The Underlying Paradox of Food Programs

In the previous post, Childhood Obesity News discussed the incredible controversy that arose 50 years ago when some factions struggled to bring to public attention the dire situation of Americans who did not have enough to eat. At the same time, other factions adamantly insisted that not only were all Americans well-nourished, but that to state otherwise was subversive and unpatriotic.

Normally, cognitive dissonance is a pathological condition, because believing two opposite things at the same time is a sign of mental illness. But in many cases, we have no choice but to believe two seemingly contradictory truths. Here is an example of how, for the past several years, the world has been confronted with a contradiction that seems on the surface to point to two different and mutually exclusive truths.

People who believe that world climate is changing catastrophically because of global warming are mocked and derided on the basis of one particularly cold and snowy winter in one particular place. Climate change deniers point to photos of people shoveling snowdrifts from their driveways, and say, “Look at that, there’s your so-called global warming, you fools.”

Meanwhile, serious climate scientists can explain how two seemingly opposed sets of evidence can both be true. Planet-wide warming that causes certain weather phenomena in some locations can indeed cause other weather patterns in other places, that appear to contradict the overall pattern of warming.

Too much or not enough?

In recent years, this same controversy has erupted in the area of nutrition. There are still very many Americans who suffer from malnutrition. But just as in the realm of weather, skeptics can publish photos of morbidly obese children, and statistics that reflect sky-high obesity rates in all age groups, and say, “Look at that, there’s your so-called nutrition crisis, you fools.”

The doubters can put forth undeniable evidence that X number of American children are overweight or obese, and then use that evidence to “prove” to themselves that the government should abandon all concern about making sure that American children are sufficiently nourished. “Look at all those fat kids,” they say, and that is the argument for refusing to spend tax money and other government resources to assure that all kids are properly fed.

In some circles, the widespread existence of obesity is considered sufficient evidence that all Americans are adequately nourished, and that government at every level should keep its nosey, interfering, overbearing, nanny-state hands off all matters concerned with food. Meanwhile, other groups insist that the government must step up and take responsibility for ensuring both that everybody gets enough to eat, and nobody gets fat.

How can these apparently mutually exclusive demands both be met? Recently, G. William Hoagland published a report dealing with efforts the federal government has made over the past half-century, since the landmark White House Food and Nutrition Conference took the first steps toward bringing this all out into the open.

Diverse experience or suspicious both-siderism?

Mr. Hoagland is a living example of what some consider to be an unholy alliance between government and business; the kind of bureaucrat who enjoys the “revolving door” relationship between official posts and private-sector employment. Although such people may be accused of having divided loyalties, they are also necessarily qualified to see issues from both sides. The next post will outline his varied experience before summarizing what he wrote on this topic.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “What’s Happened in the 50 Years Since the White House Food and Nutrition Conference?,” MedPageToday.com, 12/04/19
Image by Nick Bramhall/(CC BY-SA 2.0)

Current Obesity — How Did We Get Here?

People who were around in the 1960s remember that era fondly not just for the music and the light shows, but for such astonishing developments as the “discovery” of hunger in America.

Laurie B. Green, Ph.D, explains eloquently:

The very meaning of “discovery,” when it came to the politics of hunger in the late 1960s, rested in part on the production and reception of news, documentaries, visual images and editorials that, at times, provoked explicit confrontations over who had the right and expertise to say whether starvation existed in America.

In 1967 a pair of senators started poking around in poor neighborhoods, where a lot of bad things were going on. People who were entitled to food stamps were denied them. There was actual, clinical malnutrition. In 1968 a much-discussed TV exposé was both widely praised, and denounced as unpatriotic propaganda. Prof. Green, who teaches at the University of Texas, Austin, and is a Public Voices Fellow, wrote:

Later it came out that the Mississippi congressman who headed the House agricultural appropriations subcommittee borrowed agents from the FBI to track down and survey the cupboards of every interviewee to prove the show had been a pack of lies…

[…] While the Federal Communications Commission weighed charges that CBS had overstepped the ethical bounds of journalism, social commentators referred to the documentary as the turning point in bringing public awareness to the crisis of hunger.

The matter of truth, including who had the right to define it, was an incendiary one in April 1967 and for months thereafter. There was an enormous amount of pressure to deny that anyone went hungry in America.

But also, there were hearings in Washington, and a White House conference. There was War on Poverty funding, and the federal government paid people to go look at the most devastated areas in the country and report back. Oncology researchers were puzzled that some kids who were treated for cancer got better while others, who should logically have gotten better, did not. Many paths of inquiry converged. Racism and several other contemporary societal problems were implicated.

