I mean, I would argue that “liberal” roughly equates to “non-insane, center-left,” but honestly I’m not gonna get out of shape about it. Like you say, we don’t really have another place for it, and if we did, I think you’d have to spend a bunch of your day peering into the Twitterabyss to find stuff appropriate for it.
Timex
5262
Ya, although I think the idea that you need to really go digging to find crazy tankie stuff is not accurate. I certainly don’t go LOOKING for this stuff.
The reason I encounter it, is that it’s routinely part of the replies to essentially any left leaning political tweet.
Hell, Alstein has talked about how he actually knows and engages these kinds of folks on a regular basis. It’s not like they’re all Russian bots (although I gotta assume some of them are, fulfilling the same purpose as the Russian disinformation campaign aimed at the right).
To the camps with you, Trotskyite!
Ha, I’ll just go to my secret hiding spot assigned to me by the committee on fleeing renegade committees and you’ll never find me. Your camps don’t threaten me, I’ll be safe in Mexico!
Thrag
5265
Just don’t bring any mountain climbing equipment with you.
CraigM
5266
Windows are better anyhow.
Care for a cup of tea, comrade?
Thrag
5268
Can’t let a Trotsky reference go by without this David Ives bit.
ShivaX
5269
Or the longer angrier take from someone who describes himself as left of Lenin:
Idk if this is explicitly a “liberal” thing but certainly liberal-adjacent.
“Don’t weigh me” cards:
Speaking as someone who has struggled with weight at various points in my life, fuuuuuck this. I’m all for having healthy conversations about weight, but if you can’t trust your doctor to have that conversation with you, find a new doctor. Christ.
I think these cards are less about actually using and more about normalizing the idea that weight, while one indicator of health, isn’t really a very useful diagnostic tool. This is borne out by the fact that theyre offering 100 packs of the cards to doctors to make available to their patients.
it’s a way to highlight that any actual diagnosis of medical conditions should be done individually. If you have high blood pressure, measure the blood pressure itself, and then if losing weight is indicated as a way to reduce that pressure, recommend that, but the weight itself is not a useful metric in and of itself. If the doctor can look at you and you both know you’re fat, what additional value does having a number to attach to that fatness do the doctor?
If you have a nutritionist who is helping you with specific weight loss goals, maybe the number is useful to them, but what particular value does it have for the general practitioner? Fat itself doesn’t kill you. Contrary to what the diet industry wants you to believe, there are in fact fat people with all good health markers, just as there are some thin people with heart disease, high blood pressure, etc. Weight itself isn’t an especially useful metric in the general case, and if it is useful (“medically necessary”), the doctor can explain why.
Also, “find a new doctor” is easy to say, but if you have limits based on institutions where you work/live (e.g. college), insurance, physical distance to access, or effort to research a new doctor, it may not be as simple as just waking up one morning and finding one.
Matt_W
5273
That’s interesting. There’s a 2017 Atlantic article on this dynamic that I hadn’t read before I saw your post.
The crux seems to be that obesity is nearly always worse for your health. But the jury is out on people in the 25-30 BMI range. The article doesn’t talk about this at all, but I’d be willing to bet a significant sum that regular exercise has a far bigger effect on health outcomes than weight in that range.
Maintenance Phase is an excellent podcast about the wellness industry and anti-fatness in particular. They did an episode sort of generally about that particular Willets / Flegal debate.
Sharpe
5275
One of the issues on this (and many other topics) is the issue of numerical impact or quantification. Basically, the numbers matter. It may be true that “obesity is always worse for your health” but there’s a difference between 1% worse vs 10% worse vs 100% worse.
I think that is a big issue with weight issues in America. There’s a perception that the numerical factor of weight impact is HUGE, as in reducing life expectancy by decades, and increasing lifetime health care expenses by massive percentages and so on. People don’t quantify this but when you hear people talk, the implied quantities are large. My understanding is that quantifying this sort of thing is hard but the data we do have suggests the numerical impact is real, and measurable, but only moderate in impact from a statistical standpoint (as in life expectancy reductions of months or a few years on the outside, lifetime medical cost increases of 20% to 40% from the estimates I’ve seen, that sort of thing.) Those are real numbers that have real impacts but when you hear people talk you will often hear “Oh that person was overweight, I’m shocked they lived to 70 years of age!” But the reality is in my understanding obesity can lower your life expectancy from like 85 years to maybe 82 or 83 years on average, not below 70. Below 70 is ridiculously out of the statistical deviation range, from my understanding.
