Anorexia Nervosa, Obesity, Moral Panic and Christina Hoff Sommers

Jill and Piny both have good posts at Feministe regarding Anorexia Nervosa. My favorite quote is from Jill’s post:

And as for denial, on a most basic level, fuck that. Sorry, but why are the values of self-sacrifice only brought up when we’re talking about women’s bodies? We’re supposed to deny ourselves food in order to stay thin so that someone else (always male) will enjoy looking at us; we’re supposed to deny ourselves sex so that the virginity fetishists can have an all-access pass once we’re married; and even then we’re supposed to sacrifice all of our own wants and needs for our children and our husband, and still deny sex if we don’t want any more babies. I call bullshit. I’ve had enough of the cult of female martyrdom, and I feel no need to let other people tell me that I should feel guilty for enjoying pleasures like food and sex. I own a vibrator, I use birth control, and I make myself steak au poivre and drink good red wine every Friday night. These things bring me far more pleasure than skinny thighs or blood on my wedding-night bedsheets. And if that makes me an over-indulgent pig, then so be it.

Sing it, sister!

But the main reason I’m posting is because of this quote, from a post on the blog “Cosmic Tap”:

My personal offhand estimate had been that we might lose about 100 Americans annually to anorexia. My research this morning showed that I was not far off — a 2001 study by the University of British Columbia’s Department of Psychology of every American death for the most recently available five year period showed only 724 people with anorexia as a causal factor – 145 per year. Christina Hoff-Sommers, in her research for the book Who Stole Feminism, came up with a number below half that. In a presentation to the International Congress of Psychology, one expert (Dr. Paul Hewitt) estimated a death rate for anorexia of 6.6 per 100,000 deaths. Even if you assume that sufferers outnumber deaths by a few orders of magnitude, it would still seem that all objective evidence shows the health impact on Americans from anorexia is statistically nil. Now, I know that doesn’t make for very good shock journalism, but it doesn’t change the uncomfortable fact that it’s true.

Hoff-Sommers claimed that between 50 and a hundred Americans a year die from anorexia – but her claim was based on an appalling misunderstanding of mortality statistics. She’s right that only a tiny number of Americans have “anorexia” credited as their cause of death, but that’s not the relevant question.

According to the NIMH, anorexics typically die due to “complications of the disorder, such as cardiac arrest or electrolyte imbalance,” not anorexia itself. Hoff-Sommers might as well have claimed that because so few people have “cigarettes” written on their death certificate, smoking hardly ever causes any deaths.

So what’s the real number? There are about 19 million American women between ages 15 and 24; of those, somewhere between 190,000 and 380,000 have anorexia (it’s estimated that 1-2% of young women suffer from anorexia). About 0.56% – somewhere between one and two thousand – of those die of anorexia-related causes each year. (This is a conservative estimate, both because some studies have found a much higher long-term mortality rate, and because not everyone with anorexia is a young woman age 15-24).

Hoff-Sommers used the mistaken “100 deaths” statistic to refute an also-mistaken number some feminists used in the early 1990s. She was right to correct the feminists – but, unlike Hoff-Sommers, the feminists were willing to retract their mistaken statistic. Hoff-Sommers has never corrected or retracted her false “100 deaths from anorexia” figure.

* * *

Anthony at The Cosmic Tap complains that concern for anorexia is a “moral panic” – but it’s clear that he’s uncritically bought into a far more pervasive and popular moral panic, fat-hating. He complains that two-thirds of Americans are “overweight” and jumps from this to all the usual cliches about Americans stuffing their faces and so forth. But there’s no evidence that fat people eat significantly more than thin people.

Anthony also doesn’t mention that the “two-thirds” statistic defines anyone with a BMI (body mass index) over 25 as “overweight.” But by that standard, merely being muscular can make someone “overweight” (Brad Pitt is a famous example – what a porker!).

