It’s odd that his reaction to the idea that shorter, fatter people are likely to be paid less is not “we need to end size discrimination” but “we need to make people taller and thinner.” And the bit about smaller lungs…I finally decided, at the end of the article, that it was not satire. But I’m still not sure.
His proposal was actually quite fat/short-friendly – encourage eating better, not by just fat/short people, but by all people – especially in early childhood; and not with an individual goal of losing weight, but rather an overall goal of improving health outcomes. I think his whole point in bringing up shortness is to spotlight the evidence that targeting weight in adults is similarly impossible – “Controlling our country’s height may be just as plausible — or implausible — as controlling its weight.”
Obesity is associated with a higher risk of cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular disease and other problems. Know what else is associated with a higher risk of cancer, heart disease, and other problems, Mr. Obama? SMOKING. Smokers get sick more than non-smokers, causing corporations billions in lost time. Are you planning on quitting anytime soon? — (I remember reading somewhere that tall people are generally at a higher risk for cancer. The author of the piece half-jokingly encouraged his readers to consider a shorter mate when looking for that special someone. Since I’m 5’0″ it made me chuckle.)
Maybe Obama could’ve done something to combat obesity when he was the Senator for Illinois by taking a bold, courageous stand against corn subsidies, which inject high fructose corn syrup into everything we eat.
Perhaps one of the silliest things I’ve ever read! I’m sure *statistically* there’s a correlation between shortness and things like heart disease… but there’s also a large correlation between average height and ethnicity, or height and gender. And, historically, the trend has been towards americans getting taller (I recently read an article that said the average american woman in 1950 had a shoe size of 5, and now that’s more like 7) I also like Tom Foolery’s comment — the Senator of Illinois *could* have had a whole lot of impact by trying to control HFCS….
Well…that was an exercise in poor inference and a lack of understanding of contaminating variables. I really don’t get this “lets try to work out how to make people cost less money live longer by looking at them” bullshit thats become so popular. Why is it that people think the weight (or height, or smoking status…) of others is their business? I know that the stated reason is always some vague public health argument, but if public health was really the interest we’d be looking at the underlying causes of obesity related problems rather than the shapes of people we find offensive. I’m 6’1″, 275 pounds, I drink when I damn well please, and I cook my food with butter (and sometimes ghee). How on earth does anyone think thats anyone’s business but my own? Also, am I the only one who is starting to get really creeped out about the fact that every time a discussion about health care happens nationally we start to hear pundits talk about how much money us fatties cost by being diabetic and having heart attacks and scaring children with our rolls?
I’m sure *statistically* there’s a correlation between shortness and things like heart disease… but there’s also a large correlation between average height and ethnicity, or height and gender I think a more telling potential variable is SES. People who eat poorly as children tend to end up shorter, and the people who tend to eat poorly in most societies are the people who aren’t able to afford good enough nutrition. Seems to me that same group would be the people with the least access to medical care, the least access to future good nutrition, and the least likelihood of moving up the SES ladder. When we say “short people will die earlier and consume a lot of health care in the process” and “fat people cost too much because of their heart attacks and diabetes” what we really mean is “poor people cost too much money to keep alive.”
Know what else is associated with a higher risk of cancer, heart disease, and other problems, Mr. Obama? SMOKING. Smokers get sick more than non-smokers, causing corporations billions in lost time. Are you planning on quitting anytime soon? Um, he did already. And in what way does obesity become less of a risk just because something else, smoking, is? And are you seriously claiming the government has not done enough to warn the public about the health dangers of smoking the last 40 years??