There’s an issue of numerical impact that does matter with this sort of thing. Obviously you can’t expect the general public to have exact numbers, but it would be helpful if our medicine and media were putting us “in the ballpark”. Which, IMO, they are not.
The perception of weight impact is in my subjective opinion, out of sync with the actual numerical impact.
That’s a big part of this issue. There’s a real health impact to being overweight, but understanding how MUCH impact is important.
There isn’t much good scholarship about this, in part because it’s hard to convince people to pay for a study when “everybody knows” that being fat is bad for you. But good studies need to control for correlations (some people are fat because of other underlying health issues), as well as controlling for the documented fact that fat people avoid medical treatment or receive a lower standard of care specifically because of anti-fat bias in the medical system (the kind of thing that those cards are attempting to raise awareness about).
They also need to disentangle the health effects of being fat with the health effects of dieting, because large swings of weight gain and loss is bad for you no matter which point in the pendulum you’re currently at. The negative health effects of even brief periods of starvation (which many diets amount to) are also pretty well documented. And e.g. fat bodies can respond to those physical starvation cues (in terms of e.g. daily caloric intake) without ever being emaciated or the other things that we popularly associate with “starving”.
The list goes on and on. Obesity is a simple weight / heigh metric and doesn’t account of builds or muscle mass (The Rock is obese, because he weighs too much), so that further confounds any aggregate data. Many obesity metrics fail to account for race or even gender. People of different races seem to respond to having fat on their bodies differently (Black women for example, seem to have fewer negative health impacts associated with fat than, say, white men). The threshold for “obesity” is arbitrary and not based on science, and it was arbitrarily changed in the 90s against the recommendations of a large portion of medical researchers. So you need to make sure that any historical studies are properly normalized.
All of this points to weight and BMI not being particularly useful for making meaningful statements about health in the aggregate, and it definitely isn’t useful on an individual basis.
BMI thinks that 140lbs is the lower edge of “normal” for me, a 6’1" adult male.
BMI can kiss my whole asshole, as the man said.
Sure, but while the technical details of the BMI can be easily dunked on, it is really only the tip of the iceberg.
Look, this is not really true.
While it’s true that obesity itself does not necessarily increase mortality, and that there are healthy obese people, in general obesity presents comorbitidies with health hazards at a very high rate. And while the correlation is not 100%, the cause effect relation when there is points towards obesity causing the health hazards in most cases.
True, BMI is a horrible measure of obesity, but you can take better indicators (waist to height ratio, for example) and you get very significant life expectancy reduction, specially if the obesity onsets early on. Finally while the life expectancy loss can indeed be minor for mild obesity, it is very serious for extreme obesity.
TL;DR: yeah there’s a little too much noise made about overweight or mild obesity, as well as bad systems for measuring it (BMI), and that type of overweight is likely only important if there’s a comorbidity that can be reduced through weight loss (but it is a good indicator to test for such comorbities), but serious obesity is a different issue and very likely damaging in most cases.
Finally, something to understand is that there’s such thing as preventive medicine. High obesity is damaging, and statistically we gain weight as we age (as much as 3kg a year for males) so once you start hitting some thresholds, putting a stop or reverting weight gain is going to very likely improve quality of life and life expectancy, sometimes dramatically.
Sharpe
5280
One of the other issues here is the typical attitude of many doctors and much of the public is that losing weight is easy or “should be” easy. It’s often presented as a purely behavioral issue merely requiring a bit of “willpower” to achieve excellent results and, yeah… that’s crap.
Weight is a hugely complex issue, involving the body, the mind, behavior, environment, psychology, psychiatry, internal chemistry, outward factors like wealth and access to food, and a whole bunch of other stuff. There’s even some studies talking about the effect of maternal nutrition (and a recent study talking about the impact of the diet of the maternal grandmother) on individual weight.
The statistics on dieting are incredibly clear: dieting has a laughable high failure rate long term. And as @CLWheeljack jack mentions, diets are not just ineffective, they can be actively harmful.
I think some doctors think “well maybe the quantity of impact of weight is not super clear but diets are EASY! so let’s all diet.” Yeah, that’s crap.
I do think helping individuals manage weight is something that our society should try to do better at, but that actually requires a MASSIVE restructuring of our health care and economy. From a health care POV, we would need vastly more holistic approaches to weight loss incorporating behavior, nutrition, psychology, psychiatry, body chemistry, AND we would also need to look at economic issues of access to food, cost of food, variety of food, etc.
