Mostly boring movie. Let's grant the topic of junk food is a worthy one, if highly suspicious. But, sitting in a crowd of, hm, what are they called now? people like me, and younger, rich, educated, etc., watching some hipster show us close-ups of grotesquely fat people, gorge himself on burgers, then whine about how out of shape he's getting... I got a strong impression of preaching to the choir. And the flick was remarkably un-self-critical.
But anyway. This article in today's Times was interesting in an "up is down" way:
Dr. Jeffrey Friedman, an obesity researcher at Rockefeller University, argues that contrary to popular opinion, national data do not show Americans growing uniformly fatter.
The obesity arena "is so political, so rife with misinformation and disinformation."
Unfortunately, I can't quite make sense of the article. Sloppy, like many Science Times articles... But it might be interesting to follow up on.
I personally am not all that interested in whether people are fat or not. But I do wish food quality would improve in America (and France for that matter, but that's a slightly different topic). And it probably is, actually.
Posted by Kai Carver at June 8, 2004 10:48 AMI just watched The Bourne Identity and during the whole movie I was like, "Oh my God! I've seen this movie before!" I remembered every scene as I was seeing it, but I couldn't recall any of what was going to happen! Isn't that ironic?
[Sorry for the off-topic comment, but I don't have (justifiably) posting rights here, and this is about a muvie.]
Posted by: Erik at June 9, 2004 02:09 AMI surfed up much, much more info critical of the assumptions of the "Super Size Me" movie:
Minimize Me: to prove a point, some people actually stayed fit or lost weight by eating exclusively at McDonald's.
"when it comes to controlling body weight, it's not just what one eats that makes the difference but how many calories the food contains and how many calories are balanced by physical activity"
(Here's an idea: maybe Spurlock could sue General Motors for making Michael Moore fat?)
(hmm, turns out my source is an industry shill. A useful reminder it's easy to find what you're looking for on the Internet, but it's a good idea to double-check your findings...).
But wait, there's more!
Summary of Friedman's "A War on Obesity, Not the Obese"
differences in weight are genetically determined ... the heritability of obesity is equivalent to that of height ... height has also increased significantly in Western countries in the 20th century ... in contrast to the situation with obesity, most people readily accept the fact that genetic factors contribute to differences in stature
the change in weight attributable to any recent change in our environment, such as a change in diet or a more sedentary life-style, is much smaller than the enormous differences in weight, often numbering in the hundreds of pounds, that can be observed among individuals living in today's world
Might it be that it is the obese who carry the "hunter-gatherer" genes and the lean that carry the "Fertile Crescent" or "Western" genes?
From a book that picks apart our hysteria about fat
According to the public health establishment's current BMI definitions, Brad Pitt, Michael Jordan and Mel Gibson are all "overweight", while Russell Crowe, George Clooney and baseball star Sammy Sosa are all "obese".
In almost all large-scale epidemiological studies, little or no correlation between weight and health can be found for a large majority of the population
Obese patients who have been put on very low-calorie diets subsequently display much higher rates of congestive heart failure than equally fat people who did not attempt to lose weight in the first place.
the key to avoiding Type 2 diabetes is not to try to lose weight (indeed, there is much evidence that dieters are far more prone to the disease than average), but rather to make lifestyle changes in regard to activity levels and dietary content that greatly reduce the risk of contracting the disease, whether or not such changes lead to any weight loss
heavier women have much lower rates of osteoporosis, which is a very common and serious condition among older women
There are many other factors [besides being fat] that disproportionately affect the heaviest people in our society, and that also correlate with poor health: most notably a sedentary lifestyle, poor diet, dieting-induced weight fluctuation, diet drug use, poverty, access to and discrimination in health care, and social discrimination generally.
bald men die sooner, on average, than hirsute men, probably because bald men have higher levels of testosterone ... surely no one would conclude that giving a bald man hair implants would improve his prospects for long life.
No one has ever successfully conducted a study into the effects of long-term weight loss, and for a very simple reason: no one knows how to turn fat people into thin people.
when researchers take into account the activity levels and resulting fitness of the people being studied, body mass appears to have no relevance to health whatsoever. ... obese people who engage in at least moderate levels of physical activity have around one half the mortality rate of sedentary people who maintain supposedly ideal weight levels.
obesity research in America is funded by the diet and drug industry
If one were forced to come up with a six-word explanation for the otherwise inexplicable ferocity of America's war on fat, it would be this: Americans think being fat is disgusting.
The disgust the thin upper classes feel for the fat lower classes has nothing to do with mortality statistics and everything to do with feelings of moral superiority.
while only 10% of the white teenage girls surveyed were happy with their bodies, 70% of the black teenage girls were happy with theirs (the black girls weighed more, on average, than the white girls).
Thinness has a metaphorical significance in America today. Americans - and especially American elites - value thinness for precisely the same reason someone suffering from anorexia nervosa does: because not eating means not giving in to desire. Strangely, what the American elites consider most desirable is a body whose appearance signals a triumph of the will over desire itself.
(don't miss the two extra links on Bill, Monica, and Elvis)
This, then, is the moral of the sad tale of Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky: it seems quite probable that a constitutional crisis would have been averted if, at several crucial junctures in their respective lives, either the fat boy from Hope or the zaftig princess from Beverly Hills had simply been allowed to eat what they wanted to eat, without the accompanying message that their mutual propensity for a certain mild plumpness would mark them as outsiders, if not actual pariahs.
The images of fat Elvis and thin Elvis live together in the popular imagination, like twin brothers struggling for the affection of America's heart.
In the brain, a technical article
"The malleability of these feeding circuits by leptin suggest the possibility that the brain's wiring may be different in lean versus obese individuals"
Another article about cutting-edge diet research
"under- and over-nutrition during critical periods of hypothalamic (brain) development may induce long-lasting and potentially irreversible effects into adulthood"
Heather was maybe going to go see this movie last night and this is the review I gave her:
"Don't bother. It's boring and there's nothing in it you don't know already anyway."
I totally agree about weight being a class issue, and also genetic. I was appalled one time to hear a weight-watching middle class person who should know better say in conversation, "intelligent people usually are not fat."
My low-income but white and thin family was always very disgusted by and critical of fat people on a midwestern Protestant platform, even though we were Catholic. Fat people have no self control, fat people are lazy, every time you see a fat person he's stuffing his face and then complaining that he can't lose weight, etc. And this even though several of my father's brothers and sisters and their wives were obese, some of them to the extreme of having a hard time walking. My mother, all her sisters and my grandmother were all fat or dieting.
But when you live in the US somewhere other than New York and you just look around you at the grocery store or the mall, you can't help but notice that there are always a few really astonishingly obese people around. Is the same true in other parts of the world? I really don't know, since I've never lived outside of the foreign equivelent of New York in any country before now.
Maybe quitting smoking is making Americans fat. I know whenever I quit smoking I crave Coca Cola.
Posted by: tracy at June 10, 2004 10:08 AMErik, you should ask Chris for author rights on muvies. Then you could do what I did as a kid. I didn't get to watch a lot of TV, but I read the TV guide, and I discussed movies or shows I hadn't seen with my classmates based on that. It saved so much time!
Posted by: Kai Carver at June 10, 2004 11:55 AM