Obesity: weighing in…

Recently a lecturer of mine expressed outrage over politicians pronouncing the female body, as it is represented in modelling, as waifishly thin, when all of them, (her words) are so disgustingly fat. She’s a skinnyist.

Everyone has moments of judgement. When forced to squeeze into a train two-seater next to an overweight person, I might have been known to quietly grumble. There’s my barista friends who have a personal chuckle when an overweight person comes into a café, and orders mudcake, with a skim cappuccino. Then there’s a friend of mine who in all serious, objects to overweight people because they are … wait for it … dirty. How, she asks, can they reach to clean themselves?

There’s something to be said for the argument that we should all be skinnyists. The fact that the average woman in Australia is a size 14 does not mean that is what we should all aspire to – a great homogenisation of the overweight.

That said, we’ve got a fair way to go before we could take seriously this kind of melodramatic commentary: “As we look to the future and where childhood obesity will be in 20 years … it is every bit as threatening to us as is the terrorist threat we face today. It is the threat from within”. This quote, however, came not from an alarmist or advocacy group. It was Richard Carmona, U.S. Surgeon General under President Bush in 2004.

What has previously been deemed a private issue, is now being described as an epidemic, a crisis, a ticking bomb – and the solution: a War On Obesity (to go with the War On Terror, War On Drugs, War On Poverty). And it’s got everybody weighing in (excuse the irresistible pun).

Doctors, governments, policy makers and even the average voter has worked out that obesity isn’t a private choice or private problem. One obese person runs serious health risks. One billion obese people (as is the estimated worldwide figure) poses a potentially back-breaking strain on global health systems. Obesity has been linked to diabetes, heart disease, cancer, and an increased risk of stroke or heart attack. In time, a growing proportion of adults aging with obesity will drastically increase the demands made on national health systems.

So goes the discourse. But the last five years has seen data emerge that flies in the face of popular mythology about obesity. Instances of cardiovascular disease, strokes and weight-related cancer are down. Diabetes is the only weight related illness on the rise, and even it is not rising as rapidly as our obese population is growing (in number and in girth!).

Several studies have found that being overweight does not increase the likelihood or premature death (except among the severely obese). Being underweight is far more dangerous.

These studies should, but haven’t, change the nature of the debate. No one is encouraging you to pack on the pounds. But the focus should be on regular exercise, not weight loss. On eating unprocessed food, not banning junk advertising. Less calls to boycott Girl Scout cookies and more orange quarters on the soccer field.

And a real acknowledgement that all this talk attaches a stigma to obesity that deserves a little of the blame for eating disorders among men and women. After obesity and asthma, they are the most common diseases in young people in Australia. Unlike child obesity, eating disorders have a direct link to death. Between 10 and 20% of eating disorders end in death by suicide. Now that’s a mortality rate worth talking about.

Jennifer Blake