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The Wide Angle - February / March 1998 |
by K. J. Moore
It appears that finally members of the mainstream medical community are coming to believe what we, the size acceptance community, have been telling them for years, "Diets don't work." In a surprising editorial, the respected New England Journal of Medicine published "Losing Weight -- An Ill Fated New Year's Resolution" in the January 1st issue, available online at http://www.nejm.org/public/1998/0338/0001/0052/1.htm.
Doctors Jerome P Kassier, MD and Marcia Angell, MD came down hard on the diet industry and our national preoccupation with weight loss. Pointing out that Americans spend between $30 and $50 billion yearly on diet clubs, foods, over the counter and prescription medications. Sadly, for most this is money wasted since most people can not lose much weight or they regain the weight the loose and often times more. Often times the backlash of this failed dieting are overweight people who are likely to share the same prejudices that society has towards them. They feel they are failures, lazy and self-indulgent. They are made to feel guilty and a pattern of self-hatred often times emerges.
Teenage and young women are among the hardest hit with the pressure to fit into what is for many an unrealistic image of beauty and thinness. They are under pressure to starve, abuse over the counter medications, binge and purge in a vain effort to reach an unattainable goal. The doctors reported an alarming 20 percent of this population die from these efforts.
In an another surprising move Doctors Kassier and Angell stated that there is not concrete evidence that weight loss equals longer life or better health. Citing that most of the old data linking being overweight and the benefits of weight loss are limited, fragmentary and often ambiguous. These studies are seriously flawed and over dramatized by the diet industry to guilt the obese into dieting. The doctors state that an overweight person who is otherwise considered healthy is at very little increased risk of an early death than the general population with the same risk factors. They did go on to say that overweight people with disorders such as hypertension, high cholesterol, and diabetes might benefit from a weight loss of as little as 15% of body weight.
The editorial finishes with what I feel is the most precedent setting statement I have seen in medicine today:
"Finally, doctors should do their part to help end discrimination against overweight people in schools and workplaces. We should also speak out against the public's excessive infatuation with being thin and the extreme, expensive and potentially dangerous measures taken to attain that goal. Many Americans are sacrificing their appreciation of one of the great pleasures in life-- eating--in an attempt to look like our semi-starved celebrities. Countless numbers of our daughters and increasingly more of our sons are suffering immeasurable torment in fruitless weight-loss schemes and scams and some are losing their lives. Doctors can help the public regain a sense of proportion."
I can't help but feel that finally our voices are being heard at last.
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