Questioning the numbers
According to the CDC, us fatties are costing all the good, deserving thin people billions of dollars. (Only a fraction of what greedy, lying, thieving corporate bankers stole from all your pockets but hey – its more fun to hate fat people!)
The claim:
Look at the wording. “associated with” “may involve” “direct and indirect costs” “may include” Sounds very sketchy. Is it that fat people really cost us the 117 billion a year (adjusted for inflation) figure being claimed? Or do costs associated with obesity related illnesses directly and indirectly maybe sorta kinda come to $117 billion?
What is an “obesity related” cost? What is an indirect cost vs. a direct cost? The CDC website didn’t have that information readily findable, but what is surely an impartial, caring source – Nutristrategy (trademark) – tells us a bit more:
Type 2 diabetes costs related to overweight and obesity: cost is $98 billion (total).
Unless they are only counting the costs of cancer only found in obese patients, and the same for the others – wait. Are they seriously counting all diabetes 2 and 4 kinds of cancer as all being the fault of fat people?
I guess the easy way to figure that out is to check the sources. The page cites the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases for figures on diabetes costs related to fat people.
That’s right – even though thin people can have diabetes too, and even though this figure includes type 1 diabetes (the kind kids get for no apparent reason) all diabetes costs are your fault, fatties! Even if you don’t have it! And even though being overweight is only one of many risk factors for diabetes 2 – including your race, your genetics and your age. And never mind the fact that not even all old people of a certain race and genetic background who are fat get diabetes. And never mind the fact that some of the “increase” in diabetes is caused by a redefinition of the condition to include people with no diabetes symptoms – but who are “managed” with expensive treatments anyway.
Those breast cancer numbers? Well in the first place, I looked around a while and couldn’t find anything citing the number she stated – the CDC claims the number to be much higher. But also, there is NO KNOWN CAUSE of breast cancer. The risk factors they have found that are associated with breast cancer – those would be a correlation, not a cause – are: sex (men actually can get breast cancer, as they have a small amount of breast tissue, but its very rare); age (almost all women who get breast cancer are over 45); genetics/family history of breast cancer; race; how young menstrual cycle began; whether or not you had children or when you had them; having taken DES back when they still prescribed it; having had another kind of cancer or radiation treatment for that cancer; having taken the pill within the last decade; taking hormone replacement therapy; not having breast fed your children for at least a year if you had children; and being overweight. But again, there is no known cause. A woman can be old, white, fat, child free, with a mother who died of breast cancer – and not ever get breast cancer. And nobody knows why. Blaming breast cancer costs on fat people is fucking ridiculous.
Endometrial cancer – the most common cancer of the female reproductive system – is thought to be linked to estrogen levels, but they don’t really know what causes it. They think – but aren’t sure – that higher levels of estrogen can cause it. Blaming fat people for endometrial cancer and the associated costs is therefore fucking ridiculous.
Colon cancer. They do not know exactly what causes colon cancer. The usual ricsk factors are present, such as being old, family history, other diseases of the intestines, oh and being fat – so they say. Although it strikes me that since getting older is a risk factor for pretty much every kind of cancer, and getting older means you gain weight, couldn’t that be why people who weigh more are more likely to get cancer? Oh wait I wasn’t supposed to notice that, was I? That aside, a disease with no known cause and a wide variety of risk factors cannot be blamed entirely on obesity. That’s fucking stupid. (Can you tell I’m annoyed?)
Osteoarthritis – hey is it starting to look like they are blaming old women for everything here? Again being old and being female are two big risk factors for osteoarthritis. Yes I am sure being overweight can encourage or exacerbate arthritis on weight bearing joints like the knees and hip. However, many skinny people have arthritis too. Blaming fat people for costs associated with osteoarthritis is asinine.
And so on and so forth.
I found another source for this same claim and a little more of where it comes from. Some dudes named Wolf and Colditz did some study back in 1995 and- here let me just quote directly the asininity of all this:
So this “research” proving we cost the innocent, upright, moral deserving thin people $117 billion a year in the US alone is based on a 14 year old study that was based on the examination of the results of a SURVEY?! – with figures inflated to 2008 dollars (haven’t seen their new scary number for 2009 yet.) Wait no one can be that stupid, as to do such a thing and pretend it is both science and accurate economic analysis, right?
