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I think the intent of the article is to express that the obesity epidemic should be treated like a problem of culture and society and not an individual. Easter

I think the intent of the article is to express that the obesity epidemic should be treated like a problem of culture and society and not an individual. Eastern societies have different ways of dealing with things than Western, and that’s ok. A person should not feel humiliated, but that’s a relative feeling by culture - the law seems to be working for them. I am obese myself - whenever I visit Asia (China, Japan, Vietnam, India etc.), the difference in diet and daily walking lingers on for a bit back here in the US but I regress to the ‘cultural mean’ here very soon. At least I know I can change my habits when the right support system is around me.

mc32 2y ago
In the west it’s becoming frowned upon to observe that someone is fat (obese). Doctors have to tip-toe around the issue lest some patients become offended[1]. Some patients take it as fat (obesity)-shaming rather than what it is advice to seek being healthier. Some see being fat as something to celebrate. I don’t think I would celebrate any medical condition I had, be it fat, skinny, one-eyed, one-legged, etc. We can of course learn to cope and live with the conditions, but celebrate? That’s backwards to me. [1]https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/health/1733624/obesity-fat-shaming-patients-nhs https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/health/1733624/obesity-...
- pwdisswordfishc 2y ago
  In the USA, you mean.
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  I think it's just the pendulum swinging back the other way after it swung this way during the 19th to 20th centuries. Being fat was considered appealing in ye olde times, because it indicated to your peers that you had more access to food. Being lean became popular (again) in more recent times, especially with advances in entertainment like cinema and fashion magazines. Now that entertainment is lambasted for seeding unrealistic (and in some cases even harmful) expectations, so too has popularity for leanness waned. The pendulum will swing back again, of course. Before being fat became appealing, the ancient Greeks and Romans certainly preferred lean figures, judging by all their marble statues and other cultural artifacts.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  > Doctors have to tip-toe around the issue lest some patients become offended. As someone with a couple doctors in my family, that's BS if talking about any competent doctor. No, doctors may not say "You're super fat and better eat less", but that's because they're generally not assholes, not because they're "tip-toeing" around obesity. On the contrary, for many decades most doctors would say the same thing: "You're overweight. You have bad lab numbers (e.g. high A1C, high cholesterol, etc.) You need to diet and exercise." Of course, that advice obviously made no difference at a societal level (Americans only got more obese) largely because of things pointed out in this article: cultural impacts of things like standard portion sizes, favored cuisines, ease of walking instead of needing to take a car everywhere, etc. swamped any once or twice a year advice of "you're overweight and need to diet and exercise more".
- d4mi3n 2y ago
  There may be some of that, but there is also lazy medicine. I have several woman in my life that are above average weight/BMI for reasons that have nothing to do with their lifestyle or habits. One is a body builder. The other had their metabolism destroyed by a drug treatment. Both often receive the same, useless, non-actionable advice from most doctors they meet: exercise more, lose weight, eat less. This would be reasonable advice for most people, but falls flat when a doctor completely ignores a patients circumstances. This kind of lazy advice is commonly given to women, and more so to women of color. As a result, I’m very leery of describing all cases of disgruntled patients “sensitivity”.
  - exoverito 2y ago
    By women of color do you mean African Americans? Soul food is notoriously unhealthy and probably why Black Women are the most obese demographic in America. Changing diet would absolutely be necessary, though the deeper problem is their surrounding cultural norms.
- borski 2y ago
  Nobody sees being fat as something to celebrate. Fat people don’t like being fat. Source: I’m obese. The thing that you are misunderstanding is that people don’t want to be humiliated about their weight. It isn’t that they want to be fat, but that they don’t want to be thought of as disgusting or “less than human” for being fat. In fact, most people who struggle with their weight have worked harder to try to lose it than you can imagine. If you think “just eat less and move more” is something they’ve never heard before, you’re living in an alternate universe. It’s not always quite that simple; people have baggage, trauma, genetics, and so on. It’s not that they’re proud of being fat. It’s that they’re proud of who they are despite their weight, not because of it. The issue with doctors isn’t that they can’t tell patients they are obese and need to make dietary changes or lose weight; it’s that people will come in with unrelated issues and doctors will refuse to look past their weight to diagnose what the underlying issue might be, using weight as an easy answer to blame it on. Sometimes it’s weight; but sometimes it isn’t.
