The Fat Chick Diaries

Have you seen the new ad campaign from Snapple? It goes like this:

“We found better stuff!”

The premise is that Snapple, which has always billed itself as using “The best stuff on earth” in its drinks, has improved its products because it has found a new “good stuff” ingredient to use. Know what it is? It’s sugar. Real sugar.

Snapple is getting on the real-sugar bandwagon (Pepsi and Coke have both put out real-sugar versions) and putting out some of its drinks with sugar instead of HFCS, now that more and more research has come out linking HFCS with health problems.

But to say they’re doing it because they “found better stuff”? Are we really meant to believe that the folks at Snapple really claiming that the reason they’ve been poisoning people with HFCS all this time is not because it’s just incredibly cheaper and more profitable, but because they were previously UNAWARE OF THE EXISTENCE OF SUGAR? Pardon my French, but what a bunch of assholes and hypocrites. Really.

I rarely drink Snapple products, and when I do I go for the diet stuff (joke’s on me– there’s apparently a lot of evidence that articificial sweeteners aren’t so great for us either). But after this ridiculously insulting campaign, I’m swearing off Snapple altogether.

Why? Because I’m made of the best stuff on earth.

After all of that hullaballoo about the “obesity tax” on sugared soft drinks in New York, it turns out the Governor was only kidding. He never expected the tax to be enacted. All he really wanted to do was draw people’s attention to the issue of childhood obesity. Such a kidder.

Here’s a riddle for you: What do High Fructose Corn Syrup and Jeremy Priven have in common?

Answer: They both contain mercury!

Yes, boys and girls, as if there weren’t already enough reasons to steer clear of HCFS in the stuff you eat and drink, now it turns out that a lot of it has mercury in it. In one study, not only did half of the HFCS samples they tested contain mercury, but a third of the foods they tested which contain HFCS also contained mercury.

Mercury, y’all.

Is the corn council going to tell us that’s okay in moderation, too?

Like many of my sister fat chick bloggers, I have blogged about Governor Paterson’s fat tax. You can see my previous posts here and here. My beef has been not so much with the idea as with the abusive and misleading name given to the tax, especially since the majority of the fat people I know already drink diet soda.

I’m pretty new to this whole blogging thing, and I’m still in the process of exploring the amazing blogs out there that deal with fat issues. So forgive me if I’m the last kid on the block to clue in to this amazing resource: Junkfood Science. The blogger, Sandra Szwarc, is a thoroughly credentialed nurse among other things, and she knows how to bring the data. one of her favorite sports is taking down idiots who use outdated, debunked studies or unsupported myths to promote bogus ideas about diet and nutrition, and therefore often about fatness and health. She’s a mythbuster extraordinaire, and I can’t stop reading her stuff.

Here’s her take on the obesity tax, which she calls a fat discrimination tax. When I wrote about the tax myself, I said I didn’t think it was the fat people who were drinking the sugared sodas. She actually brings the data: the research shows not only that it’s not fat people, but rather young adult males, who drink the majority of sugared sodas. She also busts the governor’s people for using the now thoroughly debunked claim that obesity causes more than 300,000 deaths a year.

If you haven’t already, go take a look. It’s definitely worth your time.

The Obesity Tax has the fat blogosphere in a tizzy. No big surprise there. There’s a good roundup at Shapely Prose. I disagree with Kate that the term is something the media made up to whip up a frenzy and sell papers, because the NYT indicates they learned the phrase from sources close to the governor (see my post from yesterday). But other than that, her analysis is right on target, as usual. I won’t rehash it here– just go read it for yourself.

The bottom line for me is this:

1. Not all fat people drink soda loaded with HFCS
2. Not all people who drink soda loaded with HFCS are fat
3. Taxes are generally named after the thing they are taxing

With all of this in mind, it’s pretty clear the name “obesity tax” is wildly inappropriate, and as such, offensive.

It’s not like the gov is proposing to tax fat people by the pound, although there are certainly people who favor that idea.

