We Are All From Ipanema

The previous post referenced the Girl from Ipanema, who was, by the way, a real person. At the tender age of 17, Helô Pinheiro inspired the world-famous song. Between the days of her international fame and the present, things have changed a lot, as suggested by the title of a New York Times article, “Brazil, Land of the Thong, Embraces Its Heavier Self.” It was published almost four years ago, so matters could only have gotten worse since then. In fact,

In 2020, nearly 29 percent of Brazilians older than 20 were obese, up from roughly 15 percent in 2000, one of the largest increases of any country over that period … Among the 10 most populous nations, only Mexico, the United States and Russia had higher obesity rates, ranging between 31 percent and 37 percent, according to the data.

Journalist Jack Nicas took a penetrating look at the Brazilian city of Recife, which had been dubbed one of the fattest in the country. He spoke with Karla Rezende, an activist who worked for the passage of laws designed to make the lives of overweight and obese people a bit less traumatic.

When Rezende discovered that passenger plane seatbelts did not fit her, she went the political route and worked for laws that would cause that situation to be rectified. Reforms have included practical measures like the installation of larger desks in schools, as well as the requirement to make teachers conscious of weight-based discrimination so they can pass the knowledge on to students.

Fresh vocabulary

The official language of Brazil is Portuguese, which now contains the word “gordofobia,” meaning discrimination based on weight. Gordofobia is vigorously discussed on local television, and millions of citizens fill the social media with discussions of it. Here are two of the shocking subjects.

Brazil’s biggest pop star, Anitta, has made waves by including obese women in her music videos, and sometimes by not even editing out her own cellulite. And after the Brazilian country-music star Marília Mendonça died in a plane crash last year, some journalists and commentators who mentioned her weight in that context were widely criticized.

Making a federal case of it

While in some countries, overweight acceptance just quietly advances, in Brazil, it became a major focus of the media, and a topic of fierce debate on the city, state, and national levels. In 2015, federal law classified overweight as a form of disability that needed to be protected by such measures as wide seats on public transportation and in soccer stadiums. The state of Rondônia legislated a guarantee that overweight people should be entitled to dignified treatment and untrammeled access to all places, along with being shielded from gordofobia.

Three states adopted a day, September 10, when overweight people’s rights are promoted. This part is not written, but it is a fundamental human right: not to be expected to have a perfect body with perfect curves. Another unspoken but existing right is not to be coerced by public opinion into submitting to bariatric surgery because other people believe you take up too much space.

Longtime Childhood Obesity News readers will remember Rebecca M. Puhl, Ph.D., whose area of expertise is the treatment of obesity by media outlets. This scholar has taken quite an interest in how Brazil is handling the matter. Nicas mentions an example:

[A] judge ordered a comedian to pay a $1,000 fine for making jokes about an obese Brazilian dancer’s weight. “The defendant exuded unequivocal gordofobia,” the judge said in the ruling. Freedom of speech is allowed, the judge added, “but it’s the state’s duty to protect minorities.”

Dr. Puhl remarks that most other countries, including the USA, are lagging behind Brazil in making sense out of all this. We may not want to go as far as punishing comedians for what they say on a nightclub stage, but there are plenty of other areas where we could stand some improvement. In 1976, Michigan was way ahead of the crowd in passing a law that “formally protected people from weight discrimination,” but other states have not followed the example.

Meanwhile, Brazil has continued to enact statutes meant to discourage gordofobia. Still, residents of that country say that despite a decade of progress, the sought-after improvement has proceeded at a glacial pace.

What has happened much more quickly is the increasing poundage of almost everyone in almost every country on the planet.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Brazil, Land of the Thong, Embraces Its Heavier Self,” NYTimes.com, 02/27/22
Image by guertzen/Pixabay

The Fat Tax in Brazil

What 1960s worldwide hit went on to become the (probably) second-most recorded pop song in history? That’s right, “The Girl From Ipanema,” written by Vinícius de Moraes and Antônio Carlos Jobim:

Tall and tan and young and lovely
The girl from Ipanema goes walking
And when she passes
Each one she passes goes “Ah!”

Additionally, the cool swing and sway of her walk reminds onlookers of a dance called the samba… But what is the use of reminiscing about a sight that has become increasingly rare in Ipanema or anywhere else in Brazil? Sadly, the nation that The New York Times journalist Jack Nicas called “a country known for beach bodies” has changed a lot in the intervening six decades.

