obesity
zooillogix | January 2, 2008Apparently obesity isn't just for American's anymore... make that humans in general. First we have George, the greedy little pig as old British women would call him. This hedgehog was delivered to the Wildlife Aid centre in Leatherhead, England five times heavier than his natural weight. At 5lbs, George is dangerously obese and a testament to the fattening properties of garden insects, fruits and mushrooms.
Remind anyone else of this?
More of a trailer park tiggywinkle if you ask me.
Next we have Peaches, the fat baby wombat, from Tomerong, north of Sydney. In this series of caught-in-the-…
denialism | December 26, 2007Why the Washington Post decided to devote space to libertarian crankery from the Pacific Research Institute, I'll never know, but today's op-ed from Sally Pipes on the evils of governmental interference in diet is a bit much.
The way I see it, obesity cranks recycle 3 arguments over and over. It usually goes: (1) BMIs don't fit everyone (2) the stupid government has arbitrarily changed the definition of overweight to make more people fat and (3) exercise is all that matters anyway and overweight doesn't hurt you.
First, we have BMI's are inaccurate:
The standard metric for this measurement…
denialism | December 21, 2007Orac alerted me, based on my recent obesity writings, of a new crank obesity attack on science.
This latest is in the form of a rebuttal to Morgan Spurlock's excellent film Supersize me. Comedian Tom Naughton, who has all the charisma of a wet sponge, is making his own documentary Fathead: You've been fed a load of bologna. Here's the trailer:
Aside from the shoddy production, noncharismatic host, and general crankery, I guess it's not so bad. But I am growing concerned about the continual assault on what little good nutritional data is out there, and the misleading tactics of those…
denialism | December 20, 2007Recently, it seems there has been a backlash against medicine and the current knowledge of the relationship between diet, weight and overall health. I don't actually believe this is directly the fault of scientists or doctors, who react to the trashy mainstream reporting of science with little more than the occasional raised eyebrow. However, many people in response to all these silly health pronouncements, which seemingly come from on high but really are from press coverage of often minor reports in the medical literature, have lost their trust in what science has to offer as a solution to…
denialism | November 9, 2007Multiple news sources have been covering this recent article in JAMA (1) which provides epidemiological evidence that being overweight (but not obese) may decrease the risk of some illnesses, while not increasing one's overall mortality from cardiovascular disease.
Given that we've talked about overweight and obesity recently on the blog, I think it's worthwhile to go over these findings in context, and discuss what this paper, and related ones in the literature, actually mean in terms of our health.
Sorry, the news is not all good, you don't want to start putting on the pounds, and the…
denialism | October 11, 2007I will never forget the very first patient history I ever took. Part of medical school training is they send you onto the wards to gather patient histories and physicals so you learn to gather information effectively as a clinician. My first patient history was on a woman about 35 years old on the orthopedics ward, who was a triple-amputee. She had her legs removed below the thigh, and one arm amputated below the elbow. The cause was imminently preventable. She had type II diabetes that was poorly controlled. She was obese, weighing about 180 lbs despite the removal of large parts of…