Isn’t it ridiculous that the ONLY times we have ever seen this message are times when they want to either make it socially acceptable to use expensive cholesterol-lowering drugs, or scare people into getting tested (at which point they can be put on expensive cholesterol-lowering drugs as warranted) even though they may feel healthy? I guess the rest of the time the money is in making us feel bad for being fat, whereas in these isolated instances it pays better to admit that the truth is more complicated. That is fucked up.

Ooh, that brings back memories. About a decade and a bit ago when I worked in London, there was an ad on the Tube that showed two guys – actually it was the same guy and they’d just doctored the photos, so it looked like twins, one fat, one thin.. Caption: “You can’t tell by looking who’s got high cholesterol.” Aim was to get people going in Boots, our big drugstore chain here in the UK, to get their cholesterol tested in-store.

That’s the ONE time I’ve ever seen anything that admitted this among all the other fat-is-unhealthy messages. Something that actually implied that just because you were thin didn’t mean you were OK. The fact that I remember it after all these years shows how rare it is, though.

She was a non-smoking, non-alcohol-drinking, health-food loving (dude, she sent me to grade school with turkey on whole wheat with alfalfa sprout sammiches) woman for her whole life. Didn’t keep her from being fat or getting cancer.

I’m pretty touchy about the idea that we have only ourselves to blame for our illnesses (for the most part). That’s f*cking BULLSHIT.

Yeah, probably, if she looked like Scarlett Johansson.

Anyway, nobody would send an otherwise unremarkable looking pack-a-day smoker straight to the hospital just because they smoked. And if anyone claims otherwise, I demand to see their DVD and MP3 collections and their Tivo schedules.

Would the original commenter give that same advice to a thinner person too? Probably not.

Reading Rethinking Thin, it seems there are some (ok, a tiny handful of) “obesity” researchers that are like this – not exactly supportive of fat acceptance but they know that fat bodies are pretty much genetic, because they discovered the damn gene and various complicated hormonal regulations after years and years of hard slog. And they know weight loss is only ever temporary for all but a tiny percentage. Yet “everybody knows fat is bad and all down to personal laziness and gluttony” prevails even amongst medical and scientific professionals because “fat people are gross and I shouldn’t have to look at them”.

My dad had NHL, and one of the doctors told us that he probably survived as long as he did BECAUSE he was fat. (He was diagnosed at age 50, and for his particular, apparently fairly rare subtype, they weren’t initially expecting him to live another five years…he actually lived for another fifteen, most of them in fairly good shape for someone who’d had chemo and the rest AND recovered from a major industrial accident that narrowly missed killing him partway through that time.) He was also a lover of traditional fatty British country grub, a moderately heavy drinker and before I was conceived , a smoker, but the only possible risk factor his docs ever thought was important was that in his youth, he’d worked in the fields every summer, and they used agricultural chemicals back then in the 50s that were later banned for their possibly carcinogenic effects. No way to tell by that point, of course. But he had a GP who, bless him, always advised him against trying to diet. (Probably to my mother’s disgust, knowing her!)