Okay, just how many times can the medical establishment be astounded to learn YET AGAIN that the fat on your ass and your health are two separate things? At this point it’s like researchers are letting a ball drop out of their hand and are still amazed it falls down. Who would have thunk it?
Another big, fat (har) study has come out showing that “Even for the severely obese — those with a body mass index above 35 — exercising for about 2.5 hours a week at moderate intensity or for 75 minutes at vigorous levels puts average life expectancy a notch above that of a normal-weight person who is sedentary”. Yes, another study that points out that weight is not as important as exercise. It’s almost as if our physicians are products of our culture and are so invested with the concept that fat = death that they cannot really believe the evidence to the contrary!
It gets even MORE shocking vis-à-vis health & fat! It turns out that another study found (brace yourself) that FAT PEOPLE LIVE LONGER even if they are as sedentary as normal weight people! You know, just like those OTHER studies had already shown! But of course they are still calling it the “obesity paradox”, even though it is NOT a paradox at all because it is exactly what the fokking EVIDENCE would predict!
Just how many times will this need to be proven before it sinks in that fat does not axiomatically represent illness? Forever, that’s how long it will keep being re-discovered, because in Western culture thin = beauty and beauty = heath and thus fat cannot be simultaneously “ugly” and “healthy” so it MUST be unhealthy! QED! Doctors have absorbed as much of this bullshit as any of us, and it effects their thinking and analysis. Because doctors, as a group, are biased against the obese they cannot understand why the researched reality does NOT match the perceived “reality” of unhealthy fat.
In spite of these repeated “discoveries” the national media continues to feed into the myth that fat people are walking masses of ill-health dragging down the country with our health care needs, in spite of the fact that it is POVERTY that kills people sooner. But let’s not address that pesky systemic inequality, okay? Not when poor people are more likely to be corpulent and we can blame the fat, not the poverty, for their early deaths.
Pardon me while I go stomp around and snarl about the twin evils of income inequality and fat-hate bigotry for a while.