Maggie's Farm

Windy obsessively peddles that nonsense here all the time, Fert. It's a thing.

Bloody hell.

You people really believe these myths of yours, don't you?

The original piece is incoherent, as commonly is this subject in this place. Sadly, there's nothing such thinking can be led to, whether statistically, medically, or logically, that's penetrated its internal myths or corrected the double think. I've tried.

"A third of Americans are obese"? Really? I don't think so but I do not see very many obese people in my life.

Whether X ratio of Americans are obese isn't the point. The point is that some percentage of Standard Diet-eaters in the west are obese and they are historically atypical and profoundly unhealthy, and that that dietary problem then extends to disease.

Separating the symptoms as if they were distinct is no more rational than separating their causes. Like diabetes, cancer, and heart disease - all at higher levels than in the past or elsewhere in the world where diets are not the standard western diet and had already been connected by research to vastly different medical cohorts and ratios - are both symptomatic of and the cause of underlying and preventable problems. Finding those problems has already been done and the research is absolutely rife.

That data does not make the terminal logical mistake of also separating diet from obesity, and hence from disease.

I could think that a third might be fat, though, aka "overweight." Being overweight is a bad idea because it slows you down, damages your joints, and plays a role in some diseases such as breast cancer and heart disease.


Ergo, at the least obesity causes serious disease but, somehow, the cause of obesity is undiscussed and undisclosed.

I do not view being overweight or obese as a disease.

But you view it as causative of disease.

They are physical "conditions."

Disease is also a physical condition and if obesity uniquely causes it, then it becomes a symptom of obesity. Obesity is then a pathology.

All behavior has physiological consequences and correlates, which does not make them diseases. We over-pathologize things these days in an effort to let people off the hook for their behavior or, sometimes, in search of an insurance code.

Here starts the double think: Obesity causes disease but obesity is merely the extension of a cultural affect, goes the thinking, notwithstanding the pathology of its resultant diseases. We "over-pathologize" what becomes the pathology of disease-by-obesity but obesity is abstract and arbitrary and looking "to let people off the hook" about it somehow interrupts that relationship.

In my view, if you do not mind being fat, that's fine. Your choice as long as you accept the consequences.

Fair enough. But in sum, this all says that the obesity-disease correlate is a choice we shouldn't pathologize as the pathology it becomes, and while it can kill you by its effects - by the diseases obesity causes that somehow exonerate it itself as a disease - those shared roots shall go beyond the scope of such an analysis. There's a weak cause-and-effect without a cause.

Since we've diagnosed obesity as a cultural affectation without known cause - except overeating and in a moment, evil King Carbs - disease admitted as stemming from it does not itself condemn it although it does roundly implicate carbs. In other words, lifestyle is exempt except when it's not exempt. Consciousness of obesity cannot invoke the cause of obesity save for an undefined cultural effect and presumably, a limited, narrow, and undeveloped personal choice.

And this is not "letting people off the hook"?

I'll briefly discuss two physiological correlates of overweight and obesity. First, satiety. A sense of satiety is managed by chemical signals from the gut to the brain. The signals are slow to inform you that "That's sufficient." Thus fast eaters do not get the memo in time to stop. Furthermore, some people have weak signaling, or just learn to ignore the signals. Heavy-duty eaters also have expanded stomachs which are less-readily satisfied and always seem to have room for more. Recreational eating is what I call that.

This "physiologically-correlated" salad simply avoids the connection between any of the areas related to health vis a vis obesity, and therefore to disease. In fact, "heavy eaters" in this odd matrix are spontaneous creations, who, like "slow signalers", may/can have no discernable relationship to weight, obesity, and ultimately the diseases Bliss has already tied to them. Somehow, there is a physical relationship between diet and weight and therefore disease that may establish no (known, discussed, causative) relationship between diet and disease, whether via weight or not.

Here choice is blurred together with the most peripheral take on obesity, or therefore to the serious disease said to stem from it, but never let it be said that, with one undeveloped exception, there is some underlying connection - despite mountains of evidence - (unless presumably it's the "genetics" canard. Genetics, of course, that may never be tied to culture or diet either, despite these elements of society all being implicitly tied together over all time. In fact, see the Adkins/Taubes obsession and fad that implicitly and for all time ties all of them together.)

This particular double think applies accidental, uncorrelated, assumed, and/or spontaneous conditions but logically disconnects this implied "impulse control" quasi-pathology from the previous human choice-centered tacit lifestyle "physical condition" that ultimately causes the obesity said to cause disease, even if both are symptomatic of poor health rooted elsewhere, in a taboo subject that, ironically, actually is about choice, that being diet.

I think many people seem to ignore or misinterpret all sorts of physiologic signs and signals. Also, hedonism is, by definition, fun.

And I agree that many people actually do ignore or misinterpret all sorts of physiologic signs and signals, as well as causes and symptoms; pathologies and diseases. Because lifestyle is, by definition, also confirmation bias.

My second physiologic correlate for today concerns insulin. An excess of carbs (more than you need to stay alive that day) gradually causes "insulin resistance." That is not diabetes, but just an adaptation to the amount of carbs a person consumes.

And again, by the copious data on nutrition and the body, this is just flat wrong, and by the omissive bias that impairs this whole opinion.