Speaking of misnomers, I should point out that I really object to the common use of the term “sugared soda” to refer to the item the governor wants to tax. Part of the problem is that the sodas in question no longer contain sugar. Sugar was abandoned years ago in favor of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) in the name of increasing profits. HFCS is well documented to have detrimental health effects far more several and wide-ranging than those caused by cane sugar. Soft drink manufacturers know this, and they use it anyway.

Up until this morning, I have to say I have been totally loving Governor David Paterson, the lieutenant governor who was bumped up to the top spot when Elliot Spitzer resigned as governer because he couldn’t keep it in his pants. Paterson has been extremely straightforward about how bad things are and is even willing to cut programs that he himself fought for even while the infamously dysfunctional NY state legislature still tries to protect the pork, because he knows how dire the situation is.

But this morning, he pissed me off. He’s not willing to jack up income tax rates for the wealthy in order to address the state’s budget deficit, which I think is totally outrageous, since it’s rich bankers and investors and lawyers who got us into this mess in the first place. Instead, he’s proposing a range of luxury and sin taxes on things like boats, furs, and non-diet soda. So far, so good. The problem I have with that is that his team refers to the soda tax as the “Obesity Tax.” This feeds right into negative stereotypes of fat people, as if we’re all sitting around all day guzzling Coke while thin people piously sip Perrier.

The killer irony is that I first hear the phrase “Obesity Tax” on New York One, where both the reporter covering the story and morning anchor Pat Tiernan freely admitted to drinking sugared soda. They’re both rail thin.

I though to myself, why would a governer who is both blind and African American wilfully indulge in negative stereotyping? Maybe the media coined this name, not Paterson himself. But according to this morning’s New York Times, the name originates from sources close to the governor, not the reporters covering the story. Here’s a quote from the article:

Those who provided details about Mr. Paterson’s plan did so on condition of anonymity because the plan has yet to be made public. In describing the fees on nondiet soft drinks, those familiar with Mr. Paterson’s plan called them an “obesity tax.”

That is offensive in the extreme. Virtually every fat person I know, including yours truly, drinks diet soda if they drink soda at all. We’ve gotten the message that high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) is deadly, and most of us steer clear of it whenever possible. In fact, given that the reason HFCS has replaced sugar in virtually everything was done sheerly out of corporate greed despite the negative health effects of doing so (study after study shows HFCS has more detrimental health effects than the sugar is has replaced), I would argue in favor of charging the companies that produce it and use it for the increased cost of healthcare in much the same way the government did with Big Tobacco. Instead of a lawsuit, how about a corporate tax? You can manufacture and market the stuff if you want, but you have to pay up front because it’s going to cost us a lot of money to treat the people– thin or fat– whose health is damaged because consume it.

But back to the poor choice of name. Are we only going to tax fat Coke drinkers, or will skinny people also be taxed? If that is the case, why not call it something that reflects the product (”HFCS tax” or “soft drink tax”)? Do we only care that HFCS contributes to obesity in some people, or do we also care about the negative health effects on the millions of people who overindulge in Coke and Pepsi without gaining weight? Or are we going to keep pretending that never happens?

The problem now is this: Even if the governor’s office attempts to correct its mistake and give the tax a more appropriate name, the media and everyone else will almost certainly persist in calling it the Obesity Tax. People will just find it to irresistible. Just look at the coverage this morning in the various New York newspapers. Very few of the other new tax proposals have gotten anywhere near the amount of play as the Obesity Tax. The horse is alreadya out of the barn on this one, thanks to a governor who apparently lacks sensitivity to marginalized groups that aren’t the ones HE belongs to.

Thanks a lot, gov.

I promised myself today I would get back on topic and stop blogging about the election for a while. So here’s a roundup of some nifty things I’ve come across in the fat blogosphere that are worth taking a look at. Not all of them are recent, but I’m new at this, so they’re all new to me.

