Many of today’s most serious problems require complex solutions based on real data that has been analyzed by rational people whose only agenda is to actually fix the issues.
Unfortunately, we lack the properly motivated professionals and policy makers. Our “experts” are afraid to offend and offer the hard solutions. So the resolutions presented are simply word-play and the generation of new narratives.
Take for example, obesity. I recently noted that as the rates of childhood obesity have skyrocketed, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) issued an expansion of the Body Mass Index (BMI) charts used for assessing growth.
Rather than trying to address the causes of obesity on this scale, researchers want to simply eliminate the term.
Obesity should be renamed to avoid stigmatising people and reflect the hereditary nature of the disease, researchers have claimed.BMI, body mass index, has been earmarked as a measure which particularly confuses people about what obesity is.Many people have a tendency to believe it simply means carrying too much body fat.Experts suggest the illness should be rebranded as “Chronic Appetite Dysregulation”.
One of those experts, Dr Margaret Steele of the School of Public Health, University College Cork, offers philosophical considerations about how obesity should be classified.
She said efforts should be made to ‘disentangle’ public health and medical meanings of obesity and ‘acknowledge the fact that we’re really talking about two different things.’While the public health message focuses on BMI, medical professionals tend to look at a person’s physiological processes, they found – such as their ability to store excess energy as fat, to deal with insulin and dietary sugar and how well someone is able to function metabolically – to diagnose obesity.’Our environment throws so much food at us but some people seem to be able to resist the temptation and to stop eating when they’ve had enough to maintain their weight,’ she said.Yet for other people that just doesn’t seem to work – there’s something going on in the brain, something in the level of hormones. It’s not a question of willpower, it’s not a question of making decisions. It’s at a much, much deeper level that we don’t really have full control over.
Renaming obesity will not address the crisis. Reviewing the food recommendations against real science would be a better place to start.
Bringing back physical education classes, with an eye to the science-based limitations on gender when considering sports competitions, would also be extremely helpful.
There are studies that indicate overweight and obese people have low vitamin D levels when compared to their slimmer counterparts. Some studies link increased belly fat to vitamin D deficiency. Perhaps the explosion in obesity has been related to sun-screen mania and computer-focused activity, so there should be a push for vitamin D supplementation.
However, the biggest reason for the rise in obesity and the issue that may be the most important to address is the social media push for fat-entitlement and body-beautiful campaigns.
These factors recently led one super-sized model to demand accommodation by an airline . . . because discrimination.
A plus-size TikToker is arguing that airlines should make plane aisles wider to accommodate larger passengers, calling the current layout “discrimination.”The woman, who posts to the platform as Big Curvy Olivia, shared a video this week showing herself struggling to traverse a United Airlines plane, having to turn sideways as she walked past the rows of seats.“Honestly, it’s discrimination that they can’t build wider aisles in airplanes 2023,” she wrote on the clip, which has landed about 700,000 views.
I would argue that people like ‘Big Curvy Olivia” are discriminating against me having a normal world to live in.
So, expect more “Chronic Appetite Dysregulation” and “body beautiful” inanity until the serious people return to policy making and reporting.
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