Your genes are no excuse for being fat

The Amish study involved 704 people; blood samples determined which of those had a variation in the FTO gene linked to obesity. Among those with the variant, those who got about three or four hours of moderate physical activity a day weighed up to about 15 pounds less on average than the least active people.

So you’re saying that all I have to do to have my doctor tell me to lose 35 lbs instead of 50 lbs is to exercise for a ridiculously unrealistic amount of time each day?

How about a slightly more accurate headline: exercising as much as 3-4 hours per day has very little effect on your weight.

Saturated fat may not be so bad for you, after all

In this last test, the A.H.A. diet was about 30 percent calories from fat, less than 10 percent calories from saturated fat; the low-carb diet was almost 40 percent calories from fat, around 12.5 percent saturated fat. In this particular trial, as in all of them so far, the high-saturated-fat diet (low-carb or Atkins-like) resulted in the best improvement in cholesterol profile — total cholesterol/H.D.L. In this Israeli trial, the high-saturated-fat diet reduced L.D.L. at least as well as the did the A.H.A. relatively low-fat diet, the fundamental purpose of which is to lower L.D.L. by reducing the saturated fat content.

So here’s the simple question and the point: how can saturated fat be bad for us if a high saturated fat diet lowers L.D.L. at least as well as a diet that has 20 to 25 percent less saturated fat?

Interesting. And of particular interest to me because my cholesterol is a bit high. I’m not going to run off and eat lots of saturated fat just yet, but more studies that come out on this are something to keep an eye on.

Having Fat Friends Makes You Fat

Fat friends ‘can boost your size’

Where to start on this?

They suggest choices about appearance – on which decisions such as job offers or being deemed attracted – are based are determined by the choices others around you make.

So, if people around you are fat, it is permissible for you to be fat too.

I’m going to start out with my God what is wrong with your grammar?

They suggest choices about appearance – on which decisions such as job offers or being deemed attractive are based – are determined by the choices others around you make.

There we go.

Now let’s start looking at all the disturbing things in those two sentences. First, the assumption that people choose to be fat. Second, the implication that OH MY GOD IF YOU HANG OUT WITH FAT FRIENDS YOU WILL START BEING DEEMED UNATTRACTIVE AND NOT GET JOB OFFERS! Why is fat the problem, then, and not society’s prejudice against fat people?

And how about looking at other factors at work here? If you’re going to acknowledge that on the whole, poor people are fatter than rich people, maybe who you hang out with (and what job opportunities you have, and whether people deem you “attractive”) is related to social class. Or maybe fat people choose to hang out with other fat people because it makes them feel more comfortable. Or maybe–God forbid–naturally fat people who have forced themselves to be skinny hang out with fat people and then become more confident and better able to accept their bodies as they are.

“If you are surrounded by people, whether that’s friends or within the family home, who are overweight, you are sharing the same environment where there is likely to be an abundance of the wrong kind of foods.”

But no, it’s all about “good” and “bad” food.

Save the economy; eat less!

Or not, as Tari Follett writes over at Shapely Prose. Go read it.

Also, I was surprised to find out that Americans eat 3770 calories a day, which seems incredibly high. So I did a bit of looking around and, as I suspected, the figure is artificially high because it includes wasted food (which accounts for up to 50% of food in the U.S.–now that is scary and depressing), as well animal feed and industrial uses (such as ethanol). Aside from encouraging Americans to eat less meat and more local food–which, as Tari points out, is not always a viable option–perhaps Ms. Brahic should have suggested that Americans stop purchasing more food than they eat.

Why do we encourage women to do this to their bodies?

Size six Ontario woman dies after liposuction.

Thirty-two-year-old Krista Stryland, a successful Toronto real estate agent and mother, went to a private clinic for liposuction, apparently to remove fat following the birth of her three-year-old son.

Hours later, court documents allege, she lay in a recovery room for 30 minutes without vital signs after a procedure that drained fat from 23 incisions in six different parts of her body.

She was pronounced dead in hospital on Sept. 20, 2007. Her sister says she was a size 6. She says the doctor should have told her that she did not need liposuction.