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An open letter to the anti-fat brigade: enough is enough

By Michael Gard - posted Tuesday, 27 February 2007


Have you ever noticed how often nutritionists change their mind? One day high fibre diets help prevent bowel cancer, the next day they increase cancer risk. Then the roulette wheel spins again. Voila! Dietary fat is back in the good books after once being blamed for everything from heart disease to snoring. Ditto dairy foods, bread, pasta, alcohol, water, green food, yellow food, you name it.

If the word “science” is stretched to breaking point with nutrition, the study of exercise and health blows it to pieces. Should we exercise every day or three times a week, at high or low intensities, for a short or long time, in teams or by yourself? On all of these questions scientists are no closer to agreement than they were 100 years ago.

One reason for the confusion is that the people doing the research are, in many respects, normal. Like many of us, when they think of “health” they see images of elite athletes and supermodels, while exhibiting more than a tinge of middle-class self restraint when it comes to food.

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The fact that elite athletes and supermodels are neither healthier nor live longer than other people has been an ongoing source of disappointment to the anti-fat brigade. Their research also tells them that starting an exercise program will either make a minuscule difference to your body weight or none at all. But don’t expect them to admit this in public.

Faced with the persistent refusal of Western populations to heed their dubious advice, nutritionists, exercise scientists and now, it seems, the medical profession have invented the “obesity epidemic”.

Worse still, our governments, eager to be seen to be doing something, have joined the anti-fat brigade and are now throwing perfectly good tax-payers money at the issue. And as with most moral-panics, it is our children who seem destined to bear the brunt of adult anxieties. This is sad and unnecessary.

The statistics currently being thrown around regarding childhood overweight and obesity are patently alarmist.

Studies tracking childhood obesity levels over time around the world are quite rare and generally equivocal. There are many different ways to measure obesity among children and - surprise, surprise - some methods produce high levels of childhood obesity and some don’t.

As the health journalist Ray Moynihan recently pointed out in the British Medical Journal, there are many interest groups, including some of the world’s leading obesity scientists, who want to change the definition of childhood obesity in order to make it as easy as possible for children to be classified as obese.

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If they have their way childhood obesity “rates” will sky rocket overnight, just as they did the last time they shifted the goal posts in the 1990s. And all of this will have been done despite there being no study in the history of science showing that childhood obesity causes you to die young.

A few years ago I attended a conference where I listened to a young Australian researcher talking about her research into children’s weight. To the horror of her research supervisor who was sitting close by, she candidly admitted to feeling sorry for the “normal” looking children whom she was forced to classify as overweight. In other words, the kids didn’t look overweight, but the “science” said they were.

Next time you take your kids to school, watch the other children as they arrive. If the scientists are correct, between two and three out of every five children should be so overweight as to endanger their health. This is self-evident nonsense.

But it doesn’t end there. We are also being told that children are doing less exercise than in years gone by, probably because of increased television, video and computer games usage. The evidence that children are doing less exercise is non-existent. In fact, some researchers concede that children are more, not less, physically active these days. The truth is we don’t really know.

As for television and video games, the research studies are now piling up and they all say pretty much the same thing: TV and computers seem to have nothing to do with how much physical activity children do. In fact, some studies have found that children who watch the most television and play the most computer games are also the most active. The idea that technology causes childhood obesity by reducing physical activity is as dead as a dodo.

Part of the problem is that the current “obesity epidemic” is a pseudo-problem with no obvious cause. There is no scientific evidence that we are less active than in the past and there is plenty of evidence that, if anything, we are eating more of the food that nutritionists say we should.

What’s worse (or better, depending on your point of view), some health research suggests that fatter might be healthier than skinnier, particularly for the over 55s. What’s more, for obesity to affect your health, you have to be really fat. Although increasing, the number of us who are really fat is low.

Although much of this runs counter to a lot of what we hear about obesity, the evidence is compelling. In recent years both the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare and New South Wales Health have produced lengthy reports showing that Australians are living longer, healthier lives. These improvements have been particularly rapid in the last couple of decades when obesity rates have been rising.

This is not to say that some diseases are not increasing; some certainly are. But this is normal. It is a painful truth that, throughout history, our victories over some diseases are replaced by increasing incidences of others. What these reports show is that if, as we are told over and over again, we are the verge of an obesity-led health catastrophe, the evidence is very well hidden.

There are two other inconvenient “facts” which the anti-fat brigade are keeping quiet about. First, although females tend to do less physical activity than males, males are apparently more overweight. Second, even though wealthier people own more of the dreaded “household labour saving devices” which health professionals say are contributing to obesity, they are much less likely to be overweight than the less wealthy. If ever there was an issue about which people should be sceptical of the pronouncements of “experts”, this is it.

There have been a number of half-hearted attempts by Australian governments in the past to promote physical activity and “healthy” eating (whatever “healthy” happened to mean at the time). Each has had little if any measurable impact and usually involved forcing school students to do boring, repetitive physical activity and eat dull food. You may think I’m joking when I say that there are now Australian schools which have banned icing on birthday cakes and have mandated what food children can bring to school, but I’m not. I wish I was.

In so many ways, we have turned childhood into an apprenticeship for adulthood. The current panic about obesity will result in more children worrying needlessly about their weight and exercising in the mistaken belief that their health depends on it, just like their parents. And the anti-fat brigade will have succeeded in draining one more drop of fun out of life.

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About the Author

Michael Gard is a senior lecturer in dance, physical and health education at Charles Sturt University's Bathurst campus. He is the author of two books, The Obesity Epidemic: Science, Morality and Ideology (with Jan Wright) and Men Who Dance: Aesthetics, Athletics and the Art of Masculinity.

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