Fat News: Something else you can blame on your parents...

A blip in the "Morning Rounds" in the New York Times reported on a experimental procedure to help prevent childhood obesity - by intervening before birth!  According to the study, women who gain a lot of weight during pregnancy are more likely to produce overweight children and children with Type II diabetes (that'd be "adult onset" diabetes, which is, disturbingly, occurring in a growing number of children under the age of 18).  The study attempts to help pregnant women control and manage their weight during pregnancy.

More and more of what I've been reading blames obesity on childhood.  I know I read somewhere that as we are growing, we develop fat cells, too.  These never, ever go away.  It just depends on how much fat we allow to be stored in them.  This is why so many of us have such a hard time losing weight, and such an easy time gaining it back.

Of course, correlation does not prove causation, so I'm interested to know what the exact relationship between fat pregnancies and fat kids is.  A "link" is very vague, so I'm curious to know if this new study will show that childhood obesity can be shown to be caused by significant weight gain during pregnancy.  Of course, another possibility, which I'm sure this study will point out at its conclusion, is that women who gain weight during pregnancy have a predisposition to obesity, or a fat gene or something, that gets passed on to their kids, and it might not really have anything to do with pregnancy weight gain at all.

Science and statistics are fun, and the media counts on us being too ignorant or lazy to consider that a "link" really means jack shit.  But if they do discover that this particular "link" is an actual cause and effect relationship, I'd sit up and listen.

So questions I have for the researchers and for the New York Times:

1.) What does your sample look like?  Are these thin women, obese women, what?

2.) Are you trying to show that it is only weight gain during pregnancy that affects childhood obesity?  If so, you should have obese pregnant ladies in both your experimental and control groups.

3.) How are you going to control for genetic factors that may result in obesity (the "fat gene")?

Something to think about... and to blame your mom for.  "You gained 50 pounds while you were pregnant, and that's why I'm a cow!"

Fat News: Not really fat news

I need to quit obsessing over the diet thing because it's slowly but surely driving me crazy.

So! Here's some news for fat people, because it's obviously only fat people who enjoy Shakespeare, because reading Shakespeare and understanding it means sitting on your ass and positively poring over it...

Ok, that's a severe stretch. It's more just an homage to my obsession with British literature. In reality, I like Old English and Medieval literature better than the Early Modern period, but I won't bore you with that because it's, well... boring.

But anyway, the New York Times' Lede Blog posted an article today about the unveiling of a portrait believed to be of William Shakespeare that was painted from life, and not posthumously like the famous etching that you see on the front of every single Folger edition play. This is kind of cool in and of itself, but what I REALLY like are the comments to the post, with people quoting Shakespeare all over the place and generally making themselves out to be weirdo nutjobs. That's funny.

But what I really REALLY like in the comments is the argument taking place regarding authorship of Shakespeare's plays. I find it so fascinating - why are so many people so keen on proving that William Shakespeare of Stratford Upon Avon did not write the 30-some odd plays that are attributed to him? I mean, people get positively vicious about it! I'm like, rar... it was 400 years ago... authorship wasn't such a big deal then. Copyright laws as they existed back then made it so that the theater for which Shakespeare (or any other playwright wrote) owned the plays, not the author. They didn't think it was such a big deal, so why do we? (By the way - there is very little evidence to support any other person as author of Shakespeare's plays, and very little evidence to disprove that Shakespeare wrote them, while there is a wealth of information pointing to the fact that he did write them.)

I personally am a "Stratfordist." I think he wrote 'em. Analysis of his plays shows that it's the same style throughout. They can even tell that he did collaborate a few times (which was common then... you have to spit out like, a couple plays every few months - who wouldn't want some help?), but I just don't care enough, really. I like Marlowe better. Edward II, which I like to call "the gay play," is amazing. And I think Ben Jonson's comedies are funnier than Shakespeare's. The Alchemist is pure gold.

A lot of people focus on the "genius" of Shakespeare, so that we often forget that he had contemporaries. It really kind of humanizes him once you read other stuff from the period, because you realize that the individual things he wrote weren't so miraculous in comparison to a Marlowe play, for instance (and a lot of speculation says that Marlowe would have been the playwright of the period instead of Shakespeare if he hadn't been murdered). What's interesting about Shakespeare is that he wrote so in so many genres. Marlowe, for instance, sticks to tragedy. Jonson, to city comedies (a genre that Shakespeare, by the way, never touched).

