) is a risk factor for most everything. Consuming a lot or too little garlic, red wine, chocolate, fat, red meat, whole grains, sugar, or produce; and having migraines, bad teeth, pot bellies, dark skin and big noses — have all been made a risk factor for something. And they’re sure to change tomorrow. It’s little wonder that we’re all nervous wrecks.***All that the term “risk factor” means is that a researcher has found a correlation between two variables. We get risk factors from epidemiology. And it’s easy to take a group of people and pull out endless correlations between those with and without some disease and produce another health “risk factor.” And something else to scare us with.***Remember: a risk factor is just a correlation.***The public has been convinced, however, to give risk factors such importance that it’s affected our very concept of what it means to be healthy. Rather than realize that most of us are healthy most of the time and only occasionally get sick and then get better again; it’s become widely believed that healthy young people need regular medical attention and constant diligence to stay healthy because we’re all at risk.

Then go to the Alternet article on Rosie O'Donnell by Jeanine Plant to look at just what makes this very opinionated star so very popular. Perhaps being true to yourself is appreciated by the public.

That she attracted the ire of Tom Delay, managed to stir up controversy with the Donald Trumps of the world, and often gets the conservative media machine in a tizzy bespeaks her power. That such a progressive force is in such high demand and so threatening to conservative men is a happy reminder that the sea change we saw last November is real and not going away, even though she is.

And then take a trip to CommonDreams.org and read Lee Iaccoca's Where Have All The Leaders Gone?.

Am I the only guy in this country who’s fed up with what’s happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We’ve got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we’ve got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can’t even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, “Stay the course.”

Stay the course? You’ve got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic.***I’ll go a step further. You can’t call yourself a patriot if you’re not outraged.***Why are we in this mess? How did we end up with this crowd in Washington? Well, we voted for them—or at least some of us did. But I’ll tell you what we didn’t do. We didn’t agree to suspend the Constitution. We didn’t agree to stop asking questions or demanding answers. Some of us are sick and tired of people who call free speech treason. Where I come from that’s a dictatorship, not a democracy.*** A leader must have COURAGE. I’m talking about balls. (That even goes for female leaders.) Swagger isn’t courage. Tough talk isn’t courage. George Bush comes from a blue-blooded Connecticut family, but he likes to talk like a cowboy. You know, My gun is bigger than your gun. Courage in the twenty-first century doesn’t mean posturing and bravado. Courage is a commitment to sit down at the negotiating table and talk.***Thanks to our first MBA President, we’ve got the largest deficit in history, Social Security is on life support, and we’ve run up a half-a-trillion-dollar price tag (so far) in Iraq. And that’s just for starters.***We were all frozen in front of our TVs, scared out of our wits, waiting for our leaders to tell us that we were going to be okay, and there was nobody home. It took Bush a couple of days to get his bearings and devise the right photo op at Ground Zero.

That was George Bush’s moment of truth, and he was paralyzed. And what did he do when he’d regained his composure? He led us down the road to Iraq***So here’s where we stand. We’re immersed in a bloody war with no plan for winning and no plan for leaving. We’re running the biggest deficit in the history of the country. We’re losing the manufacturing edge to Asia, while our once-great companies are getting slaughtered by health care costs. Gas prices are skyrocketing, and nobody in power has a coherent energy policy. Our schools are in trouble. Our borders are like sieves. The middle class is being squeezed every which way. These are times that cry out for leadership.

Fat

I've been contemplating weight these last few days. Hell, I've been contemplating weight this last half century. For most of that time, I was obsessed with the scale and what value it judged me to have in the world. The last five or six years, I've not given it that power over me; have thrown out my bathroom scale and only get on the one in the doctor's office once a year and with my back to the numbers. I've trained them not to comment on my weight at all -- don't even tell me if it's gone down. I don't react well to knowing and I've decided not to allow it to consume my life any longer.

Recently, there have been a few posts in the blogs I read that have directed my thoughts to this subject, not in the obsessed, "how am I ever going to get thin enough" way, but back to the realization of what this preoccupation with size does to people.

On the 8th, my friend Deja Pseu over at Dilettante's Progress, posted Background Noise about what it is like to live with a weight problem.

I can't remember a time in my life when I didn't want to be thinner. The effect of this has been to generate a constant kind of background brain static that never fully goes away, a dog-whistle whine of constant dissatisfaction. Even when I'd lost weight to the point where I was quite thin, the static remained. "Just another 5 pounds" was the seashell noise in my ear.

