Posts by Danielle
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It's not their fault if then society takes that information and turns it into the shaming of men and women who happen to be overweight.
I'm not sure that it's true that these people exist in some sort of magical Objectivity Vacuum outside society, though, Giovanni. For a long time, medical studies were done on men only, because women were 'too complicated' or 'not important enough' or whatever to study as part of clinical trials. This continued until well into the 1980s. The first study of estrogen as a preventative measure for heart disease was done solely on men. Isn't that nutty? And that's just one example of the ways in which social biases can be reflected in medical research.
I'm not a denialist about things like type two diabetes by any means, although I do question how cureable Teh Fat is once it's attached to you, and whether 'curing fat' is truly what we need to be doing. Even the all-important medical journals are pretty iffy on the efficacy of longterm (greater than two years) weight loss. (See American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, Vol. 74 (5): 579-584, November 2001; Am Psychol. 2007, 62(3):220-33; Br J Gen Pract. 2008 Feb;58(547):112-7; etc. There's also a fun little article in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association in 2004 which basically says that women who've spent a lot of time dieting are more likely to have fucked up immune systems. Awesome.)
I understand Jackie's frustration with this issue. There's a lot of stuff going on here, and it's all about gender and bodies and medicine and science and self-hatred and health and shame and food and big business. It's hard to unravel and it's kind of a mess. I just think saying 'OMG we're in an epidemic FATTIES STOP EATING CHIPS!' is what we're getting, most of the time, from a lot of people (including some scientists), and it's not really helping anyone.
Which was a longwinded way to say something kinda milquetoast. :)
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Dyan, you're arguing against a point I'm not making by saying something with which I do not disagree. Since JFS is all about using peer reviewed studies from credible medical journals, and I'm actually talking about poor reporting of those studies. So I'm not entirely sure where we go from here. :)
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Gah. Post got eaten, which is probably just as well as it was even more ranty.
The most relevant markers are: hip to waist ratio, resting pulse rate, blood pressure, and relevant bloods (glucose tolerance, LDL to HDL, serum cholesterol etc).
So health is not mostly about being fat at all? Why are they measuring those little kids' BMIs then?
I also think your characterisation of Junk Food Science is pretty unfair - that's not a denialist position she's taking, but rather a 'hey media, perhaps you could read the peer-reviewed studies you're writing press releases from! They do not say what you think they say!' Which is something we seem to have been discussing a lot here recently...
(The blog is also about lots and lots of other 'media hysteria' about health, not just Teh Fatties. I particularly like the 'pregnant women eat this! But don't eat that! And never drink this! Or your baby will have three heads!' ones.)
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ended up somewhat randomly in this hotel in Damascus
Holy crap. In a good way.
I've stayed in a motel in a small Louisiana town with plastic mattress covers. No matter how little you moved, the bed squeaked all night, waking you up. Frankly, I think most of their customers were the 'hourly special' kind...
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Maybe he's been watching the cricket?
Ah! That's probably it.
I find the personal trivia of foolish people of no interest
Heh. I am so totally the opposite. (We're like matter and anti-matter! If we were ever in the same room, would the universe implode?)
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Jeez Tom, did we lose the Rugby World Cup again or something?
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Ben: your anecdote about your Fatty Boomsticks friend with an eating disorder? Is not actual data.
Dyan:
most parents of obese children do not see their child as overweight, much less obese
Oh, how I wish everyone would regularly read Junk Food Science. Yes, a diet consisting solely of freedom fries and Dr Pepper is bad. But the chunkiness of kiddies is not the actual problem - measuring the BMI of children is just weird. They're all growing in fits and starts. *Health* is the problem. Varied healthy diet and exercise should be the issue we're concentrating on, not paranoia about thunder thighs.
(Not that I think you think that, Dyan. That was just a jumping-off point for one of my rants. :))
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So does every other designer
I don't actually think that's true. Most middle- to high-end designers don't go above a snug 14 (which is the average dress size for a New Zealand woman). If the garment is made of a stretchy fabric and you're on the borderline you might be able to squeeze into it, but otherwise fuggedaboudit.
(The designers at Moa also do a range for rounder folk, which I appreciate. Some of their clothes actually go over my boobs, which is... unusual.)
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Annah S
I'll give propers to Stretton for having a Range for the Squat.
(Although most of her clothes - in any size - are a little frou-frou for my taste. Still, some of the more low-key stuff rewards a search through the racks.)
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I thought we lacked the requisite geekery, but now that I count: two desktops, two laptops, one iPhone, one occasional work laptop which comes to visit, one PS3, one Wii. Two people, one dog, one cat.
(I suppose the lack of geekery is our non-Apple-ism, as all the computers are PCs running Vista and nothing bad has ever happened. But perhaps we aren't exercising their full blue-screen-of-death potential...)