Policy incoherence.

When you scan a lot of sites, substacks, twitter accounts etc. in order to obtain your daily input of data, you of course encounter a lot of chaff for very little wheat.  In doing so, though, you do get an insight as to which vested interests are pushing which ideas.

One I have seen a fair amount of lately (perhaps the past year or more) has been the argument that not only is fat beautiful but it is healthy as well.  The unaesthetic accompanying photos are supplemented by clearly unscientific claims.  

I don't spend time on such claims and headlines because there are actually useful arguments and articles on innumerable other topics in which I am interested.  I just note the trend of false claims and wonder why they are being made.

Fortunately Handwaving Freakoutery, a substack newsletter which is actually interesting and has useful information on many worthy topics, addresses the issue.  From Yumi Nu and the Sports Illustrated Cover by Handwaving Freakoutery.  The subheading is On the media's treatment of the social acceptance of unhealthy habits.

The best way to visualize how healthy or unhealthy a life choice is, I think, is to compare it to cigarette smoking. Talking heads in the United States went so full-bore against cigarettes that smoking one can get you kicked out of bars full of people actively smoking weed. I know this, because it happened to me personally in Oakland in the late 1990s. Cigarettes are literally the devil, so mathematically comparing life choices to the Literal Devil seems like a good way to develop an intuitive frame. Here’s a comparison between weight and cigarettes.

Click to enlarge.

This figure from the New England Journal of Medicine in 2010 shows that having a body mass index (BMI) of somewhere around 43 reduces your life span the same amount as being a routine pack or more a day smoker. The overweight Woke chime in here and say “yes but you can be totally healthy your entire life while overweight.” While this is true, the same is true for smoking. That just means you made it to the far right corner of the graph. Anecdotes are not data, and when you compare the data for smoking and the data for severe obesity, the data yield comparable results.

“But you can quit smoking!” Yes, and you can quit eating Hot Pockets. “But some people can’t help themselves!” Yes, and cigarettes are also addictive. “But we can get people to never start cigarettes so they avoid nicotine addiction!” Yes, and you can do the same thing with food by not feeding your children sugar and processed factory junk. The whole argument maps over perfectly.

Yumi Nu’s BMI is difficult to calculate because there are conflicting sources of information on her height and weight. Some websites have her listed at five feet six inches tall, while others say she’s five feet eleven inches tall. Most current talking heads peg her at 242 ponds. Depending on which height measurement is correct, her BMI is either 33.7, landing her slightly to the left of the solid red line in the graph, or 39.1, landing her very close to the dashed red line. Translated loosely, her body choices are identical from a health perspective of being somewhere between a casual smoker and a daily habit smoker. That’s the price of her Deal with the Devil. Would I make that choice? I don’t know, but I bet she makes a pile more money than I do.

My interpretation is that choosing to smoke a pack a day of cigarettes is the equivalent to being borderline severely obese.  In both cases you have effectively reduced your likely longevity by ten years.  

A libertarian would say fine - your body, your choices.  A puritanical moralist/statist would argue against both cigarette smoking and obesity as detrimental to the individual and to the community.  There really is no philosophical grounds that I can think of under which it is not OK to smoke but it is OK to be obese.  That is a quixotic position to take.

Probably mostly a function of luxury beliefs which do not need either empirical evidence or logical consistency since those luxury beliefs are intended for status signaling rather than decision-making.