More substantively, as a JAMA study published last year showed, “overweight” Americans with BMIs of 25-30 actually live longer than Americans who aren’t overweight. The panic over weight has very little to do with health. It is instead a true moral panic – a reflection of the fear that Americans are over-indulgent and pleasure-driven. As Elkins wrote, “Eating is the new sex. Anti-fat hysteria is the new Puritanism.”

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44 Responses to Anorexia Nervosa, Obesity, Moral Panic and Christina Hoff Sommers

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  5. 5
    tigtog says:

    So, just as the famous quote goes that fundamentalists are ruled by “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, is enjoying sex” the dietarists are ruled by the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, is enjoying their tastebuds?

  6. 6
    piny says:

    In my totally unscientific way, I’m also curious about the long-term health effects of less-severe eating disorders and whether they’ll shorten lifespans. If you don’t actually damage your cardiovascular system irreparably but spend a few years in your teens/early twenties chugging coffee and abstaining from dairy products, what happens when you hit seventy?

  7. 7
    Barbara says:

    piny, you don’t have to wait until you are 70. There is a lot of medical literature on starvation and it is not pretty. Basically, when you go into starvation status your body responds by, first and foremost, protecting your brain. Everything else is at risk.

    Side effects from prolonged undernutrition include significant, and significantly advanced, bone loss and its attendant effects, and damage to the gastrointestinal tract, sometimes severe — like colitis, and frequently less severe, like GERD (especially associated with bulimia). Bulimic and anorectic people also risk severe dental problems.

    Karen Carpenter pretty clearly died of a heart attack induced by anorectic behavior. I suspect the heart and other organs could be permanently damaged and weakened by continually engaging in behavior that throws key chemicals (calcium, sodium, potassium) out of balance or results in severe muscle atrophy. When in starvation mode, the body raids itself for energy and nutrition — using fat stores, of course, but also muscle if that’s all that’s available.

    (Parenthetically, what is it with pointing to the number of dead as the sum and substance of public health concern? Do we stop being concerned about the health of premature babies, for instance, merely because they didn’t die shortly after birth?)

  8. 8
    redbraidy says:

    http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/thin/

    This is a webpage associated with a nova program about eating disorders. It has some of the long term effects of various eating disorders, whether or not the person was critically ill. I don’t have time to look for the exact clip, but somewhere in the program was a clip about a former prima ballerina whose osteoporosis due to near starvation during her dancing days has her in a walker in her 50s? 60s?

    I saw the program when it originally aired, and that segment has stuck with me ever since. I have never had an eating disorder, and I’m not thin and I’m not fat, but I did at one time dance, and yeah, quit because I didn’t have the body of a dancer nor the inclination to force myself to re-shape mine into one (nor would I have ever been a professional, I didn’t have the talent). But her story really struck me, and I remembered all the girls in my dance classes and the power that food had over them and I wonder how many of them have health issues now that we are in our 40s.

  9. 9
    silverside says:

    I don’t know that it necessarily means that there is no concern about the non-fatal effects of anorexia. Having just completed a community study with lots of indicators, I know that only certain indicators are widely collected (based partly on the priorities of the agencies involved, how easy they are to define and collect) and that they only tell part of the story. I suspect that deaths related to eating disorders are one of the few indicators available. Unless doctors are required to report diagnosed cases (as they do with cancer) that data may not be available, or may be of limited quantity. Other possible data might include surveys of certain populations regarding self-defined behavior, or samples. All of these data sources have their strengths and weaknesses.

  10. 10
    piny says:

    piny, you don’t have to wait until you are 70. There is a lot of medical literature on starvation and it is not pretty. Basically, when you go into starvation status your body responds by, first and foremost, protecting your brain. Everything else is at risk.

    Side effects from prolonged undernutrition include significant, and significantly advanced, bone loss and its attendant effects, and damage to the gastrointestinal tract, sometimes severe … like colitis, and frequently less severe, like GERD (especially associated with bulimia). Bulimic and anorectic people also risk severe dental problems.

    Um, if you’ll follow the link to my first post in the series, you’ll see that I’m an eating-disorder survivor. I am well aware of the consequences of starvation.

