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Surprising no one who has ever listened to a fat, Black or brown, or chronically ill person:
Researchers who study Type 2 diabetes have reached a stark conclusion: There is no device, no drug powerful enough to counter the effects of poverty, pollution, stress, a broken food system, cities that are hard to navigate on foot and inequitable access to health care, particularly in minority communities.
“Healthy lifestyle habits are associated with a significant decrease in mortality regardless of baseline body mass index.”
The other manipulation of significant is a misuse of the concept of “statistical significance.” When a study looks at an intervention’s outcomes and find that those outcomes are “statistically significant” it simply means that it is more likely that the outcomes are a result of the intervention than that they were the result of chance. So if a study had a statistically significant finding that people using some weight loss method lost 3% of their body weight, that would mean that it was more likely that the small amount of weight loss was due to the weight loss method than that it was by chance. However, if the study conclusion were to say that people lost a “significant amount of weight” when what they meant was that the weight loss was statistically significant, they might mislead people into thinking that “significant” in this case meant “a lot of” weight.
Weight stigma impacts negatively healthcare quality and hinders public health goals. The aim of this review was to identify strategies for minimizing weight bias among healthcare professionals and explore future research directions. An electronic search was performed in PubMed, PsycINFO and Scopus (until June 2020). Studies on weight stigma reduction in healthcare students, trainees and professionals were assessed based on specific inclusion and exclusion criteria. A narrative synthesis was undertaken to analyze emerging themes. We identified five stigma reduction strategies in healthcare: (i) increased education, (ii) causal information and controllability, (iii) empathy evoking, (iv) weight-inclusive approach, and (v) mixed methodology. Weight stigma needs to be addressed early on and continuously throughout healthcare education and practice, by teaching the genetic and socioenvironmental determinants of weight, and explicitly discussing the sources, impact and implications of stigma. There is a need to move away from a solely weight-centric approach to healthcare to a health-focused weight-inclusive one. Assessing the effects of weight stigma in epidemiological research is equally important. The ethical argument and evidence base for the need to reduce weight stigma in healthcare and beyond is strong. Although evidence on long-term stigma reduction is emerging, precautionary action is needed.
A dynamic list of ongoing fat research.
“BMI has been malleable over time in response to the desires of the weight loss industry. In 1998, a committee recommended that the NIH lower the BMI categories, shaving 15-20 pounds off the definition of “healthy/normal weight.” Seven of the nine committee members had direct ties to the weight loss industry. The committee chairman was a former Executive Director and current board member of the Weight Watchers Foundation. Their recommendations gave the weight loss industry about 29 million new customers, literally overnight. Katherine Flegal (one of the two committee members without ties to the weight loss industry) explained that they were pressured to conform to the WHO standard. That standard was created by the International Ob*sity Task Force, which receives funding from Hoffman-La Roche (makers of diet drug Xenical) and Abott Laboratories (makers of diet drug Meridia) and has a primary mission of lobbying governments for pharma companies’ agendas.”
Of course, researchers are scratching their heads trying to figure out how to stop weight cycling, and can’t fathom the fact that the only way to stop weight cycling is to stop prescribing weight loss and to fight fat stigma.