"Short Wave Sportfishing" wrote in message
news
From today's New York Times:

For those who have online access:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/29/we...=1&oref=slogin

For those who don't:

For a World of Woes, We Blame Cookie Monsters

By GINA KOLATA
Published: October 29, 2006

FIRST we said they were ruining their health with their bad habit, and
they should just quit.

Then we said they were repulsive and we didn't want to be around them.
Then we said they were costing us loads of money maybe they should pay
extra taxes. Other Americans, after all, do not share their dissolute
ways.

Cigarette smokers? No, the obese.

Last week the list of ills attributable to obesity grew: fat people
cause global warming.

This latest contribution to the obesity debate comes in an article by
Sheldon H. Jacobson of the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana
and his doctoral student, Laura McLay. Their paper, published in the
current issue of The Engineering Economist, calculates how much extra
gasoline is used to transport Americans now that they have grown
fatter. The answer, they said, is a billion gallons a year.

Their conclusion is in the same vein as a letter published last year
in The American Journal of Public Health. Its authors, from the
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, did a sort of
back-of-the-envelope calculation of how much extra fuel airlines spend
hauling around fatter Americans. The answer, they wrote, based on the
extra 10 pounds the average American gained in the 1990's, is 350
million gallons, which means an extra 3.8 million tons of carbon
dioxide.

"People are out scouring the landscape for things that make obese
people look bad", said Kelly Brownell, director of the Rudd Center for
Food Policy and Obesity at Yale.

And is that a bad thing? Dr. Jacobson doesn't think so. "We felt that
beyond public health, being overweight has many other socioeconomic
implications," he said, which was why he was drawn to calculating the
gasoline costs of added weight.

The idea of using economic incentives to help people shed pounds comes
up in the periodic calls for taxes on junk food. Martin B. Schmidt, an
economist at the College of William and Mary, suggests a tax on food
bought at drive-through windows. Describing his theory in a recent
Op-Ed article in The New York Times, Dr. Schmidt said people would
expend more calories if they had to get out of their cars to pick up
their food.

"We tax cigarettes in part because of their health cost," he wrote.
"Similarly, the individual's decision to lead a sedentary lifestyle
will end up costing taxpayers."

Eric Oliver, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, said
his first instinct was to laugh at the gas and drive-through
arguments. But such claims often get wide attention, he says, and take
on a life of their own.

"This is like, let's find another reason to scapegoat fat people," Dr.
Oliver says.

~~~~~~~~~~CONTRIBUTOR'S NOTE~~~~~~~~~~~

The following two paragraphs state exactly, even if it's about another
subject, how I feel about the Global Warming Debate.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

At an annual meeting of the Obesity Society, one talk correlated
obesity with deaths in car accidents, and another correlated obesity
with suicides. Dr. Oliver, who attended, said no one in the crowd of
at least 200 questioned whether the correlations were really cause and
effect. "The funny thing was that everyone took it seriously," he
said.

Katherine Flegal of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
also wryly cautions against being quick to link cause and effect.
"Yes, obesity is to blame for all the evils of modern life, except
somehow, weirdly, it is not killing people enough," she said. "In fact
that's why there are all these fat people around. They just won't
die."

The message in the blame-obesity approach, said James Marone, a
political science professor at Brown University, is that it is so
important to persuade fat people to lose weight that common sense
disappears.

"Anything we can say to persuade you, we will say," Dr. Marone added.

So is it working?

It doesn't seem to be. Fat people are more reviled than ever,
researchers find, even as more people become fat. When smokers and
heavy drinkers turned pariah, rates of smoking and drinking went down.

Won't fat people, in time, follow suit?

Research suggests that the stigma of being fat leads to more eating,
not less. And if reducing the stigma suggests a solution, that's not
working either.

"One hypothesis about getting rid of stigma is having more contact
with the stigmatized group," Dr. Brownell says. But with obesity, the
stigma seems to be growing along with the national girth.

He cites a famous study in the 1960's in which children were shown
drawings of children with and without disabilities, as well as a
drawing of a fat child. Who, they were asked, would you want for your
friend? The fat child was picked last.

Now, three researchers have repeated the study, this time with college
students. Once again, almost no one, not even fat people, liked the
fat person. "Obesity was highly stigmatized," wrote the researchers,
Janet D. Latner of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, Albert
J. Stunkard of the University of Pennsylvania and C. Terence Wilson of
Rutgers University, in the July 2005 issue of Obesity Research.

One problem with blaming people for being fat, obesity researchers
say, is that getting thin is not like quitting smoking. People
struggle to stop smoking, but many, in the end, succeed. Obesity is
different. It's not that the obese don't care. Instead, as science has
shown over and over, they have limited personal control over their
weight. Genes play a significant role, the science says.

That is not a popular message, Dr. Brownell says. And the notion that
anyone can be thin with a little effort has consequences. "Once weight
is due to a personal failing, a lot of things follow," he said.

There's the attitude that if you are fat, you deserve to be
stigmatized. Maybe it will motivate you to lose weight. The opposite
happens.

In a paper published Oct. 10 in Obesity, Dr. Brownell and his
colleagues studied more than 3,000 fat people, asking them about their
experiences of stigmatization and discrimination and how they
responded.

Almost everyone said they ate more.
--

"What the hell's the deal with this newsgroup...
is there a computer terminal in the day room of
some looney bin somewhere?"

Bilgeman - circa 2004

And to think beauty was Reubanesque some years ago.