I'll grant the point about financial problems obliquely--it's less about not having the money for food and more about the way that food deserts tend to map pretty accurately onto low-income areas. Inexpensive and healthful food is available, just generally not in areas where poorer people live.
BMI
is heritable to a certain degree, but that's not a guarantee of obesity--an individual still needs to pursue unhealthy behaviors.
Work on obesity-related gene–environment interactions is still in its infancy. The evidence so far suggests that genetic predisposition is not destiny—many people who carry so-called “obesity genes” do not become overweight. Rather, it seems that eating a healthy diet and getting enough exercise may counteract some of the gene-related obesity risk.
In 2008, for example, Andreasen and colleagues demonstrated that physical activity offsets the effects of one obesity-promoting gene, a common variant of FTO. The study, conducted in 17,058 Danes, found that people who carried the obesity-promoting gene, and who were inactive, had higher BMIs than people without the gene variant who were inactive. Having a genetic predisposition to obesity did not seem to matter, however, for people who were active: Their BMIs were no higher or lower than those of people who did not have the obesity gene.
We already have an excellent example of this sort of situation: alcoholism. It's many sources include genetic predisposition, &c. &c., but simply having that predisposition is insufficient to cause an individual to become alcoholic--they may fall into it easier and faster, but they must still choose to partake repeatedly and heavily. Even if you have to buy crappy food from crappy places with absolutely no recourse, you can still take steps to minimize the harm by purchasing the least unhealthful foods. Some of my old co-workers lived in pretty bad straits, and most of them had vegetable gardens to supplement their diets.
If you're
not painfully impoverished, you had to make conscious decisions to repeatedly and continually engage in unhealthy behavior in order to become obese, just as an alcoholic does. And yet, when an alcoholic has made a mess of their body and life because of their problem, you don't see people springing to defend their behavior as perfectly natural, wholly out of their control, or even trying to rebrand them as the ideal.
It's hard to crawl back up out of a pit like that, but that doesn't mean that people should be allowed to drag others down with them or paint over the problem and pretend that it's a good thing, especially when they're children who aren't capable of effectively resisting being made to live unhealthy lives. That last one pisses me off for much the same reason that cigarette companies marketing to kids does.
Not mock people who are either content with their lives or trying to improve? Certainly! But that's not the same thing as feeding delusions, which is no more responsible than agreeing with an alcoholic that, "Yeah, you don't have a problem at all! Here, let's go drinking tonight!"
Author
Topic: Things that made you go "WTF?" today o_O (Read 14950258 times)