    What I’m wondering about are not the health problems–short-term or long-term–associated with severe undernutrition. I’m wondering about the health problems associated with more moderate–although that word should never be used in the context of a disordered mindset–self-deprivation.

    I didn’t encounter very many women whose eating habits made them emaciated. I have met a multitude who think it’s a good idea to eat nothing but salads for a few days after “indulging” at a party, or who avoid dairy because they think it’ll make them fat. I’m wondering about the health consequences of those decisions. A woman who doesn’t nourish herself in that way may never reach “starvation status,” but how strong will her bones be when she’s old?

  11. 11
    piny says:

    I suspect that deaths related to eating disorders are one of the few indicators available.

    While Amp’s information on the prevalence of eating disorders is much appreciated, my problem–I’m not speaking for Jill, whose post covered slightly different grounds of criticism–wasn’t quite that the number of eating disorder deaths was being taken as an indicator of the number of eating disorder sufferers. My problem was that Anthony was engaging in a calculus that would not place disordered behavior or disordered self-perception in the “Not of the Good” category so long as the person engaging in them wasn’t actually starving herself towards death.

    IOW, it’s perfectly okay to hate your body and obsess over every calorie that goes into it, as long as your target weight isn’t totally unsustainable and your routines superficially normal. And if you’re chunky but sane and deeply committed to nutritious eating and regular exercise, you need to try to develop a little of that self-hatred so you can trim that flab off your waist.

  12. 12
    Barbar says:

    We’re supposed to deny ourselves food in order to stay thin so that someone else (always male) will enjoy looking at us

    I don’t think women who starve themselves are likely to look very attractive to men (and I honestly don’t understand who elevated super-skinny people like Kate Moss to universal sex symbol status).

    (If this comment is just a bit of idiocy in a serious discussion about the health consequences of anorexia, please ignore; I don’t mean to drag the discussion downward.)

  13. 13
    Sally1.0 says:

    Karen Carpenter pretty clearly died of a heart attack induced by anorectic behavior.

    I’ve heard that one of the major contributing factors to Karen Carpenter’s death was ipecac abuse. When I was in eating disorder treatment, a lot of inpatient facilities wouldn’t take patients who had abused ipecac, because they were at risk for sudden death.

    I think I may have a strange take on all of this. I’m annoyed by a lot of discussions of anorexia. I’m not sure I think there’s a moral panic, but I do think there’s a tendency to fetishize anorexics, and I do think there’s a kind of prurient, icky tone to a lot of discussions of anorexia. It’s just terrible, terrible what anorexics are doing to themselves, but it’s also really fascinating, so let’s discuss exactly how many calories they eat and how little they weigh and how alluringly delicate and tiny they are. Nobody ever says that anorexia makes you selfish and very boring, which is my experience. I don’t think we should stigmitize anorexics (well, maybe I do. I’m still working through a lot of guilt about my eating disorder), but it would be nice if discussions of anorexia didn’t romanticize it quite so much. And I think that, because there’s something fascinating about tiny women and girls, discussions of eating disorders tend to focus on very thin sufferers, when many women with EDs aren’t tiny and delicate.

    But I also think that Anthony’s article was part of a larger trend, which is to use anorexia as a jumping-off point for garden-variety fat-bashing. The people who engage in that tactic don’t have anything interesting to say about anorexia, because they’re a lot less interested in anorexia than in the fat-bashing. And honestly, fat-bashing is pretty triggering even for a thin ED-survivor such as me. So their crap is bad for fat people and bad for people with EDs. It’s shitty behavior all around.

  14. 14
    Mandolin says:

    And bad for fat people who have EDs.

    (My lovely, liberal, and overweight mother to me, when I mentioned some stuff at a gym that was potentially ED triggering: Oh, well, most everyone in here is fat, so that shouldn’t be a problem.)

