Fat Chance, Fat Man

"But she's...fat!"

That's a common judgment and insult in this century and the end of the last. Even with the gangly heroines of Sex and the City permeating our culture, it's not only the big (if you pardon that word) slur of one woman on another.

Lately though, as the Sunday New York Times covers, somatotype seems to have become destiny in much of America. The alternately amusing and reflective piece by NYT science writer Gina Kolata ridicules some of the most recent related hysteria.

She points to scholarly guess-timates of how much an extra 10 pounds of weight costs the nation in car and airline gas mileage, and even how that contributes to pollution and global warming.

The most obvious trend in recent decades is that real or perceived overweight is stigmatized. Many of feel free to insult openly even people who are quite healthy and those who have low body fat, but because of high muscle mass rank as obese on such pseudo-measures as the body mass index (BMI).

Some scholars propose taxes on fast food and meals purchased at drive-in windows. Kolata cites "an annual meeting of the Obesity Society, one talk correlated obesity with deaths in car accidents, and another correlated obesity with suicides. Dr. (Eric) Oliver (U. of Chicago political scientist), 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."

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

Even otherwise rational folk can get caught up in group think on such memes. It's not very far from being uncomfortable seeing a morbidly obese man to stereotyping anyone who is not an ectomorph naturally.

We note the obvious irony of the last century. Until a short time ago, secondary sex characteristics were big stuff. Women should have obvious breasts and hips, men massive shoulders and arms.

This came to mind just recently when a high-school classmate was writing on the class reunion site about just such matters. He's still scrawny. Back then, he tried everything he could to gain weight and put on some muscle mass. As a true ectomorph, he never could. Now, he is bragging about his weight, belt size and how he can wear his HS clothes.

The pop culture is quite different now. Even the thin through illness can be fashionable. Nancy Reagan's long-term treatment for anemia doesn't get much coverage. Many point to her frail frame as enviable.

The main medical establishment has jumped on this shift with seeming glee. The BMI, for example, is a great tool for lazy physicians. Rather than evaluating a patient's body fat or doing a meaningful analysis, they can look to what is fundamentally a height/weight chart that even insurance company laugh at. With the BMI, many muscular people are considered fat and many thin looking people with high body fat and low muscle mass are seen as ideal.

Some researchers have little patience for the pop fake science aspects. Among those studying the real problems and looking for ways to make us healthier are:

• Yale's Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity
• Author and lawyer Paul Campos who reviewed countless studies and has written seminal books on the subject
• National Eating Disorders Association

Among the most salient points of these and others is that there's lots of information about the effects of obesity. The most startling consistent finding is that the skinniest of us tend to die first. You can, in fact, be too thin, too thin for your own good, too thin to live.

You can go to any of those sources above or the places they can point you to for research. A nice overview is Campos. He's read all those tables and methodologies so we don't have to. He became obsessed with the hysteria on the subject and reviewed hundreds, maybe thousands, of studies. The gist of the longevity findings include:

• The thinnest die first
• The morbidly obese are next.
• The very thin follow.
• The pretty fat are next.
• The ideal follow them.
• Those classified medically as 5% to 10% overweight live longest

Of course, pop culture has another view. Most of us are uncomfortable around the heaviest and we are willing to believe that every additional pound brings increased health risk.

It's surely unlikely that we as a nation will ever return to those Colonial days when only the wealthy could afford to get fat. Then big-and-tall (as the euphemism goes) men were desirable and admirable.

Yet the silliness of telling muscular athletes that they are obese and knocking on death's door is too far the other way. Likely when the Baby Boomers die in sufficient numbers we'll see clearly from this large demographic that we're left largely with that those charts say are moderately overweight adults.

An unfortunate aspect is that meanwhile the efforts to get us to eat healthier is muddled by this stigma. There are people who are never going to fit the ectomorphic ideal even when they are at their healthiest weights. There are many, particularly the poor, who either do not know what are good foods or know and cannot afford to buy them for their families.

Insulting the chubby doesn't do anything other than increase the self-righteousness score of the nasties insulting them. In fact, Kolata reports that the research indicates that stigmatizing the fattest leads them to eat even more.

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Tags: massmarrier, obesity, pop culture, Gina Kolata, health