Sandy Szwarc at Junkfood Science has two posts that became part of this pondering. The first is News Too Troubling To Stomach which concerns the degree to which our culture's hatred of fat people results in a willingness to hurt children:

. . .exploiting and mocking fat children for entertainment on reality show fat camps. . .
***. . .an upcoming show featuring Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie as weight loss camp counselors. But there’s more... ***. . . administer enemas to the fat teens, outside, in front of television cameras. These starlets were “more than happy” to talk to the press about what they did. Both they and the show’s producers appeared oblivious to the unimaginable degrees of humiliation they subjected these fat kids to, let alone how they endangered their health. ***Now, as far as this fat camp reality show and others like it, I don’t know why lawyers, size acceptance and civil rights organizations aren’t all over these things (substitute black or crippled children for the fat children and the public outcries would be swift and loud); why parents or other adults would even consider allowing their children to be victimized and ridiculed in this way; or why anyone would watch. And that reveals the most troubling aspect of all.

The second is News A Woman Can Use in which Sandy takes a look at older women and weight.

The researchers concluded that the lowest risks for older woman was to be fatter than the current government recommended BMIs. Our chances for living longer and healthier improve with some fat on our bones. The researchers specifically said that the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) guidelines, which recommend weight management of “overweight,” were inappropriate in older women because those were the sizes where women have the lowest rates of mortality. In other words, following government guidelines would increase their risks for dying*. ***. . .researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, found that except for smoking none of the lifestyle and risk factors popularly believed to be important actually made a difference in how long we live, and that obesity was associated with a 30% lower mortality. And for those who develop heart failure, every 5 BMI units higher lowered the risk of dying by 10%. The Cardiovascular Health Study of 5,200 older men and women, recently published in the Journal of the American Geriatric Society, again found that body mass index was inversely related to mortality. ***. . .it bears repeating because of the exaggerated fears about obesity, that based on weight alone, a woman is no more likely to die at a BMI of 50 (about 310 pounds) as at a BMI of 35, and that the most extremely "morbidly obese" women still have a longer life expectancy than normal weight men. Our figures need not be our worry.

* Emphasis added.

Last Thursday, Julie posted Fat, a look at the recent PBS special and her thoughts about it.

Several years ago, in the hospital after suffering a heart attack, my bony tiny grandmother asked her bony tiny sister to check her chart, to see how much weight she had lost while flat on her back. When told she had lost a pound and a half, she was disappointed, she had hoped for more, that she would have been able to ‘do better’. ***It’s an issue that is haunting so many people every day (like the oatmeal commercial, where the people have their scales chained to their ankles while Willy Nelson sings, “You are always on my mind…”)

Since then, I have watched the special (I had recorded it) and the things I noticed were, in the section on weight loss surgery, I didn't see much indication of the dangers of this surgery. It has very high mortality rates (I have heard both 1 in 100 for on the table and 1 in 50 for within 90 days), nutrient absorption is reduced for the rest of the person's life, leading to nutritional diseases, and weight rebound is just the same as for diets.** And, in the discussion at the end among the medical personnel, they mentioned that dieting didn't work, and then proceeded to give what was good advice for living a healthy life in such a way as to make it sound like weight loss advice. In a culture as saturated with fat phobia and diet messages as this one, I would have reiterated that these suggestions were for optimum health and that there is no way to lose weight permanently that works for more than two percent of the population. I did fall in love with the idea of being "a free-range fat woman" as mentioned by Pat Lyons.

And this special has also been a subject over on Big Fat Blog, where in discussion, one commenter stated that obesity was the one subject on which Michael Moore would not be taken seriously.

And that is how I feel about explaining to my agency head why we shouldn't pass out weight information along with the alcohol and smoking information at health fairs. It would be easier to tell him about the fat producing effects of dieting if I were thin, somehow. Somehow, it feels like an excuse when I try to tell people about all the research that emphasizes how dangerous it is to diet. There is a part of me that knows that, having been on around 35 diets and weighing more than twice what I did when I was put on my first one, I am living proof that they don't work. But, who gives credence to what a fat woman says about weight?