This post from Shapely Prose is really just superb. It should really be required reading for any ignorant thin person and self-loathing fat person contemplating opening their mouths to talk about weight issues.

Next, babble has a big long list of places to go to ponder why diets don’t work. I’m glad every time I see this topic discussed because, after all, somebody has to counter the multi-billion-dollar diet industry. However, what I hate about articles/books/posts about how diets don’t work is that they rarely define what they mean by diet. Are these just fad diets with catchy names, like the Cabbage Soup Diet or the Watermelon Diet or even the South Beach Diet? Only crash diets with extreme calorie restrictions? Or are they talking about any attempt whatsoever to lose weight be altering food intake? Very few of these articles define specifically what they mean by diets. I’ve seen it reported in several places that eating several small, balanced meals per day is the most consistently successful way to lose weight by changing your food intake. Does this count as a diet?

Okay, this next one isn’t a blog post, but it’s still worth checking out. It’s an article from Newsweek online that I’ve been meaning to post and blog about. It discusses five financial costs of obesity. Some of the give are costs to society at large for having fat people in it, and some are costs to the fat people themselves, such as lower wages. Apparently, we make more than $7K less per year than our thin counterparts. I’m thinking of printing this article out and carrying it around with me so I can whip it out every time somebody complains that fat people are costing everybody else money. The next person I hear complaining that fat people are driving up the price of airline tickets or screwing up the cost of their group health plan, they can damn well explain to me where my missing $7K is. Think my fat costs you money? Well, your bigotry costs ME money. $7K buys a lot of airline tickets.

Finally, the most recent post over on Big Fat Blog, a post about the importance of real-world activism has generated quite a few comments, including this one by DebraSY, which says a lot of what I often find myself thinking. So much so, in fact, that I’m going to b-quote her here just so I can see it all again:

Those same people buy the mythology that we eat radically differently now than we did thirty years ago. We do, in fact, eat differently, but not as the established voices would have us believe. Thirty years ago, we didn’t think of a serving of meat as the size of the palm of one’s hand. Likewise, a “serving” of spaghetti was the size of the plate it was served on; not a half cup with a small scoop of marinara sauce. We didn’t eat hummus; we ate Velveeta. Sprouts? Who the Hell ate alfalfa sprouts? Thirty years ago, we didn’t feel guilty if we’d only eaten four vegetables on a particular day. There is also a cultural mythology that we were soooo much more active. I don’t know about you, but thirty years ago, after school, I was watching either the Brady Bunch reruns or Dark Shadows. Playing outdoors with my friends was sometimes “kick the can” or riding bikes, but more often it was “sit around and talk about other kids at school.”

The mythology now is that people choose a life of sloth and culinary indulgence, and choose to live in bodies that are socially unacceptable, rather than to live in sacred “moderation.”

Oddly, so many of the people who buy this mythology are, as you point out, fat. That’s why we must be very careful not to exclude people who are trim in our movement. A fat pride parade doesn’t work here. So many thin people see their fat relatives eating less than the rest of the family, or at least no more, at Thanksgiving and Christmas. They know that their sisters and brothers have not “chosen” to be social pariahs and are not, in fact, slothful. They see what they see, but they need reassurance that when their backs are turned they aren’t being betrayed by a big lie. They need to know who the real liars are: the weight-loss industry, the people who have books to sell, the college department chairs who put department funding before academic integrity.

That’s why we need to reclaim the scientists. We need to attack the CDC when it issues an obesity alert (like an orange alert for the department of homeland security) to increase its prominence and funding. We need to demand that scientists start over from neutral, NEUTRAL, and to delve into why, why, why the average weight has increased by ten pounds in thirty years, and why, why, why the bell curve has flattened, creating more people who are “morbidly obese,” despite our extraordinary efforts to be “virtuous,” up to and including the surgical mutilation of our intestines, for God’s sake! On the other end of the bell curve are people who are dangerously thin — some triggered into eating disorders by a society that elevates weight paranoia to a religion, some besieged by immune defense disorders that do not make it possible to eat most foods. WHY? Our scientists must start from somewhere other than “lifestyle is the key,” as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation would dictate with its near monopoly on funding of obesity research. (Robert Wood Johnson — founder of Johnson and Johnson, maker of the REALIZE laproscopic band.)

