It has been about a hundred years since anyone in the US died of consumption, at least as the dreaded malady was known to our 19th-century forebears. Unfortunately, we owe this startling change of fortune not to the interventions of some heroic-but-forgotten Jonas Salk, but to the correction of our previous ignorance. People still die, but we now the cause now as cancer, heart disease, or one of a thousand other maladies that cause the body to shed weight.
I thought of this while reading this article in BusinessWeek about the race to develop effective obesity medications and was hit face-first by this line:
The latest obesity research is centering on an increasingly popular scientific premise: The human mind is all but hard-wired to hold the body at a certain weight.
Any time someone (especially a fat person) suggests that more than a few percent of obesity cases are caused by factors other than sloth or gluttony, all hell breaks loose. I find this tendency particularly (though not exclusively) pronounced on the part of liberals, who latch onto it as yet another avenue to bash America's culture and economy--conservatives are hardly the only ones to pick and choose when they use the seven deadly sins to justify their argument.
Do diet and exercise help? Of course. But a century of experience can also show us that they are about as effective as telling someone with bipolar disorder to just calm the f--k down.
¶ 7:38 AM
