War on obesity

[ChrisJ]

fascinating stuff from ChrisJ on the Channel Swimming. No doubt he knows the White Horse pub in Dover, whose walls are plastered with pics of swimmers and info on this.

I've been in there once. Though I did not, of course, qualify to write my name and crossing time on the wall. More pertinently to the thread, it's noteworthy that a significant portion of Channel Swimmers, while extraordinary 'athletes' in many senses, are overweight - some clinically obese.

Sporting Back on topic, I wanted to ask any Spanish residents (or those with relevant experience) a question.

I spent a month in Sevilla this year, loved it, and was astonished by the bar culture. I couldn't believe that a population that seemed to spend most of its leisure time eating and drinking in bars wasn't so much more overweight. I came to the conclusion that the explanation was twofold; that the wine and tapas were about quality not quantity and that the going out was so much more about socialising than glugging and scoffing than it would be in Britain. Any thoughts?

[Sporting]

Sporting Back on topic, I wanted to ask any Spanish residents (or those with relevant experience) a question.

I spent a month in Sevilla this year, loved it, and was astonished by the bar culture. I couldn't believe that a population that seemed to spend most of its leisure time eating and drinking in bars wasn't so much more overweight. I came to the conclusion that the explanation was twofold; that the wine and tapas were about quality not quantity and that the going out was so much more about socialising than glugging and scoffing than it would be in Britain. Any thoughts?

Ah, now here we have a case of where perfectly understandable anecdotal evidence is not corroborated by facts.

Exhibit 1:

https://www.oecd.org/fr/els/systemes...inkeyfacts.htm


"Adult obesity rates in Spain are higher than the OECD average, but child rates are amongst the highest in the OECD. Two out of 3 men are overweight and 1 in 6 people are obese in Spain. One in 3 children aged 13 to 14 are overweight. The proportion of adults who are overweight is projected by the OECD to rise a further 10% during the next 10 years."


Exhibit 2 (article in English edition of El Pais):

https://english.elpais.com/elpais/20...51_501777.html

"An investigation by the Mar de Barcelona hospital has found that 80% of men and 55% of women will be overweight by 2030. If the current trend continues, the researchers write, within 11 years more than 27 million people in Spain will be overweight."

Exhibit 3; Spain mid-table in world obesity rates:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...y_obesity_rate

It's not all bad news for Spaniards as their life expectancy is up there with the very best:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...ife_expectancy

There are obviously many factors influencing life expectancy but (my turn to use anecdotal evidence!) perhaps obesity is not a major player? Intuitively I somewhat doubt this.

going out was so much more about socialising than glugging and scoffing than it would be in Britain

This is very true, though understates why people in Britain will pay several times more for a drink in a pub than doing the same at home. British people are sociable too!.

[ChrisJ]

Ah, fair enough, thanks. That's interesting about the weight stats for Spain. I'd heard life expectancy was one of the highest and assumed it was associated with lower stress levels, better social connections etc as well as a better diet. Although I saw somewhere that the Mediterranean diet is becoming less prevalent with economic and social changes in the region.

Of course it's true what you say about Brits being sociable - the hoo-hah about pub reopening would seem to bear that out. I did get the strong feeling that people in Spain were more focused on their companions though. I hardly ever saw a group of people sat where one or more was constantly on their phone.

I must get you to give me the lowdown on Valencia sometime btw, as it was planned to be our next destination in Spain.

[Sporting]

I must get you to give me the lowdown on Valencia sometime btw, as it was planned to be our next destination in Spain.

A pleasure.

[Moonlight Shadow]

A pleasure.

I need to go back to Valencia, for a start my cousin, wife and daughter live there plus I loved it during my brief, football related, previous visit. I'll be sure to be in touch when it happens....

[Sporting]

I need to go back to Valencia, for a start my cousin, wife and daughter live there plus I loved it during my brief, football related, previous visit. I'll be sure to be in touch when it happens....

Your cousin's wife and daughter or your wife and daughter?

[Moonlight Shadow]

Your cousin's wife and daughter or your wife and daughter?

The former, my wife is still here with me!

[ChrisJ]

A pleasure.

Cheers!

[DCI Harry Batt]

I read an interesting and relevant piece earlier. I was going to share it here, but I have forgotten where and what it was. Oh well.

[Toby Gymshorts]

For me it boils down to this: other people's bodies are none of my business, just like my body is no-one else's business.

[laverte]

i struggle to dip a toe in the English Channel for fear of hypothermia, the idea that anyone would try to swim across it blows my mind.

A few thoughts about language. This is a very good question:

Can the word 'obesity' be de-stigmatized or is too far embedded in the language of illness to be salvaged?

My impression is that, a bit like with "special needs" , whatever term is used will end up becoming stigmatised. Language can only do so much. i remember a foreign student telling me she'd been taught that "fat" was rude and instead she should say "chubby", which is obviously worse. i think "obese" as a statistical description for a weight range is fine, but i would like to do away with "morbidly obese", even if it has some kind of root in science. The way it associates fatness with death and the macabre is really unhelpful.