  15. 15
    redbraidy says:

    Piny, I think the nova website might have some info about the effects of less obvious self-deprivation, including the effects of not eating dairy. There was a lot of material covered in the series and a lot of material on the website; I just remembered the ballerina because of my own experiences as a vaguely aspiring dancer (I took ballet classes from early childhood to high school). I know there was a segment about some studies about the ‘average’ woman who does not eat dairy, even though they wouldn’t necessarily be considered to have an eating disorder.

  16. 16
    Hugo says:

    Just in case everyone missed Jill’s vibrator and her carnal appetite for steak the first time… ;-)

    On the subject of eating habits, when I’m working out I’m consuming 4000 calories a day minimum, usually more. Lots of heavier people are eating a lot less. When it comes to consuming food, I overeat. Does the fact that I’ve got a fast metabolism and an exercise obsession make me more virtuous? I think not.

  17. 17
    piny says:

    I think I may have a strange take on all of this. I’m annoyed by a lot of discussions of anorexia. I’m not sure I think there’s a moral panic, but I do think there’s a tendency to fetishize anorexics, and I do think there’s a kind of prurient, icky tone to a lot of discussions of anorexia. It’s just terrible, terrible what anorexics are doing to themselves, but it’s also really fascinating, so let’s discuss exactly how many calories they eat and how little they weigh and how alluringly delicate and tiny they are. Nobody ever says that anorexia makes you selfish and very boring, which is my experience. I don’t think we should stigmitize anorexics (well, maybe I do. I’m still working through a lot of guilt about my eating disorder), but it would be nice if discussions of anorexia didn’t romanticize it quite so much. And I think that, because there’s something fascinating about tiny women and girls, discussions of eating disorders tend to focus on very thin sufferers, when many women with EDs aren’t tiny and delicate.

    Hm. This read makes a lot of sense, from the popular portrayals I’ve encountered. I think that the focus on disordered rituals allows us to reduce the disorder to a few signal behaviors (e.g. purging) and therefore claim that people without those behaviors (e.g. someone who “only” chain-smokes or takes Hydroxicut to keep the weight off) aren’t ill. But the point about fetishization was well-made…I need to mull this over. There are other medicalized circumstances when it’s okay to pick over a woman’s body like a Cornish game hen; they tend to be the most visible/shallow examples of conditions that most women live with if not in.

  18. 18
    lucia says:

    but spend a few years in your teens/early twenties chugging coffee and abstaining from dairy products, what happens when you hit seventy?
    I’m assuming you are wondering about people who don’t go so far as to actually get anorexia. The answer is: if you are a woman, break your hip, fall and die of something else within a year of breaking your hip. Osteoporosis is very common in older women. Drugs to encourage bone regrowth now exist, but it’s something small women in particular need to be aware of.

  19. 19
    Arwen says:

    Piny: I don’t know if this counts, but my 6 month sojourn with anorexia in High School left me weaker than a kitten in my arms for many years after. I’m better now with lots of exercise, 20 years later, but for a long time I couldn’t open heavy doors without using my other muscle groups and 2 pounds was a workout on the free weights.
    No doubt lack of muscle meant a lower metabolism, which in turn meant that post-anorexia I put on overweight and kept gaining it even on a rigorously followed 1500 calorie diet. (And, should there be skeptics, I wasn’t cheating, and I measured everything. I had been anorexic, and pretty good at the whole controlling intake thing.)
    Anyway, that sort of yo-yo post anorexic effect on endomorphs like me is doubtless exactly the kind of stress that Amp’s posted about other places.

    Thank god I had a doctor who intervened with the line, “Never diet again.” I stopped counting calories, got “fat”, and then slowly lost weight as other systems recovered. But I think it was doubtless a physical, as well as mental, stress, with long term system ramifications.

  20. 20
    Nancy Lebovitz says:

    Last I heard, a lot of the people who die don’t get autopsied, at least in the US–someone has to pay for an autopsy, and frequently no one wants to. The means that any stats you’ve got about cause of death are extremely suspect.

    I don’t think women go into extreme starvation to attract men, though I’ve read accounts of getting more compliments at weights low enough to involve quite a bit of misery. However, I think there are at least two things other than attracting men involved in dieting/anorexia: pressure from other women, and fear of being hated for being fat.