G. William Hoagland used to work for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, as Administrator of the Food and Nutrition Service. Accordingly, he was for a short time in 1981 in charge of feeding America’s hungry people.

Hoagland marked the end of last year with an enlightening piece called “What’s Happened in the 50 Years Since the White House Food and Nutrition Conference?” Childhood Obesity News intends to use it as the armature on which to hang additional matters, especially as they relate to who gets to eat what, in public schools, and how those practices are connected to childhood obesity. Hoagland wrote of the past,

The National School Lunch Program and the School Breakfast Program were also expanded to provide both free and reduced priced lunches to needy children, and the Special, Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) — targeting nutrition assistance for pregnant and postpartum women, infants, and young children — was established.

Food stamps, aka SNAP, fed three million people in 1969, and now has 36 million enrollees. Today, 11% of the population are “food insecure, defined as uncertain of having or unable to acquire enough food for their family.”

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “The Media Matters: 50 years after the ‘discovery’ of hunger in the U.S.,” MLK50.com, 04/15/17
Source: “What’s Happened in the 50 Years Since the White House Food and Nutrition Conference?,” MedPageToday.com, 12/04/19
Image by Howard Litwiler/(CC BY-ND 2.0)

People vs. Bullying

Recently, Childhood Obesity News mentioned young LaNiyah Bailey, who wrote the children’s book Not Fat Because I Wanna Be. Ms. Bailey has become a well-known anti-bullying activist, and the author of Stand Up: Bully Busters Coming to Town. She has hosted events and made media appearances, always working to help kids champion themselves and others.

LaNiyah has a Twitter account that does not seem very up-to-date, which is an encouraging sign, because we would like to think that the experience in dealing with the public, and the friendships and connections cultivated during the years of anti-bullying activism, have led this charismatic child into new areas of interest and accomplishment.

A great many parents have looked for advice about what to do when their child encounters this particular kind of aggression. Sometimes children are ashamed to talk about the hostile treatment they are subjected to at school and in other public places. But they are not the ones who should be ashamed.

The mirror’s unblinking eye

Just as every coin has two sides, every victim has a perpetrator. In our haste to help the victim, we sometimes forget that somebody out there is doing the bullying. Could it be our very own child? Some parents of obese children are oblivious to this possibility. Somehow it doesn’t make sense that fat kids would make life miserable for other fat kids. But as we have seen, it is totally possible for those who should know better, to actually be bullies themselves!

In that same post, we mentioned how bizarre it is to quiz parents on their children’s experiences as either victims or bullies. In any study that hopes to be taken seriously, self-reporting is never an ideal practice, and this is second-hand self-reporting; self-reporting at a remove; what a court would call hearsay evidence. A child in a bullying situation should be considered competent to answer questions about it herself or himself.

Whether a hostile, obnoxious child is overweight or in tip-top shape, this is a terrible problem because of the high likelihood that the parents of bullies just don’t care. Most often, they are the ones who taught their kids such loathsome behavior through their own bad example. In fact, they probably believe that those other kids deserve to be mistreated, for the same reasons they feel justified in torturing their own kids.

Antidotes may exist

But just in case the rare bullying parent might wish things were different, it is worth trying to reach out to them anyway. One of LaNiyah Bailey’s Facebook entries says,

Is your child the bully? It’s OK to admit it. Maybe they don’t understand the severity of it. Bullying at school is the #1 reason children have been committing “bullycide” (suicide due to being bullied) at an alarming rate. Now is the time to raise awareness in your household. Because, it starts at home!! Help save a life!

A page at HealthyChildren.org offers a lot of helpful information for parents, including a definition of the line between teasing and bullying. And then, there is the whole gray area between bullying and victimhood — which is being a bystander. Children need guidance about how to conduct themselves in the “bystander” space. They need to understand that watching is not a neutral position, but an enabling one.

And then… there is a section titled “When Your Child is the Bully.” The suggestions are good, but it is easy to feel hopeless, because children who bully are often the victims of adults who just don’t care that their behavior hurts people, and whose indifference to their own culpability is profound. Also, some parents, like overwhelmed single mothers, qualify as victims of their bully children. Sadly, some parents out there are frightened of their own progeny — and justifiably so — and it will take more than a book or a webpage to help them.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Bullying: It’s Not OK,” HealthyChildren.org, 11/21/15
Image: Fair Use

Social Media As Subversive Force

The previous Childhood Obesity News post, “People of Size, and Their Voices,” could stir endless controversy. Do overweight humans deserve pride, self-esteem, and other attributes of mental health? Or does the world have an obligation to constantly remind them of their inadequacy? Must the obese bow their heads and agree to suffer ignominy as punishment for their unacceptable bodies?