Um, he did already. And in what way does obesity become less of a risk just because something else, smoking, is? And are you seriously claiming the government has not done enough to warn the public about the health dangers of smoking the last 40 years?? I’m more than willing to seriously claim that if anyone needs to be told about the dangers of either the chances of the warning having any effect upon them approaches zero. People make different analyses of risks and benefits no matter how strongly some busybody who thinks their view of the way things ought to be is ascendent brays to the contrary. Also, lets not talk about obesity as if it is either a clear and unambiguous construct or as if it has clear dangers. Morbid obesity certainly has some ramifications for health, but what counts as morbidly obese is radically different for different people of different builds and genetic endowments. Perhaps more importantly, a lot of people who end up morbidly obese are doing the best they can. For most people being “fat” isn’t a matter of being lazy or not being able to put down the twinkies. Its about a medical issue, or not having the time and energy to hit the gym after a 10 hour day and making dinner for the kids, or eating the what you can with the time and money you have available, or trading you health for a little bit of comfort in a world that gives you next to none. I don’t think you’re going to find many people interested in making the kinds of social changes required to fix those very basic problems, so all talking about obesity does is shame fat people for being a drain on the system and encourage some dim-witted congressman with a lobbyist’s check in his back pocket and a little bit of ambition to pass a law which makes life harder for poor people so he can tell voters that he did something to fight obesity and tell the people who own his ass that he protected their interests by making it harder for poor people to buy shit that they don’t sell.
I read it as rvman said in comment #2: he’s making the point that just like trying to make adults taller won’t work, trying to make adults lose weight and keep it off probably won’t work in most cases. However, he says, there are health problems that shortness can be an indicator for, just as there are health problems that heaviness can be an indicator for, and some of those health problems can be addressed by making better food options more accessible (and this is particularly effective for kids, less so for adults). I don’t think he’s claiming that correlation = causation (i.e. that being fat makes you sick or that being short makes you sick).
Erm, yeah, rvman & JessSnark have got it right: the article was actually saying that targeting individuals who are overweight makes about as much sense as targeting individuals who are short. They also make the valid point that health issues are social issues and not about personal morality. I think we could do with more articles along these lines.
Chill, Jill. I’m the same height, and I feel like this could apply to any number of things. I mean, what about those diseases that are usually attuned to a certain ethnic group? Like Huntington’s for white people, or Tay Sachs for Jewish people? (Er, this is all from 9th grade biology, for any incorrectness on my part.) Maybe if we eliminated them from the health care system, we would save even more? I mean, since we can’t change these things, this argument feels extremely arbitrary. And kind of offensive. What about extremely tall people? Or underweight people? Have you done research on THAT, Engber? Anything outside the bell curve would probably have an effect on the health care system.
As this is a feminist site, it’s worth noticing that, in the article, he ignores the way that discrimination against fat people is gendered (as is discrimination against short people–something you–Jill–should notice but don’t!). Daniel Engber writes: In the labor market, the effects of height and weight tend to run in parallel. A 2004 study by John Cawley of Cornell University found that severely obese white women… Likewise, a decrease in a man’s height…” Yeah, that’s really parallel all right! Parallel in an asymmetric sort of way. Further, Engber presents a hypothetical ideal world when he writes: “If everyone came from a perfect home, the average height across the population would be a function of our genes alone. (There would still be tall people and short people, but we would all have grown as much as we possibly could.)” He allows for no such world in which, all things being perfect, there were (gasp!) still fat and thin people living side by side. Instead, he imagines a hypothetical ideal world in which, “we could somehow slenderize the fattest people in America all at once…” He cannot get past his own fatphobia to dig into what he’s saying and notice the conflation of health, beauty standards, and gender, nor can he see that he’s resting many of his assumptions about deathfat (aka “morbid obesity”) on some rather shaky ground–again, without looking at the social context in which health recommendations are made. I’m glad that he manages to consistently use the phrase “associated with” rather than, as with many science articles, “caused by,” but I admire him far less for his complete inability to imagine that there are fat healthy people and thin unhealthy people. And in the context of Feministe, I can’t help but wonder how this post fits into No Fat Talk week, given that you’ve issued no guidelines on replies and, already, we have people writing in to say that fatness=death while framing fatness as something to fight.
Who here left a comment saying that fatness = death? I just re-read the comments and didn’t see anything like that.
Well, at 4’11” with a disability that severely limits my mobility leading to weight gain (technically, I’m overweight, but not obese, although who knows what will happen if things get worse and my mobility is restricted further) I guess I should just go put a bullet in my head and get it over with. Save everyone some time and frustration. In other news, I’m really, really fucking sick of this “war on (whatever)” thing. I could really do without the militarization of fucking everything. Take note, journalists! If you don’t knock it off, I’ll stop reading! That’ll show ’em.