Today’s reading material is brought to you by this timeline: Fat Acceptance bloggers butt heads with Hey Maybe Fat Isn’t Good bloggers. FA blogger posts dozens of quotes about how obesity does not equal unfitness and fitness is the real predictor of mortality. I think to myself, Y’know, I have a lot of unquestioned assumptions about this topic. I should learn more. What do they mean by “fitness”? At the bottom, it says the specific academic citations are in the PDF I link to in this post. I scan the book and see that one of their major points is the old truism that BMI is a load of horseshit. Cool. But that’s not really the same thing as FA, right? If a powerlifter is obese by BMI but wildly strong, that doesn’t validate the kind of obesity that someone on the street would recognize as fatness. So I think Hell, now I have to read the whole thing. I scroll to the top, and—well, that’s interesting.
The PDF is “Obesity Myths”, published by The Center for Consumer Freedom. If that name doesn’t set off your Astroturfing alarm you should see a mechanic. The Center For Consumer Freedom seems to be against meat-haters. OK, fine. They think biotechnology is swell. I used to read a lot of Niven, so I’m willing to entertain that idea. They have an entire section devoted to how organic food is a scam (or something). Ruh-roh. They have another site called Mercury Facts. To be honest, I haven’t reviewed the science, but being pro-mercury is troublesome for me. Maybe I’m being overprotective, but I’d prefer to err on the side of too little mercury than too much. These Consumer Freedom fighters are pro-soda, pro-corn sugar, and anti-animal rights, all in a way that suggests it’s less about the science and more about Rich
PeopleCorporate Libertarianism.So, y’know, grain of salt.
(And it turns out that fitness means VO2Max, which means I need to go learn about all that. And I still have to read the rest of the PDF.)
Of course, most of the quotes I posted come from respected professionals and reputable publications like the Journal of the American Medical Association, the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports, and the Harvard Health Policy Review. In fact, the quote you reblogged was from the Journal of the American Medical Association, even if it was posted on a questionable site.
You can see one of the studies in question, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1999, further explaining what constitutes fitness and why fitness is a better indicator of health than BMI here, hosted on the College of Nursing and Health Sciences at UMass Boston website, if that source makes you feel a little less uneasy.
Grain of salt indeed.