Brief digression

Obviously, no one here advocates that overweight and obese people should be mistreated in any way, whether at school, at work, or in the wild. On the other hand, it is a pretty good bet that most obese people would prefer not to be in that situation, which can be uncomfortable in many ways: physically, emotionally, and — as we have especially been looking these days — financially.

One current trend is that all sorts of people pay big bucks in efforts to counteract the unpleasant effects of obesity, their own and others’. But it does not have to be like this. If we could somehow manage to be honest with ourselves and tolerant of others, those two practices would go a long way toward figuring out how to turn this thing around.

Meanwhile, back in Brazil

Still, some might argue that there is such a thing as too much tolerance. For example, in Brazil, obese people are favored with “preferential seats on subways, priority at places like banks and, in some cases, protection from discrimination.”

Note: Many would say that “protection from discrimination” belongs on a different list, because everyone should be protected from discrimination at all times. Everyone has enough problems already, and nobody needs that nonsense.

At any rate, Nicas has described how new laws have “made Brazil the world leader in enshrining protections for the overweight” while an “accelerating movement” has caused the country to become “one of the world’s most accommodating places for people with obesity.” Nicas writes:

[T]he schools are buying bigger desks, the hospitals are purchasing larger beds and M.R.I. machines, and the historic theater downtown is offering wider seats.

Many citizens resent all this, reasoning that ultimately, sooner or later, one way or another, every customer pays for these seats and desks and beds and machines. Many people favor tolerance in theory but can’t help thinking that perhaps, in practice, there has been a bit too much of it. As Nicas reported in February, “Over the past 20 years, Brazil’s obesity rate has doubled to more than one in four adults.”

Each day when she walks to the sea…

Ipanema is an area of Rio de Janeiro that features a beach. More than a thousand miles north is Recife, another coastal metropolis with great beaches and a population of over four million, and the reputation, Nicas says, of being “one of the fattest cities in Brazil.” He speaks of a public school there that mandated classes on weight prejudice for teachers and students alike. Since the days of the Girl, this whole South American nation has gained weight.

(To be continued…)

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Brazil, Land of the Thong, Embraces Its Heavier Self,” NYTimes.com. 02/27/22
Image by phadoca/Pixabay

The Lifelong Price of Obesity

Multitudinous examples illustrate how, ultimately, every sector and group of which our society is composed will ultimately pay the price of obesity one way or another. Before getting into another one of those, here is a generalization.

The victims of it suffer the most, of course. But even people whose personal body weights are healthy will, one way or another, foot the bill that always falls due for the existence of obesity. There are a few essential messages that, for various reasons, need to be discussed repeatedly and by many voices.

What could surpass badness?

An important point is: To blame obese people is not only unfair and ignorant, but it’s worse than bad — it’s useless. If fat-shaming and fat-blaming have not revolutionized the situation in all these years, such a change is unlikely to happen in the future.

As has been discussed here before, what might turn things around is an uprising against corporations that fill up boxes and bags with any old detritus that happens to be lying around the laboratory, rather than with actual, viable food. Of course, we already have that, in a way. Numerous companies and chains specialize in foodstuffs that are scientifically proven to be superior in every way, and some folks pay a lot for them.

Others cannot afford to do that, or rationalize and justify to themselves that they can’t, and either way, the result is the same. The status quo is unfair, but — as many would argue — still preferable to nobody having any choice at all.

Let’s face it

The bottom line is our kids. They grow and get jobs and fall in love, and all that good stuff. Later on, they struggle to support the families that result from those first two milestones. Then, inevitably, one way or another, our children and their children will be handed a bill for a portion of obesity’s cost.

An article titled “Obesity is linked to higher rates of bankruptcy, according to a new study,” published not long ago by a website specializing in success, makes some interesting points. The information source was a study of bankruptcy in 3,000 counties in America, which found that the economic costs of obesity are staggeringly enormous and inescapable.

The medical costs are ultimately paid by everyone, regardless of individual weight status. According to the article,

The Center[s] for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports that people who have obesity are at increased risk for many serious diseases and health conditions. This includes high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, coronary heart disease, stroke, and many types of cancers, to name a few.