But it's really fascinating if you've spent years studying this kind of stuff, only to see it argued over by third- and fourth-rate scholars on the internets (I'm not claiming I'm first- or even second-rate, but I know my facts and my limitations).

So if you're a wee-bit bookish, like I am, you might enjoy the article, and you'll enjoy the comments following it even more. And if you aren't bookish, you've probably seen that etching around on something, so this "new" image of Shakespeare is kind of thrilling, in that he appears so awake, so alert, and with so much humanity instead of the pomp and double-chinnedness of other representations. Also, check out this slideshow of other images of Shakespeare, all of them, at some point, either debunked or dismissed as accurate representations of William Shakespeare.

One more note... A lot of people were bitching about how Shakespeare looks bald in the etching, but doesn't in this "new" portrait. I have an explanation for that. In Early Modern England, people were stupid enough to believe that big forehead = big brain. Queen Elizabeth I actually plucked her hair out to about halfway to the back of her skull to present the illusion that she had this big ol' forehead, and was therefore smarter than everybody else. This perhaps could explain the baldness vs. full hairline phenomenon that we see between the Cobbe painting and the widely accepted Folger etching.

Everyone make fun of me for being a dork now, ok? I don't even LIKE Shakespeare that much, but anything related to early British literature makes me sit up and go, "Wha???"

Check out the full article, and the lovely, lovely painting, here.

Fat News: The Economy of Obesity

On February 8, 2009, the New York Times interviewed health economist and author of the book, The Fattening of America, Eric Finkelstein, about the cost-benefit side of obesity.  Obesity is often correlated with lower socioeconomic status, so it surprised me to learn that the current "obesity epidemic" (a term which Finkelstein debunks in this interview) is a result of a complex and healthy economy.

Basically, it boils down to the fact that the development of certain technologies, such as convenience food, microwaves, even power windows in our cars, are all contributors to obesity in America.  And, Finkelstein says, obesity can often be explained away as a lifestyle choice, especially now that health care for obesity-related illnesses has become cheaper.  In fact, obese Americans are currently healthier than "normal weight" Americans were thirty years ago, and there is no significant relation between obesity and mortality in this country.

It's kind of interesting to look at this issue from an economic standpoint, especially since many of the arguments thin Americans like to make about how awful fat people are for wasting taxpayer moola (i.e. - I don't want my tax dollars going to pay for fatty's health care cost when fatty could just get on a treadmill and prevent it) are false.

We should feel no shame about our fatness, in essence, since there is apparently no significant cost inflicted upon the government/taxpayers to keep fat people alive and healthy (ironic, right? - healthy fat people... but it's true in a lot of cases that overweight and obese people can be healthy).  This is not to say that Finkelstein does not clearly intimate that people should be trying to lose weight, but he says that fiscally and rationally, it makes no sense to try to enact legislation to try to get obese adults to lose weight, since the cost inflicted upon the rest of America appears, at this point, to be negligible at best.  Thank God.  I had more Big Brother than I could stand in the form of the Patriot Act.

Click here to read the full article.

Fat News: Nutrition Facts are on the Menu for Good in New York

An article in yesterday's Washington Post reported that, despite the wishes of certain fat-peddling vendors, caloric values of foods will remain on restaurant menu boards in the state of New York. Vendors like McDonalds claimed that the requirement was a violation of the restaurants' first amendment rights. Bullhockey! Not putting caloric values there is a violation of my right to know what the heck I'm putting in my body!

Check out the full article here.

Fat News: Artificial Sweetners: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

The New York Times ran an article on artificial sweetners yesterday, which made me oh so happy (Brody, Jane E. "Sweeteners: Real Aid or Excuse to Indulge?" The New York Times. 16 February 2009.) I was delighted to discover that the vast majority of non-caloric sweeteners that we often use (for example, the high amounts of aspartame I consume in the form of Diet Coke) have not been linked to cancer (they reported on one study done in the 60s that found that the risk of developing bladder cancer increases when two non-caloric sweeteners are combined).

The article reported that people attempting to lose weight can use non-caloric sweeteners as an effective substitute for regular sugar, but one should be careful about using artificial sweeteners like Splenda in exchange for something high in calories (i.e. - putting Sweet & Low in your coffee doesn't make up for your apple pie and ice cream).

Good news for all of us Diet Coke fiends out there... I know I'm not alone. Those of you who are into regular soda - you can cut down on your caloric intake SO MUCH by simply switching from regular to Diet. I know that the taste is different... but if I can make myself go from 2% milk to skim, I know you can do it!

Check out the full article here.