Farseer Lolotea said:
Marowit said:
On the other hand I just find it so irresponsible of them - there are so many co-morbidities that go along with being obese that our health care system is literally splintering under the weight of their problems, all puns intended.
So. As a future doctor, what do you say to the studies [http://www.nutritionj.com/content/10/1/9] put forth by Bacon, et al.?
I'll read through the article and let you know - my first criticism is it's a review article...those aren't generally the best places to get real data.
2nd is that I'm not encouraging Dieting, as paradoxical as that sounds. I'm talking about not eating a cheese burger from McDs, a 64oz Coke, and fries. As a reference, I'm a med student, and I eat ~4,000cals/day. So I'm pretty sedentary for 8-10hrs a day, but I do workout for 90-120mins most days, and clock in at 6foot/185lbs.
If you eat a salad, a piece of chicken/pork/turkey/red meat you cook yourself, some veggies, and a glass of milk/beer/wine/water, whatever is considered a healthy diet, and are still "obese," then I have no problems with that, and research I've read indicates that you won't either.
I think BMI's are a load of crap.
I know I was overweight most of my H.S./College career due to being an athlete, and am still on the boarder of that BMI designation due to residual-muscle.
That being said, the vast, vaaaaaaaaaaaaast, majority of obese people in the US are not overweight/obese due to those reasons above (natural weight, muscle mass, falsely-imposed-societal-norms)...they are overweight/obese due to eating shit, and mostly high sugar diets, which are starting to look like they are even worse for you than high-fat diets...everything in moderation ppl! That brings up a whole other discussion about the transition from a high-fat, but low volume, diet to a high-volume, low fat (but high sugar) diet which transitioned in around 1980-blah, but I digress...
The dangerous things about studies, similar to the one you linked above, is people then use them as a rational for eating crap. 'Oh, I just am a larger person, so I'm going to eat a 5500Kcal dinner...' No, you sat at a computer most of the day, you should not be eating a bunch of fried crap from Applebee's, and using a study like this to justify you're large-boned-ness...
edit: one of the semi-functional ways to see how a paper was accepted by the broader scientific community is to go to google scholar, and type in the name of the article. Then you can see how many times it was cited. The article above was 42-times. For a similar, other-side-of-the-issue-paper from approximately the same year, it's up over 1000.
I did find their, "Intuitive eating" argument interesting though, as it's how I eat. The problem is when people have been socialized to have their diet intuitively lead them towards fast-food and other terrible things for them. However, I'm not sure how you could reconcile that in research study.