  21. 21
    mythago says:

    Er, folks, not everybody comes from an ethnic group where everybody eats dairy products well into adulthood and nobody is “lactose intolerant.” Just because you may have grown up among the Butter People doesn’t mean that women who didn’t are freaky anorexics, destined to die of a broken hip.

  22. 22
    Mendy says:

    Nancy,

    I think you’ve hit upon something. I’ve never been small, and for my entire life from my pre-teens until now I have felt tremendous pressure from other women to “diet” to be a size five or six. I have never had trouble attracting men. Even at my biggest (during a severe back injury) I still had male attention.

    No, rather than the pressure coming from males… I felt that pressure to be perfectly thin coming directly from the women in my life. My Grandmother in particular would tell me “I’d let myself go” and that “skinny girls get the cute boys”… etc, etc.

    All of that pressure created a love/hate relationship with food that I’ve only started to come out from under in the past few years.

  23. 23
    Mendy says:

    I just reread the previous post, and I realize it sounds as though I’m not blaming our patriarchal society. I do blame patriarchy for most of this, but in my experience it wasn’t men, directly, propogating the problem it was the women closest to me.

    And no, I don’t go out of my way to attract male attention. In fact, the only man I want to attract is my mate of five years.

  24. 24
    Shannon says:

    mythago, calcium fortified orange juice and supplements work wonders. I tend to not eat a lot of diary because I’m slightly lactose intolerant.

  25. 25
    Mikko says:

    “We’re supposed to deny ourselves food in order to stay thin so that someone else (always male) will enjoy looking at us.”

    Just recently you blogged about how the amount of one’s eating doesn’t correlate with weight.

    (To be perfectly fair, you only argued that this holds between normal-weight and obese people, but it just seems weird that with the morbidly underweight food suddenly becomes an indicating variable. The former theory is pretty much shot down by the notion of feederism.)

  26. 26
    lucia says:

    Er, folks, not everybody comes from an ethnic group where everybody eats dairy products well into adulthood and nobody is “lactose intolerant.”

    Your right. I should have given a longer answer instead of making a broad general statement. White and/or asian women are prone to osteoporosis, particularly if they avoid dairy products in order to keep their weight down.

    While osteoporosis occurs in all ethnic groups, it is less prevalent in people with African ancestry. Lactose intolerance is fairly common in adults, but very uncommon in people with northern European ancestry.

    Still, for many women, avoiding dairy with the intention of controling weight puts them at risk of osteoporsis. Avoiding it for other reasons may not be as big a problem. (And if you really don’t want to consume dairy, there’s always broccoli and green leafy veggies.)

  27. 27
    Rob says:

    Mikko, I noticed that too. I’m surprised no one jumped on Hugo for saying that exercise burned off calories.

    The way FAs hate feederism always shocked me. I guess obese women don’t want men with mental illnesses. Or maybe they just don’t want to get fatter. But I’m not sure why they think that eating more would make them gain weight.

  28. 28
    piny says:

    Er, folks, not everybody comes from an ethnic group where everybody eats dairy products well into adulthood and nobody is “lactose intolerant.” Just because you may have grown up among the Butter People doesn’t mean that women who didn’t are freaky anorexics, destined to die of a broken hip.

    Actually, everyone on my mom’s side is lactose intolerant. And frequently allergic to soy.

    You’re right; like lucia said, the generalizations were unconsidered. I said a few times that I definitely was not talking about “freaky anorexics” (and thanks so much!), but about women who opt out of nourishing foods because they’re worried about heaviness–IOW, how our weight-not-health objective might be damaging women in subtler ways. Dairy is one example among many; I used it because osteoporosis, unlike a great many other health problems, is one that the yogurt lobbyists have made visible.

    (To be perfectly fair, you only argued that this holds between normal-weight and obese people, but it just seems weird that with the morbidly underweight food suddenly becomes an indicating variable. The former theory is pretty much shot down by the notion of feederism.)