  - mc32 2y ago
    I am sympathetic to what you say. I agree with it all. Nonethless, I see where people want to celebrate it --now this could be industry taking advantage of folks and it's some perverse indoctrination, but it's there in commercials, on social media, etc.
    - borski 2y ago
      I think it’s just a response to many decades of literal shaming. I have so many friends that were put on unhealthy fad diets by their parents because they were overweight kids, and that led to them having eating disorders when they got older that many of them still struggle with, hating themselves the whole time. The goal of those ads (which I agree there are too many of today) is to help people hate themselves a little bit less. There’s a reason obesity is often comorbid with suicide.
  - rayiner 2y ago
    > The thing that you are misunderstanding is that people don’t want to be humiliated about their weight. But shaming is effective. There are of course fat Japanese people, but for the average person, shame is an effective deterrent against weight gain. That makes sense. Food doesn’t act on people’s rational senses. It targets pleasure centers. The cold logic of non-judgmental medical advice is powerless to do anything against that. Medical professionals, after all, are nearly as likely to be overweight or obese as the general population. Shaming, by contrast, targets a different, more primitive part of the brain. People will change their behavior in an effort to avoid shame in a way they won’t for abstract good advice.
- sgift 2y ago
  Someone who thinks that giving health advice to an obese person and fat shaming are the same thing has no business being in a job that requires them to give people advice. Obese people know the difference very well, no matter how often others try to gaslight them into believing that they are the same thing.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
HDThoreaun 2y ago
> Eastern societies have different ways of dealing with things than Western, and that’s ok. This is basically my point. A lot of the policies the writer points to arent transferrable to the west imo because they rely on eastern values that wouldnt fly here. In some ways the estern values are better, in some ways the western ones are, nothing wrong with that.
- rpastuszak 2y ago
  Learning from and translating these values/mentalities/ways of seeing things is an interesting and valuable problem nevertheless. (I know that these are complex and wicked problems, and using the word “translating” might sound like an oversimplification, but humans are incredibly adaptable)
- Barrin92 2y ago
  >because they rely on eastern values That's almost bordering on orientalism. The fact that everything you do has a social dimension, that the way you live impacts the people around you is a true fact, not an eastern value. It's simply that we in the West ignore this at our own peril because we ideologically pretend that every man and woman is an island. That what any individual does has no impact on their surroundings, and for that reason that society cannot impose on our "private decisions". You can actually map out obesity spreading within families and communities like a viral disease. That's why they have a 4% obesity rate spending almost nothing, why over here half the nations are obese despite spending hundreds of billions on individual livestyle fixes. They have a correct understanding of how societies work in this regard at least, we've given up on it. This is not about subjective cultural values.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  Some value systems are better than others.
  - HDThoreaun 2y ago
    I feel very strongly that government sanctioned shame culture is very bad for society. I really dont think you can say that is objectively wrong, even if it comes with downsides.
rpastuszak 2y ago
I’m the same with cigarettes. I picked up smoking again after moving to a country with a strong coffee culture. I’m older, less stressed and (hopefully) wiser than I used to be but still: I stop, but keep coming back to it for a couple of months after a longer break, because this behaviour is so deeply ingrained in my upbringing and in the culture of my new home. And there are so many socially accepted triggers. I am aware that ultimately this is my own responsibility but it’s hard. I know that I can’t fully compare obesity to nicotine addiction, these are all complex states/behaviours but I feel like the social and cultural aspect is similar in some ways. Familiarity with the environment matters so much. An example would be the percentage of Vietnam war veterans who suffered from heroin addiction during deployment but ceased using after coming back home (it was ridiculously low compared to people who lived and used in the same country.