What has happened to mess with our collective weight in the past three decades? Is it environmental toxins? Fat-inducing hormones shot into the meat supply? New strains of viruses? A ridiculous concentration on sterilite surfaces? Or something else? Or a variety of reasons? Are these things affecting our genes, our endocrine systems, the composition of our gut flora, or something else? If fat is ASSOCIATED with certain disease, is it because of these outside factors. WE DON’T KNOW because the scientists can only get funding for “lifestyle” solutions that do not demonize business industry but include business and industry in the “solution” (a philosophy voiced by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation spokesperson in a Newsweek artcle written by diet guru Dean Ornish).

If in the past three decades, the noses on people’s faces rotated left by 10% on average, we’d be researching the Hell out of anything that might have caused it. If some people’s noses had rotated upside down, right or left, and they couldn’t go outside their houses for fear of drowning in the rain, we’d be asking WHY! We wouldn’t be humiliating the people with nose rotation and further victimizing them.

In addition to putting the scientists in our sites, we need to put the legislators there. THEY need to know that the science of obesity is UNDECIDED, UNCLEAR, and until there are REAL answers, then legislation that further victimizes people who have put up with social pariah status is OUT OF THE QUESTION.

Care to know what I really think? (She descends from her soap box.)

Does Fructose Make You Fatter? - Well - Tara Parker-Pope - Health - New York Times Blog

Another study on the evils of HFCS. I first got turned on to this topic while watching a CNN documentary on why there are so many fat Americans. Basically, the government subsidizes corn, which makes high-fructose corn syrup extremely cheap and abundant, and it’s in a huge number of foods and beverages sold in the U.S. Meanwhile, research is showing more and more that HFCS converts to fat in your body much faster and more efficiently than the less-subsidized and more-expensive sugar that it has replaced. Remember Coke, and then New Coke (with the Dr. J and Dr. C commercials in the early 1980s), and then finally Coca Cola Classic? Know what that was all about? It was about this: HFCS was suddenly cheaper than sugar due to sugar tariffs and corn subsidies, and Coke wanted to cash in, so they changed the formula.

Of course, the government could subsidize, say, broccoli, but it doesn’t.

Does the ubiquity of harmful HFCS in food excuse anybody from personal responsibility for being fat? No, of course not. It is not an excuse. But it is part of the explanation– it’s part of what makes it an unfair fight. And as such, it pisses me off.

Boy, there are so many fat-related articles and blog posts in the New York Times lately, I hardly know where to start.  First there’s this post by NYT blogger Tara Parker-Pope that confirms what most fat people already know: body weight does not accurately indicate overall health. There are lots of healthy fat folks, and lots of unhealthy skinny people. Anybody who defends their own anti-fat bias as based on concerns about fat people’s health should read this, and then shut up.

One of the parts of the post actually comes from the comments underneath, by a reader who calls herself tatiana. Here’s some of what she said:

Fat people are more likely to be unhealthy, and this study doesn’t deny that… I think the most important thing to take from this study is that overweight and obese folks shouldn’t be demoralized by the difficulties to loose [sic] weight. Exercising is good for you even if you stay fat! So is eating healthy. All that yo-yo dieting is caused by demoralization, from feeling being put down by the actual and imagined holier than thou folks who don’t believe that you are trying to be healthier, they see those extra pounds as 100% proof positive that you’re just lazy. That is certainly how we got there, but once you’re fat, it takes more than healthy habits to loose [sic] weight… thin may never be possible for alot [sic] of people without extreme measures (look at all the gastric bypass folks who don’t actually get skinny)… But I’m healthier than I’ve ever been in my life. And its largely because I’m able to ignore the real and imagined skeptics who believe I must be lying, or delusional at best (”I bet she eats cookies when no one’s looking!”). If I listened to them, I would still be eating straight out of the oreo box!