    Yes, it’s totally inconsistent to point out that significant weight loss for the obese frequently involves starvation and then to post about how people who starve themselves tend to lose weight.

  29. 29
    Rob says:

    Eating 1000 fewer calories a day is not starvation if one is eating 3000 calories a day. Thinking that is starvation is how people get really obese.

  30. 30
    littlem says:

    Re:
    “I just reread the previous post, and I realize it sounds as though I’m not blaming our patriarchal society. I do blame patriarchy for most of this, but in my experience it wasn’t men, directly, propogating the problem it was the women closest to me.”

    Mendy, only because the men won’t discuss it, not directly with a woman. Go over to fattymcblog.blogspot.com and read the “Would You Date a Fat Girl” post? The girls did an experiment permitting men from Craigslist to respond anonymously to that inquiry. Now, there are a lot of mouth-breathers on Craigslist, but I think the responses (and the comments on the experiment) point to some interesting male variants on the type of female presure you were just talking about.

    Professor Hugo Schwyzer also has a post on the relationship between men’s perception of their homosocial status and how it’s related to the perceived hewing of their mate/wife/girlfriend to prevailing social standards of beauty, and today that means thin thin thin. So even though I certainly don’t deny the pressure we women put on each other, don’t underestimate the equal – although generally more silent – role of men in this mess.

  31. 31
    littlem says:

    Here is the link to FMB.

    Here is Hugo’s first post on the subject.

    (Thanks for the link lesson for those of us who are bloggingly challenged, Amp – hope I did it right.)

  32. 32
    Mikko says:

    Eating 1000 fewer calories a day is not starvation if one is eating 3000 calories a day. Thinking that is starvation is how people get really obese.

    I think you’re referring to kilocalories instead of just calories (2000 cal diet would certainly kill anyone, no matter how low hir metabolism).

    Even with that assumption, I have to disagree a bit. If a person’s metabolic rate is over 2000kcal per day, then changing to a 2000kcal diet can have two consequences:

    1) The fat storaged in a person’s body (about 3500kcal per pound of fat I think) will get transformed into energy in response to the lowered energy intake.
    2) The person’s metabolic rate will drop in response to the lowered energy intake.

    It is the second option that makes weight-loss a difficult “non-linear” phenomenon. Certainly, if there were no metabolic differences, then we could just stick numbers into simple formulas and get a guaranteed weight loss plan.

    (This doesn’t change my overall believe that eating and weight are correlated, though.)

  33. 33
    Rob says:

    of course I meant capital C Calories. I didn’t want anyone to start consuming 1000 times the food they do now. Metabolism only slows so much, and no known person has ever consumed 1200 kcal a day or less in a metabolic chamber without losing weight.

  34. 34
    mythago says:

    piny, I agree with the larger point you were making; I got irritated with the generalities partly because I get tired of the “Drink milk or DIE!” messages women are bombarded with, and partly because I’m a lawyer. ;)

    shannon, word. I even get calcium-fortified stuff (and tofu) for my kids, who I’m sad to say are themselves members of the Butter People Clan and technically don’t need it.

  35. 35
    Ed says:

    Undereating is terrible, no doubt. I am a bit of a health nut and in my family you eat if you are sick, eat if you are healthy, eat if you are sad, eat if you are happy…so on and so forth. Eating fixes pretty much everything. I would have to say though that overeating is as much an eating disorder as undereating. And perhaps, in our new enlightened world, we should have a way of expressing poor eating habits as an ED as well. People talk about calorie intake and often ignore the nutritional value of those calories. I know this is old and will probably be seen as cliche’ but, “everything in moderation”.