mc32 2y ago

In the west it’s becoming frowned upon to observe that someone is fat (obese). Doctors have to tip-toe around the issue lest some patients become offended[1]. Some patients take it as fat (obesity)-shaming rather than what it is advice to seek being healthier. Some see being fat as something to celebrate. I don’t think I would celebrate any medical condition I had, be it fat, skinny, one-eyed, one-legged, etc. We can of course learn to cope and live with the conditions, but celebrate? That’s backwards to me. [1]https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/health/1733624/obesity-fat-shaming-patients-nhs https://www.express.co.uk/life-style/health/1733624/obesity-...

pwdisswordfishc 2y ago
In the USA, you mean.
Dalewyn 2y ago
I think it's just the pendulum swinging back the other way after it swung this way during the 19th to 20th centuries. Being fat was considered appealing in ye olde times, because it indicated to your peers that you had more access to food. Being lean became popular (again) in more recent times, especially with advances in entertainment like cinema and fashion magazines. Now that entertainment is lambasted for seeding unrealistic (and in some cases even harmful) expectations, so too has popularity for leanness waned. The pendulum will swing back again, of course. Before being fat became appealing, the ancient Greeks and Romans certainly preferred lean figures, judging by all their marble statues and other cultural artifacts.
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
> Doctors have to tip-toe around the issue lest some patients become offended. As someone with a couple doctors in my family, that's BS if talking about any competent doctor. No, doctors may not say "You're super fat and better eat less", but that's because they're generally not assholes, not because they're "tip-toeing" around obesity. On the contrary, for many decades most doctors would say the same thing: "You're overweight. You have bad lab numbers (e.g. high A1C, high cholesterol, etc.) You need to diet and exercise." Of course, that advice obviously made no difference at a societal level (Americans only got more obese) largely because of things pointed out in this article: cultural impacts of things like standard portion sizes, favored cuisines, ease of walking instead of needing to take a car everywhere, etc. swamped any once or twice a year advice of "you're overweight and need to diet and exercise more".
d4mi3n 2y ago
There may be some of that, but there is also lazy medicine. I have several woman in my life that are above average weight/BMI for reasons that have nothing to do with their lifestyle or habits. One is a body builder. The other had their metabolism destroyed by a drug treatment. Both often receive the same, useless, non-actionable advice from most doctors they meet: exercise more, lose weight, eat less. This would be reasonable advice for most people, but falls flat when a doctor completely ignores a patients circumstances. This kind of lazy advice is commonly given to women, and more so to women of color. As a result, I’m very leery of describing all cases of disgruntled patients “sensitivity”.
- exoverito 2y ago
  By women of color do you mean African Americans? Soul food is notoriously unhealthy and probably why Black Women are the most obese demographic in America. Changing diet would absolutely be necessary, though the deeper problem is their surrounding cultural norms.
borski 2y ago
Nobody sees being fat as something to celebrate. Fat people don’t like being fat. Source: I’m obese. The thing that you are misunderstanding is that people don’t want to be humiliated about their weight. It isn’t that they want to be fat, but that they don’t want to be thought of as disgusting or “less than human” for being fat. In fact, most people who struggle with their weight have worked harder to try to lose it than you can imagine. If you think “just eat less and move more” is something they’ve never heard before, you’re living in an alternate universe. It’s not always quite that simple; people have baggage, trauma, genetics, and so on. It’s not that they’re proud of being fat. It’s that they’re proud of who they are despite their weight, not because of it. The issue with doctors isn’t that they can’t tell patients they are obese and need to make dietary changes or lose weight; it’s that people will come in with unrelated issues and doctors will refuse to look past their weight to diagnose what the underlying issue might be, using weight as an easy answer to blame it on. Sometimes it’s weight; but sometimes it isn’t.
- mc32 2y ago
  I am sympathetic to what you say. I agree with it all. Nonethless, I see where people want to celebrate it --now this could be industry taking advantage of folks and it's some perverse indoctrination, but it's there in commercials, on social media, etc.
  - borski 2y ago
    I think it’s just a response to many decades of literal shaming. I have so many friends that were put on unhealthy fad diets by their parents because they were overweight kids, and that led to them having eating disorders when they got older that many of them still struggle with, hating themselves the whole time. The goal of those ads (which I agree there are too many of today) is to help people hate themselves a little bit less. There’s a reason obesity is often comorbid with suicide.
- rayiner 2y ago
  > The thing that you are misunderstanding is that people don’t want to be humiliated about their weight. But shaming is effective. There are of course fat Japanese people, but for the average person, shame is an effective deterrent against weight gain. That makes sense. Food doesn’t act on people’s rational senses. It targets pleasure centers. The cold logic of non-judgmental medical advice is powerless to do anything against that. Medical professionals, after all, are nearly as likely to be overweight or obese as the general population. Shaming, by contrast, targets a different, more primitive part of the brain. People will change their behavior in an effort to avoid shame in a way they won’t for abstract good advice.
sgift 2y ago
Someone who thinks that giving health advice to an obese person and fat shaming are the same thing has no business being in a job that requires them to give people advice. Obese people know the difference very well, no matter how often others try to gaslight them into believing that they are the same thing.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

HDThoreaun 2y ago

> Eastern societies have different ways of dealing with things than Western, and that’s ok. This is basically my point. A lot of the policies the writer points to arent transferrable to the west imo because they rely on eastern values that wouldnt fly here. In some ways the estern values are better, in some ways the western ones are, nothing wrong with that.

rpastuszak 2y ago
Learning from and translating these values/mentalities/ways of seeing things is an interesting and valuable problem nevertheless. (I know that these are complex and wicked problems, and using the word “translating” might sound like an oversimplification, but humans are incredibly adaptable)
Barrin92 2y ago
>because they rely on eastern values That's almost bordering on orientalism. The fact that everything you do has a social dimension, that the way you live impacts the people around you is a true fact, not an eastern value. It's simply that we in the West ignore this at our own peril because we ideologically pretend that every man and woman is an island. That what any individual does has no impact on their surroundings, and for that reason that society cannot impose on our "private decisions". You can actually map out obesity spreading within families and communities like a viral disease. That's why they have a 4% obesity rate spending almost nothing, why over here half the nations are obese despite spending hundreds of billions on individual livestyle fixes. They have a correct understanding of how societies work in this regard at least, we've given up on it. This is not about subjective cultural values.
WalterBright 2y ago
Some value systems are better than others.
- HDThoreaun 2y ago
  I feel very strongly that government sanctioned shame culture is very bad for society. I really dont think you can say that is objectively wrong, even if it comes with downsides.

rpastuszak 2y ago

I’m the same with cigarettes. I picked up smoking again after moving to a country with a strong coffee culture. I’m older, less stressed and (hopefully) wiser than I used to be but still: I stop, but keep coming back to it for a couple of months after a longer break, because this behaviour is so deeply ingrained in my upbringing and in the culture of my new home. And there are so many socially accepted triggers. I am aware that ultimately this is my own responsibility but it’s hard. I know that I can’t fully compare obesity to nicotine addiction, these are all complex states/behaviours but I feel like the social and cultural aspect is similar in some ways. Familiarity with the environment matters so much. An example would be the percentage of Vietnam war veterans who suffered from heroin addiction during deployment but ceased using after coming back home (it was ridiculously low compared to people who lived and used in the same country.