NPR recently published a puff piece by overweight photojournalist Jackie Molloy about her attendance at Philly FatCon earlier this year, "a fat-focused convention for people to come as they are and celebrate their bodies." All jokes aside, Molloy's article is just one more sign of an ongoing — and deadly — preference cascade.
No matter what Molloy or other supporters of "fat liberation" might claim about "internalized fatphobia" and the "baseless assumptions are often made about you and your health," it's indisputable that being overweight is bad for virtually every part of the human body. Increased joint damage, risk of heart attack, diabetes, high blood pressure, and even cancer are all very real risks of what medicine properly calls morbid obesity.
But I'm not here to lecture or judge anyone about their weight. With modern lifestyles and diets, being overweight is an epidemic that 40% of American adults suffer from. More than a quarter of us suffer from even more dangerous obesity. Childhood obesity — the most difficult kind to ever recover from — is on the rise, too.
I believe much of the blame lies in the addition of high-fructose corn syrup to virtually all parts of our diet, combined with weight-inducing high-carb/low-fat dietary recommendations from a government that increasingly seems bent on making us all sick or dead.
Worse, weight is easy to gain and difficult to take off. I've been lucky in that I don't have much of a sweet tooth (at least not since I discovered scotch 30 years ago) and have never had to struggle with portion control. Sadly, that makes me almost an outlier in a country that, 30 or 40 years ago, was generally fit as a fiddle.
ASIDE: That isn't to say that every measure of obesity is correct. The so-called Body Mass Index (BMI) is basically garbage. Consult your doctor, not magazine covers.
But there's a difference between accepting the fact that weight is a real struggle for so many people and glorifying morbid obesity as a perfectly healthy lifestyle choice. You don't see anyone advocating for "lung cancer liberation" or getting involved in National Stab Yourself in the Liver with a Fork Day.
So why are we being told to forget about getting fit and learn to celebrate being "fat, happy, and healed?"
To be blunt about it, there are now so many obese people that they have enough mass to try and force us to change our perceptions — a deadly preference cascade that stands in stark contrast to an earlier one that made the country much healthier.
A preference cascade begins much like an avalanche when a series of small movements of snow or rock slowly but then suddenly build up into a deluge.
Remember when people could smoke anywhere, including tightly packed and enclosed spaces like airplanes? Even this reformed smoker looks back and says: "What the hell were we thinking?" But it's pretty simple. When most adults smoked, most adults got their preference to smoke wherever they wanted. It was non-smokers who got relegated to a small and undesirable corner of the restaurant.
But attitudes began to change as people learned the real health risks of smoking. Fewer people picked up the habit (for many reasons ranging from health concerns to punitive excise taxes) and more people died from it. The result was that, slowly, over time, there were fewer smokers. But as the preference cascade gathered steam, the rules changed very quickly.
It took a very few years to go from smoking in airplanes to smoking only in tiny airport smoking lounges, to not being allowed to smoke within 15 feet of the entrance to the airport. I don't have the numbers in front of me but I'd wager a carton of Camels — that's big money these days — that we crossed the threshold of permissibility at almost the same time that smokers began to number less than half the adult population.
At 40% and rising, there is now a large enough minority among the overweight who don't want to change to try and force a preference cascade on the skinny, the fit, and the rest of the overweight, alike.
The preference cascade against smoking led to radical reductions in lung cancer, emphysema, and other related health injuries. The oncoming cascade of fat acceptance threatens the health of a nation that's already suffering from unprecedented declines in life expectancy.
Maybe miracle-seeming weight-loss drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy can stem the tide, even though the medical science on their long-term efficacy and safety is far from settled. Regardless of what drugs we devise to help people return to a healthy weight, the time to stop celebrating obesity was before we began.
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