So, this isn’t a call for the overweight and obese to feel vindicated, nor for the thin to dismiss this as junk science. Its a call for all of us to stop obsessing about our appearance and to start focusing on our health.

Right on, tatiana! She touches on two of my biggest pet peeves about the whole discussion of fatness. First, that fat people who really make an effort but don’t get thin are essentially assumed to be liars– definitely NOT a helpful reaction. Second, that it’s all about size, not health. It’s why so many people find a study like this one hard to believe (scroll through the comments and you’ll see people desperately trying to miss TPP’s point), and why so many fat people who have vastly improved their health with diet and exercise are still seen as failures– by society and by themselves– because they didn’t also get thin.

Another of Parker-Pope’s NYT blog posts sends you here to the Illustrated BMI Categories project. It’s a nifty reality check on what people with various BMI scores actually look like. Most of the obese people really do look obese to me (although I really do hate that word), but there are a LOT of people in the “overweight” category that look perfectly normal and even somewhat thin. Who made up these BMI categories, by what authority, and why are we all required to be sorted this way? I would just as soon see healthcare professionals treat us individually on a case by case basis. When you have distance runners and people with pretty advanced yoga skills qualifying as obese according to the BMI categories, I think it’s time to seriously reconsider how valuable that metric really is.

Finally, there’s a post about the age-old discussion of whether diets really work. In the ensuing discussion in the comments section beneath the post, there are the usual partisans: those who believe diets don’t work, and those who think they do work if properly followed, but people don’t stick to them. Personally, I find this whole duality to be a huge red herring. If a diet is designed in such a way that the majority of people who try it won’t stick to it, to me that makes it ineffective. It’s like designing a bike in such a way that most people can’t reach the pedals, and claiming the problem is not with the bike, but the riders. If you are aware of the nature of human beings and you ignore it in designing your product, whose fault is that really when it doesn’t deliver results? Wouldn’t it be more productive to look for a solution that takes human nature into account?

This reminds me of the people who believe in abstinence-only education. If people just didn’t have sex, there would be no unwanted pregnancies or STDs, right? Well, yes, but thousands of years of human history tell us that’s not going to happen. Abstinence-only education fails because it utterly fails to take into account human nature in the form of human frailty, but also human nature in terms of hard-wired endrocrinologically-based drives that are the key to the continued existence of the human species. In one case, sex, and in the other, hunger, without which none of us would be here because our parents would have either starved to death, not created any offspring, or both.

Among the comments at the bottom of the post, I found this gem, posted by Jason Infeld, MD:

There is no question that diets are often ineffective, but that still does not explain why obesity rates have increased tremendously in the past 3 decades. Our genetic makeup has not changed? I assume our “will power” hasn’t changed. There is clearly some environmental factor in our diets that makes up prone to fat accumulation. It is the job of obesity researchers to clarify what this is. This diet study proves in my mind that it is clearly not saturated fat. We have been preached to for 25 years that if we all lowered our fat intake we would be thinner, our cholesterol would be lower, and we wouldn’t get heart disease. This study strongly suggests that this is not true.

What the blame-the-diets AND the blame-the-fatties camps are both distracting us all from is the possibility that there are more dangerous and powerful external forces at work that are un-leveling the playing field. Hormones, antibiotics, and other chemicals in the food…. the substitution of high-fructose corn syrup for sugar in sodas and other sweet things, agricultural chemicals that are hormone mimics and wind up in the water supply… side effects of otherwise beneficial medications, including what they do to our gut flora… When you consider that girls are getting their periods at younger and younger ages, it’s hard not to wonder what else the chemicals we live with are doing to us that is changing the nature of our bodes. Could there be something among them that is making the battle to lose weight less of a fair fight? Doesn’t it make sense at least to check?