7/4/2023 0 Comments Podcaster meaningMCCAMMON: I want to ask you both about something. So despite the sort of best intentions behind that redefinition, it has unfortunately produced the opposite. It has happened amongst the general public in the United States that we are seeing, you know, dramatically rising levels of anti-fat bias. That has happened amongst health care providers. Paradoxically, and unfortunately, what we have seen in the years since that redefinition is a skyrocketing of bias against fat people. I think that was the intention of this person at the CDC. It's something that requires treatment, not punishment, not scorn. MCCAMMON: I mean, isn't the goal of calling something a disease often to be more compassionate? I mean, we see this with the drug war - right? - to look at addiction as a disease, which implies it's not something that somebody's fault, necessarily. That's not to say that those products haven't worked for some folks and haven't produced weight loss for some folks, but it is to say that that wasn't a neutral medical decision that was uninfluenced by capital, right? Like any other industry - right? - in the diet industry and in the health care industry, profit motives are still at play. The challenge is, as he did that, a bunch of drug companies started to back his efforts because if more people were defined as fat, they would have more customers for their weight loss drugs and surgery. And he thought that redefining fatness as a disease would lead folks to understand that it's much more complicated than just this sort of like hard driving kind of personal responsibility narrative that we get. It was just, we're going to call the fattest 15% of us overweight.Įssentially, what happened here is that there was a public health person at the CDC who felt really passionately that our conversations about weight and weight loss were woefully over-simplistic. That wasn't attached to their specific health outcomes that happen at that point. was that the fattest 15% of us should be considered overweight. The first BMI sort of public policy definition of overweight in the U.S. GORDON: I mean, I think in order to talk about, quote-unquote, "obesity as a disease," you've got to talk about the BMI, which I think we think of now as a hard and fast measure and an objective measure of size and health. Can you just give us a nutshell version of how this happened? MCCAMMON: You spend an episode looking at how obesity became defined not just as a risk factor for certain diseases, but eventually as a disease in and of itself. So the question is, why are we still putting weight at the center of our understanding about health when there's actually much more sophisticated ways to help people be healthy and we're not really doing those? And there is a very strong association, but there's very strong associations of all kinds of things with health outcomes. There's all these other health disparities that sort of we accept as correlations.Īnd yet, weirdly, when it comes to obesity, it's like, oh, no, no, we know that the obesity is causing this, right? Like, people have kind of jumped to this causal explanation. And, like, I think it's, like, Boulder, Colo., or something, they live until they're 85. The poorest, most marginalized counties in America, people live to about 65. The life expectancy in various counties in America can be up to 20 years of difference. We know that poverty has a devastating effect on people's health. GORDON: Yeah, there's a very clear correlation between weight and bad health outcomes, but weight is not the only thing that's correlated with health. MCCAMMON: I spoke with Aubrey Gordon and Michael Hobbes the other day, and we started by talking about the medical consensus that obesity can lead to health problems. GORDON: Felt worth having a conversation about, like, OK, well, what's actually the science behind this? What are the motives of the people who are presenting all of these fad diets, all of these wellness trends? Like, what's the story behind it? That other health and fitness podcasts weren't necessarily asking And she says when they first started, they wanted to focus on big questions. She co-hosts the podcast "Maintenance Phase" with journalist Michael Hobbes. are continuing to rise?ĪUBREY GORDON: It's an incredibly complex issue that we don't actually have answers for, but we continue to sort of use the rising rates of fatness in our culture as a cudgel to get folks to lose weight. So why, despite all of that, are obesity rates in the U.S. Americans also spend billions of dollars on weight loss products. Every year, millions of Americans go on a diet.
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