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Hey, have you heard? Being overweight is bad for you, and can hamper your interaction with other people.
In other news, water is wet, the sky is blue, and Duke Nukem Forever still hasn’t been released.
Unremitting snark aside, it’s becoming increasingly hard to ignore the myriad ways in which being overweight is bad news. It seems like researchers — whether they’re doing hard science like clinical studies, or softer, more subjective stuff like gauging personal interactions — are uncovering more and more downsides that can result from it.
“Eat less and exercise more to lose weight,” remains a boring, un-sexy mantra in much the same way that “Drive slower to save gas” or “Don’t steal aggro from the tank” are. Maybe we shouldn’t have hired the asylum denizens from Crazy People to do the marketing. I mean, “Volvo: Boxy, But Good”? We should have seen this coming.
The scientists whose report appeared in the November issue of the Journal of General Internal Medicine were a bit vague in their study, merely asking doctors on a scale of 1-5 how much they respected a collection of patients relative to “an average patient.” Subjective value judgments are tricky at best, but the general trend for more overweight patients to be viewed with less respect is troubling, even if it’s subconscious. There wasn’t any investigation into any potential correlation between this attitude and the level of care delivered, but the authors did speculate that this less-favorable attitude may dissuade heavier folks from seeing their doctor as often, which could result in negative health issues to snowball.
Findings by the American Institute for Cancer Research don’t paint a pretty picture. Their figures, based on about 1.6 million cancer patients, reveals that obesity may be the primary factor in r0ughly 65,000 annual cancer diagnoses — about half of which are breast cancer, a third are endometrial cancer, and a sixth are colorectal cancer. In case that wasn’t enough bad news, being chronically overweight can turn our livers into foie gras.
I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that’s probably a bad thing, too.
[BBC link via diet-blog.com]
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