I remember one day about five years ago, I got out and about early and had an hour walk under my belt by breakfast time. I headed down to McDonald's, feeling alive and good and clear headed and centered and all of the things I feel when I get a good walk. On the way, I passed the garbage truck as the workers finished emptying several cans and stopped to thank them for the good work they were doing, remarking that it is nice that someone comes and carts this stuff away (I'm aware of this, because I have lived where no one does and you have to do it yourself). A block or so further on, a FedEx truck stopped near me and I opened the building door for the burdened driver. I saw my reflection in a shop window and liked the chartreuse and turquoise pants suit I was wearing, as well as the Tweetie Bird applique on my purse and the fact that I had a box of Edward Gorey Christmas cards to address in that bag. I was feeling on top of the world, until I went into McDonald's and remembered that I don't fit into the booths; I have to sit at a table with chairs that can be pulled out. And all day long, that one fact defined me. I wasn't the well dressed woman in the gorgeous pants suit or the polite woman who helped the FedEx man and thanked the garbage man or the woman with the outre sense of humor who sent Edward Gorey Christmas cards or even the playful woman who had Tweetie Bird on her purse. I was the fat woman who had to sit at the special table in McDonald's.

** Survivors are in for months of difficult recovery with complications such as ulcers, hernias, vomiting, and internal bleeding. The mortality rate of follow-up surgery (and a surprisingly high number of patients have to have at least one follow-up surgery) is even higher than for the original surgery. And, one thing they don't ever seem to talk about before hand -- the patient then has to live on a strict diet for the rest of their lives and may gain back more than they lost anyway. Then there is "predictive malabsorption" (a name which more than implies that the condition is predicted!) a side-effect which stops the body from absorbing crucial nutrients. Post operative patients are prone the diseases of malnutrition! One of which is brain damage. And may have to give up certain foods for the rest of their lives. Patients who get weight loss surgery are people who have had trouble dieting -- and now they have to diet more stringently than they ever had to before.

Signposts to Sanity

An occasional feature where your lovin' Granny points you at somebody else's really good stuff



For those of us who may feel that we are not exercising enough, and that it is impossible to exercise too much, please go over to see Sandy Szwarc at Junkfood Science and read about the downside of high impact exercise. The fact that people in their 40s are having joint replacement surgery because they thought they were doing something that was good for them, and perhaps forced themselves to do so under the idea that "no pain, no gain" is sobering.

And while you are at it, check out her article on the neurological harm that is too common with weight loss surgery.

And just to round things out, Cooking Up Fears not only deals with the hype about the danger of Teflon cookware, it also has a lovely rundown on how fears are created and exploited -- a thing we can all use understanding of.

And in a variation of the theme of harm masqurading as good, do go over to CommonDreams.com and read The Sport of King George by David Michael Green for an in-depth look at supporting the troops.

And here we have an editorial cartoon from the Juneau Empire, March 16, 2007. Gotta love it.

Sandy SzwarcThe Latest Diet Study

Sandy has done it again. All Diets Work (Wait for the Punchline)

The story of the week has appeared practically everywhere: “Atkins wins!”
Despite the glut of coverage the latest diet study has received -- in mainstream media, medical literature and even the blog world -- no one’s gotten the secret yet.***At the end of one year, what did they find? The story we’ve heard reported is that the Atkins diet resulted in the greatest weight loss: an average of 10.4 pounds, as compared to 5.7 pounds on LEARN, 4.8 pounds on Ornish, and 3.5 pounds on the Zone. While a 4 3/4-pounds difference after a year of dieting is being heralded as significant, the undeniable fact is that all of the weight losses were modest at best and clinically insignificant. And all were considerably less than the diets claim and certainly what most consumers believe will be their pay off after a year of effort.***The U.S. government’s Dietary Guidelines tell us that all we need to do to lose a pound is to eat 3,500 calories less or burn 3,500 calories more. Given the calorie reductions made by all of the dieters in this study, they “should” have each lost about 36 pounds. They didn’t, of course.*** It would be more accurate to say that the Atkins dieters experienced the biggest weight yo-yoing, and the fastest and most significant weight regain.During the last 6 months of the trial, all of the dieters regardless of the diet plan, experienced weight regain. At the end of the first year, they were already at or above the weight they lost during the first 2 months of the study.

My experience with the approximately 36 diets I was on was that I didn't only always gain back more than I lost. After a certain point, with each subsequent diet, I was able to lose less weight so that on my first I lost the three pounds I was aiming for, and on the second the five I'd rebounded, and on the third the seven from that rebound -- but, somewhere along the way I stopped losing further and further from my goal. And each time I began to regain at a lower calorie total than before, until I could gain weight on 600 calories a day and wouldn't stop gaining until I was at least 20% higher than when I started that diet. And the longer I continued the madness, the higher the percentage of muscle I lost on the diet and of fat I gained on the rebound.

In A Nutshell follows.

