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February 4, 2011
Food and everything that surrounds it is a crucial matter of personal and public health. Changing sedentary, high-cholesterol, high blood pressure, high blood sugar fat people into more active, low-cholesteral, normal blood pressure, normal blood sugar fat people improve their health and wellbeing.
We can see from this on John Birmingham's Why is fat such a fractious issue? in the Brisbane Times in which it is mentioned that obesity skews significantly towards the lower income groups for a whole bunch of reasons.
In an earlier post --A weighty issue----Birmingham writes that from his own painful experience personal responsibility for what you eat and how you burn off any excess energy is, for a lot of the population, one hundred percent of the issue. He then asks:
Is it inevitable as the rate of obesity increases in Western society, that obesity will come to be defined as the norm? I ask that as somebody who has been obese. Not just clinically obese. But morbidly obese. I'm not any more, but only because I got so sick at one stage from carrying that much weight, that I suddenly dropped a couple of kilos and decided to kick on and see if I could get rid of the rest of it. I was very lucky in having both the money and the time to be able to do so. Not everybody does.
He wonders whether or not obesity might well become as politically fraught in the near future as smoking has become over the past decade. Will it get to a point where the word 'fat' is no longer considered appropriate in polite circles, because of the offence and hurt it might cause?
Even though obesity is deadly and crippling and is killing people Birmingham's answer is that there a concerted effort to 'normalise' fat as a condition in the form of the 'human right' to be fat, not to feel bad about it and to contest the argument that obese equates to being unhealthy.
Obesity is a public health issue, so a policy response is appropriate, but there won't be much of one, because of the power of the food industry. The situation is that we sell junk food while telling people not to eat it.
Despite our our diet being unhealthful and unsafe it is highly unlikely that there will be a tax on junk or high processed food food; or that government subsidies to processed food are ended; that Agricultural Departments whose goal is to expanding markets for agricultural products for junk food become an agency devoted to encouraging healthy eating; factory animal feeding operations are discouraged whilst encouragement is given to the development of sustainable animal husbandry; provide food education for children in public schools as part of the national curriculum; mandate truth in labeling.
Even though public health is an accepted role of government, the reaction to the above would be that this is nanny-state paternalism ; that it’s time we “stop harassing people about their weight”; and that we are in the midst of a moral panic.
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What are the most significant reasons why obesity skews toward lower income groups? Is it equally the case that smoking skews towards the same group?
I am suggesting that solutions to public health issues cannot be addressed by focusing on symptoms, not (social?)causes. I would suggest it is important to look at the exceptions to the generalization