Those costs are shared by other insured individuals, patients’ family members, taxpayers, doctors who are pressured into corporate employment rather than private practice, and so on. Here is the technical, financial gist of the matter, as conveyed by economics professor Masanori Kuroki,

A one-percentage-point increase in the obesity rate is associated with a 0.02-0.03 increase (or a 1.0 percent increase) in Chapter 7 bankruptcy rates per 1,000 residents and a 0.02-0.04 increase (or a 3-4 percent increase) in Chapter 13 bankruptcy rates per 1,000 residents.

In addition to the cost of obesity, there is the cost of avoiding obesity, which also fits onto the scale when weighing the overall cost to the public. Childhood Obesity News has previously quoted Dr. Katy Miller, whose words are worth repeating:

We are proposing treatment strategies that are expensive and even in the best circumstances are often unsuccessful. How can we ask someone to diet when we’re not addressing things like poverty, food scarcity and housing instability?

This is true not only of Dr. Miller’s clientele, consisting of teenagers with eating disorders, but of every person in the USA. Furthermore, weight-loss pharmaceuticals will probably not vanquish obesity, and surgery is only suitable and affordable for a small minority of concerned individuals. And the money to pay for treatments of any kind could dry up any day.

Of course, there is the ongoing debate over which is worse: obesity that leads to poverty, or poverty that leads to obesity? The simple answer is that both need to be fixed. So, instead of wasting our breath debating that fine point, we might as well just get on with vanquishing both.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Obesity is linked to higher rates of bankruptcy, according to a new study,” TheLadders.com, 09/13/20
Image by Surprising Media/Pixabay

How Can the Federal Government Help?

This current series looks at the costs of obesity to society as a whole, and many readers may experience surprise as instances and examples of harmful influence are revealed. One certainty cannot be repeated too often, and that is the unavoidable fact that childhood obesity affects all children — if not directly, then indirectly.

Our kids, no matter what shape they are in now, may grow into obese adults. Even if they do not personally share that fate, the society they live in for the rest of their lives will certainly be lavishly populated with obese adults. This fact will be reflected in the taxes they pay, as well as in many other aspects of their lives.

Many government departments are concerned about reducing the expenses that society is expected to cover, and in numerous cases, these bureaucracies can actually do something about the conditions that cause those expenses to mount.

As we have seen, adequate hydration is one of the conditions that can go some distance toward alleviating widespread obesity. The National Institutes of Health naturally want to know how workplaces, homes, and schools can be helped to maintain standards that will cause less obesity and less illness, and fewer injuries and thus, less expense to the national budget.

Consequently, that agency paid attention to a publication describing WHPPs, or workplace health promotion programs. Any WHPP that the government comes up with is intended to improve citizens’ lifestyles and consequently their health, and furthermore the prosperity and well-being of the businesses where they earn their salaries.

Every such program ever initiated has been launched with the purpose of promoting physical and mental health. By aiming to promote physical activity, such programs hope to increase workplace productivity and, ultimately, to reduce the number of sick days claimed by the workers. Furthermore, a well-designed WHPP can improve “employee productivity, working energy, and job satisfaction, as well as decrease absenteeism, enhance a sense of community, health behaviors, and overall well-being.”

That is a tall order, but the designers of these programs are quite serious and dedicated to their goals. The hope, always, is that employees who benefit from these well-intentioned programs will speak generously of them to other workers, thus making further adoption of the ideas frictionless.

When someone does not drink enough water, the body is aware of being deprived of something important, and may react by malfunctioning in ways that no employer wants to see — like changes in attitude and consciousness that can lead to expensive mistakes or counter-productive hostility, or even to internal conditions that foster actual physical illness.

The changes in people’s knowledge, attitudes, and expectations may be minor, and yet still exert significant influence on their capabilities and moods, and meaningfully impact the work environment’s overall emotional and cognitive weather. All in all,

Adequate water intake is a low-cost and effectively non-invasive strategy for individual health outcomes… Besides significantly increasing water intake, the intervention improved other health behaviors, thereby benefiting physical and mental health. Hence, promoting water consumption in workplaces till it becomes a habit may benefit the employees.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Effectiveness of a Water Intake Program at the Workplace in Physical and Mental Health Outcomes,” NIH.gov, 2022
Image by daha3131053/Pixabay