She's Done It Again

Sandy Szwarc, at Junkfood Science has an article on myths concerning the causes of birth defects that is well worth reading to anyone who is likely to worry or who knows anyone who is likely to worry about the development of an unborn child. Sandy has, with his permission, encapsulated information from Dr. Jon Aase, M.D., of the Division of Clinical Genetics/Dysmorphology and Metabolism.

Go Visit Sandy Szwarc Again

Over at Junkfood Science, Sandy Szwarc debunks the AP coverage of
Links Between Weight & Prostrate Cancer. In the process, she also offers invaluable information on how to recognize "Trojan numbers" in reported studies.

it's one of the strategies used by researchers to inflate the size of a study so it sounds more impressive when the actual number of people with the condition being studied is significantly less.
***When you find a Trojan Number, cautions Dr. Brignell, "these studies are often part of a large data dredge, in which many combinations of condition and potential cause are covered, so that the inevitable coincidental excesses can be identified and claimed as significant."
***The researchers found no association between the men's body mass index (BMI), or the men's change in weight, and their overall risk for prostate cancer.

In fact, looking at the data, the obese men had about 10% lower overall incidence of prostate cancers and the risk steadily dropped as BMIs increased

Do go over and check out Sandy's complete article, especially if you have any interest at all in prostrate cancer; men should be aware of conditions that affect their own health and women should be aware of the things that affect their husbands, sons, brothers, and fathers. If you are a woman with no men in your life at all, this post is excellent education on how studies get distorted and findings "tweaked" to suit hidden agendas.

Concern

Sandy Szwarc at Junkfood Science has a very powerful post concerning childhood weight and food issues, discussing anorexia being found in children as young as five, the ways that the literal mind of young children can misunderstand well meant nutrition education, and the tendency of our culture to believe that low fat equals healthy. Among her concerns is the malnutrition that can occur when children become vegetarians.
Junkfood Science Weekend Special: Why are we surprised?

A Call For Sanity

Once again, I am both impressed and moved by an incredibly sensible and well considered article by Sandy Szwarc, RN, BSN, CCP , at Junkfood Science. One the media ignored: Please don't weigh the children

The panic surrounding childhood obesity has led public schools administrators, politicians and consumer groups to get behind "prevention" approaches which encourage weighing and screening children for "obesity."
Without regard to the evidence.
***Based on the findings throughout this Project, the researchers advise that public health interventions should avoid messages focused on weight.

Sadly, this is not the first such study to suggest harm. It concurs with the body of evidence showing the unsupportable nature of all "childhood obesity" initiatives.
***. . . recommendations did caution that the potential harm of screening and weighing young people included: "labeling, induced self-managed dieting with its negative sequelae, poorer self-concept, poorer health habits, disordered eating or negative impacts from parental concerns."

Musings:Beliefs, not evidence, continue to come first. Don't our children deserve better?

Drop over and read the entire post.

Junkfood Science

You may notice a new blog on my blogroll -- Junkfood Science. I only discovered on Tuesday that one of my favorite sane people has her own blog. I have read Sandy Szwarc, RN, BSN, CCP, for a couple of years now at Techcentral Station. (I was unable to give you a direct link to her series. If you are interested, use the link above, then under authors, look her up and it will take you to her archives.) She wrote a crackerjack series there on the moral panic (although, I'm not certain that she calls it that) about obesity and food that we are experiencing these days. Her writing is firmly rooted in science and she recognizes the misuse of research and pseudoscience in creating a false epidemic of obesity in order to sell products and services which, at best are useless, at worst are harmful and sometimes deadly. Hers is a voice of reason in the wilderness, and I can not recommend her too highly.

This quote from a recent post, Have your steak and enjoy it too! gives you an idea of the flavor of her writing and the solid, good sense of her information:

When it comes to food and health news, the saturation of media coverage is usually inversely proportional to the soundness of the research. Sensational claims sell a lot of newspapers, lure viewers and listeners, and create good buzz. The trouble is, most of us don't realize we're getting Hitchcock-like fiction when we turn on the news. With last week's scare du juor "red meat increases risk for breast cancer" no mainstream news reporter took a critical look at the study they were reporting, preferring to simply pass along the press release. No one except Steve Milloy, of course, who wrote an excellent review here.
Our first clue that there was something more afoot in this media blitz than brilliant science, is that this one study, out of the thousands of new studies released every single day, was reported in every media outlet, on the exact same day, all saying the exact same thing. This is evidence of brilliant marketing, but not much more. Like everything in media today, it deserves viewing with the same skepticism as you would any other commercial. The study wasn't nearly as well done as its marketing...

What more could I possibly say? Visit her. Visit her series on Techcentral Station.