Zach J. Payne wrote about losing a “stupidly huge amount of weight” in a piece subtitled, “And why it doesn’t matter.” Yes, between weighing in at 560 pounds and 480 pounds, a quantitative difference can be verified. But is there really a qualitative difference? Of course there is! “I can walk a few more steps without being short of breath.” As the kids used to say, Big Whoop! He figures it would require the loss of another 250 pounds to be significantly life-changing. As things are,

I still can’t comfortably fit into most cars. There’s still no chance of me ever being able to board a commercial airplane. I have to walk sideways down a bus aisle. I still draw looks and harassment.

And then, cussing profusely, Payne describes the monomaniacal state of mind that prevents him from focusing on anything but food:

Carole is talking about cookies and cakes again… Why is Jon sharing a Facebook memory about Cheese Sticks?

Why does anyone post food photos on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or any other SNS (social network sites)? Over the years, various theories have been proposed. Academic papers have been written about this topic, such as a very lengthy and detailed recent one.

The researchers wanted to know whether seeing appetizing food pictures (aka “food porn”) would result in more external eating, in both normal people and in those already known to have eating disorders. “External eating” is consumption triggered by the sight, smell, or thought of food, regardless of the absence of actual hunger. Observation of 165 subjects suggested that “while SNS use is correlated with eating patterns, it does not influence them directly.”

Some experts believe that taking pictures of food, to display to the world via social media, is either a symptom or a cause of mental illness. Food writer Josh Ozersky expressed the opposite view:

If anything, shooting food pictures is an act of impulse control, delayed gratification, and long-term planning. It would be a lot easier to just gobble that food up.

The harmfulness of “food porn” is an idea that will not go away. Two years later, an article titled “The Instagram effect: Are pictures of food fueling obesity?” included the term “digital grazing” and discussed an interesting piece that had been published in the journal Brain and Cognition. It is the kind of subject that can lead to philosophical rabbit holes. In a world where some people starve, and others carry around two or three times their natural weight, fancy pictures of food can arguably be regarded as obscene.

A 2018 article mentions a Registered Dietician who reportedly eats anything that social media contacts show her a picture of. That alone seems enough to close the case.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “I Lost A Stupidly Huge Amount of Weight,” Medium.com, 10/03/19
Source: “The effect of exposure to food in social networks on food cravings and external eating,” ClinicalTrials.gov, undated
Source: “Expert: Photographing Food May Be Sign of Mental Illness,” Eater.com, 05/09/13
Source: “The Instagram effect: Are pictures of food fuelling obesity?” FoodNavigator.com, 10/18/15
Source: “Are social media food photos ruining your diet?” WXYZ.com, 08/24/18
Image by TT Marketing/(CC BY 2.0)

People of Size, and Their Voices

In the 1960s, there were writers who shook things up by describing what it was like to belong to a non-majority, non-white race. Similarly, our most recent decade has seen some audacious writing about body size — and not just in discussion threads and forums buried in some obscure corner of the Internet.

One of the most eloquent and prolific voices is that of Your Fat Friend, who describes herself as “just shy of 350 pounds,” and looks back on a lifetime of being excluded, underserved, and made to feel inferior. She feels empathy for the people who describe themselves as normal or average, because they face the same struggle, different only in degree. Even for them,

[…] thinness is an ideal, some shining idol forever out of reach, a horizon with no point of arrival. Thinness is always distant, unattainable, a punishing standard that few feel they can meet — and those who can still avoid the term, for fear of seeming arrogant.

For someone who grows up obese, the moments that mark life transitions are not bright. The summer camp memories do not include the first jump from the knotted rope into the river, or the first two-piece bathing suit. To think about lumbering across the graduation stage like a tank is more likely to cause dismay than delight. And prom? Forget it.

Instead, this writer reveals, you remember the day when the clerk at the “plus-size” store just shook her head. You remember…

[…] the moment when strangers begin to shout at you on the street, throwing trash or mooing as you pass.

Then again, not all recollections are toxic. Kasandra Brabaw has a different take:

I remember very clearly the moment I finally understood that being fat doesn’t make me ugly or unworthy. Suddenly, it dawned on me that I could be both. I could be fat and beautiful, fat and successful, fat and smart, and fat and worthy of love.