  36. 36
    Sally1.0 says:

    I am really not crazy about equating “poor eating habits” with eating disorders. As piny pointed out somewhere, eating disorders aren’t just destructive because of inadequate nutrition or because of the way they harm one’s body. They’re also destructive because they totally take over your life. When I was anorexic, I could not think about anything but food and weight. I couldn’t do my school work. I alienated all of my friends, because I never talked about anything but food and weight. I compulsively read cookbooks, and I insisted on cooking people elaborate meals that I never touched. I dreamed about food and woke up in a panic that I’d actually eaten the things I had dreamed about. I was my eating disorder. There was nothing else to me. And I think that’s a really different thing from eating too much McDonalds or getting too much salt or mindlessly snacking on doritoes when you’re watching T.V. If one is eating compulsively (say, hoarding food or scheduling one’s life so that one can binge without being discovered), one may have an eating disorder. But while poor eating habits may be something people should address, but that doesn’t mean they’re eating disorders.

  37. 37
    piny says:

    piny, I agree with the larger point you were making; I got irritated with the generalities partly because I get tired of the “Drink milk or DIE!” messages women are bombarded with, and partly because I’m a lawyer. ;)

    Isn’t it more like, “Eat Yoplait or DIE!”?

  38. 38
    piny says:

    I am really not crazy about equating “poor eating habits” with eating disorders.

    I wouldn’t make that mistake, either…but I think there is support for the argument that a lot of “poor eating habits” in one direction or another are the result of a culture with some ideas about food that are, erm, familiar to eating-disorder survivors. IOW, if we tend to value appearance over health, then we’re gonna tend to eat poorly.

  39. 39
    mythago says:

    Isn’t it more like, “Eat Yoplait or DIE!”?

    For “Yoplait” read “whatever sweetened diet-marketed yogurt product just hit the market”, plus of course we are supposed to drink glasses upon glasses of moo juice.

  40. 40
    lucia says:

    of course we are supposed to drink glasses upon glasses of moo juice.I think they are recommending 3 servings of diary now– up from two.

    I happen to love dairy, particularly in the form of hot chocolote. Still, I’m not sure why they raised recommendation is since 3 servings would give you 90% of your calcium needs from dairy alone. Maybe they assume people won’t follow the recommendation on green leafy veggies or other foods containing calcium?

    In any case, lack of weight bearing exercise seems implicated in osteoporosis, so even drinking milk, or taking supplements, may not help if you are very sedentary.

  41. 41
    alsis39.75 says:

    Yoplait sucks. And their containers are the wrong shape to make slug traps, too. Brown cow is better for both the original and secondary purpose. ;)

    I’d add the caveat that everyone should learn to love greens. It shouldn’t be too hard, once you buy a cast-iron pan and some decent olive oil. Mmmm…

  42. 42
    Sally1.0 says:

    IOW, if we tend to value appearance over health, then we’re gonna tend to eat poorly.

    Yeah, that’s definitely true. And lord knows a lot of low-calorie processed foods are nutritionally useless. I’m mostly just responding to the “if undereating is an eating disorder, why isn’t overeating one, too?” meme that seems to be floating around. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the compulsive aspect that makes an eating disorder. If you just find it easier to live on ramen and jello, that may be a bad call, but it’s not necessarily an eating disorder.

    Maybe they assume people won’t follow the recommendation on green leafy veggies or other foods containing calcium?

    Possibly. But it may also be that the dairy industry has more influence than they should over the FDA. Call me cynical.

  43. 43
    Aaron V. says:

    Oh, and lookie here….looks like the diet-peddlers are fighting back with this study.

    Seriously, who cares whether you’re technically overweight or technically obese? True, there is a point where obesity impairs basic movement, and that’s what people oftentimes define as “obese”.

    But does it really matter if a man who’s 5’10 and 210 lbs. doesn’t think of himself as “obese”? Hell, I’d be glad to be 5’8 and 210 – when I’m that size, I think of myself as being in good shape, with good health stats (blood pressure, cholesterol, etc.)

    There’s NFW I’m going to get down to 180 lbs. just to please the &&^$^#$ diet industry.

  44. 44
    Dinx says:

    You know – the lady who spoke about not wanting to have a body that is ‘for men’ and saving their virginity for men – well some people don’t do it for the opposite sex. I for example look for satisfaction in myself that I can feel good about myself walking down the street because losing weight is about self discovery, and so is saving your virginity! Its about having morals and sticking to what you believe in!