fat phobia in minor action
This weekend I visited with my aunt who has macular degeneration. I was chatting with Frank this afternoon about it and decided to look up macular degeneration prevention (mainly to see what the zinc and selenium status is now, twenty-five or so years after my friend was first researching it). Both the Mayo Clinic and WebMD have the urgent suggestion to lose weight to prevent macular degeneration, which startled me as I had never seen any mention of a connection to obesity before. WebMD had cutge little citation numbers on its page, but what they linked to was a general, un-numbered list of sources, not generally related to prevention and of course none of them was a study on obesity and macular degeneration. So I was puzzled: was this pure prejudice, or based in some known medical fact somewhere?
I looked at the NIH Medline site and their recommendation was a bit different. They said a "high-fat diet" was a risk factor. That still seemed a bit distant to me. Frank wandered off for a while, presumably investigating on his end (which is now Shepshed, UK, and not Prague), and returned, saying that diabetes causes macular degeneration, and obesity and high-fat diets are risk factors for diabetes, so presumably that's the connection (I am not sure he is correct about the high-fat diet: I believe that is obsolete knowledge, but I am not sure).
In the absence of some secret, obscure knowledge I have no access too, I'm going to just say it's dumb to tell people that they should "maintain a normal weight" when what you really mean is "avoid diabetes." Because, while many people will avoid diabetes by maintaining a "normal" weight, many people won't, because they'll maintain a normal weight by consuming fewer calories and still be bringing in an refined carbohydrates beyond what their particular metabolisms can deal with, or because their genetics sets them up for it. And many fat people will never develop diabetes.
I looked at the NIH Medline site and their recommendation was a bit different. They said a "high-fat diet" was a risk factor. That still seemed a bit distant to me. Frank wandered off for a while, presumably investigating on his end (which is now Shepshed, UK, and not Prague), and returned, saying that diabetes causes macular degeneration, and obesity and high-fat diets are risk factors for diabetes, so presumably that's the connection (I am not sure he is correct about the high-fat diet: I believe that is obsolete knowledge, but I am not sure).
In the absence of some secret, obscure knowledge I have no access too, I'm going to just say it's dumb to tell people that they should "maintain a normal weight" when what you really mean is "avoid diabetes." Because, while many people will avoid diabetes by maintaining a "normal" weight, many people won't, because they'll maintain a normal weight by consuming fewer calories and still be bringing in an refined carbohydrates beyond what their particular metabolisms can deal with, or because their genetics sets them up for it. And many fat people will never develop diabetes.