Among celebrities, some, like Oprah, will talk about their weight journeys exhaustively. Others, like the zaftig Christina Hendriks, rule out discussion of their physical selves.

At the age of six, LaNiyah Bailey published a book about being shamed and name-called not only by other kids, but even by a professional adult child-care worker. A Chicago Tribune article by Dawn Turner Trice described her difficulties and how the family coped, and how the little girl insisted on the validity of her subjective experience. The reporter quotes LaNiyah’s assistant, her mom:

I showed what I had to the editor… and she said that we had to make it more fun to appeal to kids. But when I read it to my daughter, she said, ‘I don’t want it to be fun. It’s not funny.’

LaNiyah’s mother, LaToya White, used to be a professional singer who was hounded by management to slim down. This is her 5-foot, 6-inch point of view:

They make you feel like you have to be stick-thin. At my thinnest, I was 120 pounds. I’ve learned to accept myself the way I am, and I want LaNiyah to accept herself, too, no matter her size.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “The Way We Talk About Our Bodies Is Deeply Flawed,” Medium.com, 04/23/19
Source: “What Happened When I Told My Girlfriend She Was Fat,” Medium.com, 11/25/19
Source: “Even Mindy Kaling Can’t Win the Body-Image Wars’,” TIME.com, 04/14/14
Source: “Girl, 6, gives frank talk about being fat,” ChicagoTribune,com, 04/04/11
Image by LaNiyah

Tomorrow, March 4, Is World Obesity Day

A couple of relevant things are going on at the present time. One is described by a contender for longest headline ever — “The 6th Annual Obesity Care Week (OCW) Takes Aim At Important Issues Impacting People With Obesity And Celebrates World Obesity Day.” We are already in the midst of Obesity Care Week, which started February 28. Its point is awareness cultivation, with the goal of…

[…] changing the way we care about obesity by creating a society that understands, respects and accepts the complexities of obesity and values science-based care.

Obesity Care Week wants to get people excited about widespread access to respectful, comprehensive, and appropriate care.

Worldwide, it is said that some 650 million people are affected by obesity. For a stunning example, the Pakistan Health Research Council has discovered that more than 50% of that country’s population is obese. That’s half the people! If projections are accurate, by 2030 — in another 10 years — that will include five million children in Pakistan alone.

One thing that really needs work is the idea that obesity is some kind of “lifestyle choice.” Okay, maybe for a very small segment of the obese population, it is. But five million Pakistani kids did not make that choice. It was somehow made for, and imposed upon, them. Among other issues, the problems everywhere include access to care, weight bias, and agreement on the best obesity treatment.

Currently in the U.S, the Treat and Reduce Obesity Act is before Congress, where it has 180 supporters.

The critical legislation will provide the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) with authority to enhance the current Medicare benefit for intensive behavioral counseling by allowing additional types of qualified healthcare providers to offer these services. The Act also allows the agency to expand Medicare Part D coverage to include FDA-approved prescription drugs for chronic weight management.

The part about behavior counseling sounds great; the part about chronic weight management drugs, not so much. Realistically, in the face of threats to reduce or eliminate Medicare, and a frightening viral pandemic, the odds of success for the bill are not good.

Stories, resources, and more

WorldObesity.org, headquartered in London, invites and urges people to visit their website and obtain tools for preparedness to fight the good fight. They offer templates for social media applications, infographics, reports, and posters. The group collects and shares people’s individual stories, and directions to image banks of photos of obese people that are not stigmatizing, pejorative, or stereotypical, for journalists to use.

The project they suggest participating in this year is “Send Us Your O” for the World Obesity Federation Image Bank, and here is the call to action:

It’s a quick and easy thing you can do alone, or in a group. All of your photos will be compiled for use on our website and social media channels to demonstrate the global support that World Obesity Day has.

We would especially love to see you and your colleagues supporting World Obesity Day with any local landmarks in the background so that we can build a real global feel to the images we share.

Please email us your images at WOD@worldobesity.org.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “More than 50 percent population in Pakistan is obese: study,” TheNews.com, 03/01/20
Source: “The 6th Annual Obesity Care Week (OCW) Takes Aim At Important Issues Impacting People With Obesity And Celebrates World Obesity Day,” IdahoStateJournal.com, 02/28/20
Image by Taro the Shiba Inu/(CC BY 2.0)