Okay here is a slightly more explanatory paragraph of their method:
Anne Wolf and Graham Colditz used an epidemiologic approach to quantify aggregate medical spending attributable to obesity (excluding overweight).They calculated the relative risk of disease for obese versus nonobese people for type 2 diabetes; coronary heart disease; hypertension; gallbladder disease; musculoskeletal disease; and breast, endometrial, and colon cancer. They then applied the relative risk estimates to published estimates of disease costs to determine obesity-attributable medical spending. They found that such spending equaled 5.7 percent of US national health spending in 1995 ($51.6 billion). However, because their disease costs were based on data from as far back as 1985, their spending estimate may be outdated.
So, in some cases they included all disease costs to the obese, in some cases they decided what percentage of it is the fault of obese people, even in diseases where THERE IS NO KNOWN CAUSE. Obesity is only a risk factor in all of the diseases listed – and it is hard to explain this to people anymore because there’s so much hype thrown around, but a risk factor is not a cause. A risk factor for a diease is merely something observed that happens to many people around the same time they develop a disease. It could mean iot causes the disease but the relationship is unclear. It could mean the disease causes the risk factor! THEY DON’T KNOW.
So on the basis of obesity being a “risk factor” somehow mysteriously related to various diseases that have a long list of risk factors associated with them, the researchers blamed 5% or so of all health costs in the US on people being too fat. Well I don’t know, 5% doesn’t really sound like all that much to me, considering how much they pulled straight out of their asses to try to inflate the “costso of obesity” as high as possible to include everything they could possibly imagine might possibly be caused by fat people.
And you may think, so okay, some fatphobic morons came up with some shoddy research claiming the rising costs of healthcare rest on my pudgy shoulders, so what? Why does it matter?
First of all this matters because changing one’s weight to a more socially acceptable weight, while relentlessly marketed to us, even by the government, as something within our control (they call it a “lifestyle choice”), there is no evidence, anywhere, that has ever been collected, to suggest that this is true. Consider this bullshit study trying to “prove” people can take off significant amounts of weight long term if they just do the right things:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16002825
“There is a general perception that almost no one succeeds in long-term maintenance of weight loss. However, research has shown that approximately 20% of overweight individuals are successful at long-term weight loss when defined as losing at least 10% of initial body weight and maintaining the loss for at least 1 y. “
So – if a woman who is 5′6″ and weighed 170 pounds (defined as overweight) goes on a diet and loses 10% of her body weight – 17 pounds, putting her at 153 pounds (defined as “normal and healthy) and manages not to gain it back within a year, that is considered long term significant weight loss? And yet even such a modest short term weight loss is only managed by 20% of dieters?
The study goes on to cite The National Weight Control Registry. The name alone gives me the creeps. here is their index page blurb:
Nice that they say its a “belief” that fat people can’t lose weight – and yet they only have 5,000 people they track out of the estimated 150,000,000 Americans we are told are overweight. They include people who have only kept their weight off a year and people who have lost as little as 30 pounds. We are told this is significant and long term weight loss. The average person they research has kept off 66 pounds for 5.5 years. THESE ARE HIGHLY EXCEPTIONAL PEOPLE. They are literally the exception that proves the rule. Millions of people sign up with weight watchers every year, many with Jenny Craig, many with other diet programs large and small. Yet they only found 5,000 people who lost “significant” amounts of weight “long term”. And this tiny percentage they claim as “proof” that long term significant weight loss is something anyone can achieve. It’s not true.
So being fat is something that almost no one can change about themselves for any significant amount of time. Yet partly because of studies like this one that blames us wrongly for $117 billion a year in medical costs, thus encouraging anti-fat bias, fat people are denied jobs, denied promotions and raises – particularly among women. Because of the lie told to employers that fat employees will cost them more money and take more time off work and are less productive – beliefs supported by these outdated, inaccurate, shadily conducted estimates – we experience very real, serious penalties for something we cannot change about ourselves. Being punished for something you can’t change is cruel, angering, unjust. Having put up with this kind of treatment for two decades now, I’m at my wits end.
Fat is a feminist issue, people.