So much of the judgement is based around class. It's all "Look at the fat peasants eating their convenience foods".

This is so true, and i would throw gender in there too, as shown in the figure of Johnson, with his 'healthy' or 'vigorous' appetite. He's so maverick that he just doesn't care about his waistline! It's much harder for a woman in public life to do that. Cf the reaction to Amber Rudd once wearing a suit with creases in it, versus Johnson's permanent and deliberate dishevelment.

The idea that people who like salad or are vegetarian or won't eat at McDonalds are militant is, I would posit, a part ... of the problem

i wonder, has there ever been a positive portrayal of a vegan in popular culture? Vegans seem to be the soft target for these times. As well as being, to my mind, among the least deserving, they're often young and/or female, which is of course an age-old short cut for 'annoying' and dismissible. Stick to laughing at golfers, people!

I'd just add that sometimes all the stuff about exercise and banning cars comes across as unthinking ableism. Good for you if you can walk / ride a bike. Not so great if you can't.

i would definitely dispute this. For one thing, there would have to be exceptions to "banning cars" and the carers of severely disabled people would need to be among those excepted. But any disadvantages would surely be outweighed by the benefits of wider pavements, car-free streets, cleaner air, more public toilets, more frequent and far-reaching public transport, and a wholesale reorganisation of the way we live that would reintroduce delivery vans and corner shops and town centres and other amenities driven to near-extinction by car culture. For me on a daily basis i think the single biggest obstacle and stress factor is parked cars: they prevent pedestrians from moving off the pavement to let me pass, impede my vision when i want to cross the road, and often block access to ramps and dipped kerbs. They're an eyesore too – such a waste of public space.

i agree with the entirety of your political programme though.

it doesn’t require much exercise to make a big difference in health. We have too much fucking emphasis on running and serious weight lifting.

i agree very strongly with this, even if weight lifting isn't quite as big a thing in Europe as it is in the US. For women, there's a lot more emphasis on yoga, pilates and the like, which are fine for what they are. But despite some success with eg the parkrun movement there are still socio-psychological barriers to being seen to run / wobble / sweat / look like shit in public, exacerbated by the constant shaming of 'fat' bodies in public places in women's media, from pap pics in the sidebar of shame to reality tv to tut-tutting 'news' stories illustrated with headless pictures of young women's 'shameful' bodies, a byword for the dangers of obesity.

For me it boils down to this: other people's bodies are none of my business, just like my body is no-one else's business.

i liked this agony aunt-style piece on that subject. The link also contains interesting resources for "gaining strength in an unfriendly-to-fat-people world": the site operates as a "no diet-talk, no mention of specific-weights, no body-shaming, no weight-loss evangelism zone". i think that list of prohibitions is worth bearing in mind, especially if you're interacting with someone you know to have had an eating disorder.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

I would always be sceptical of a quasi moral crusade launched by the living embodiment of the seven deadly fucking sins.

This isn't meant to achieve anything, it's just meant to give the impression that they're doing something while allowing some shrill fuckers to be judgemental at other people's expense, and maybe expand another front in the culture war.

The thing I find myself noticing more and more as I queue in the socially distanced supermarket, is that one side of the aisle leading up to the tills, is about 60 feet of bottles of soft drinks, while the other side of the aisle is sixty feet of fun packs of chocolates and crisps. From the big bags of flakes for parents to give to their kids to appease them, to the 100 gram bars of expensive dark chocolate for the adults. These things are relatively so much cheaper than when I was a kid, and are so fucking prominent that I would start here. You can buy twice your daily energy needs in sweets form for about a fiver almost without being aware of it, with no sense of exactly how much sugar is in a 2 litre bottle of coke. And it's as much a deliberate part of supermarket layout as having the bakery and vegetables just inside the door.

[anton pulisov]

oh yeah, I gave up fizzy drinks about 15 years ago. amazing how much sugar is in that shite.

When I was a kid, Ribena was marketed at parents as a healthy drink for their kids. My mother was having none of it. She used to set fire to crisps as well to demonstrate their fat content.

Here's a Ribena ad from Australia:

fuckers

[anton pulisov]

Here's one for Chupa Chups with Roberto Carlos, well past my childhood and this shit was still going on:

Roberto Carlos: "Do you want Chupa Chups"
Kid: "My mother says I can't"
Cue Roberto Carlos going around to the mother's gaff to explain that that Chupa Chups contain glucose, which is good for your brain.
Approved by the "Study Centre of Nutrition and Diet", apparently.

[Hot Pepsi]

I would always be sceptical of a quasi moral crusade launched by the living embodiment of the seven deadly fucking sins.

This isn't meant to achieve anything, it's just meant to give the impression that they're doing something while allowing some shrill fuckers to be judgemental at other people's expense, and maybe expand another front in the culture war.

The thing I find myself noticing more and more as I queue in the socially distanced supermarket, is that one side of the aisle leading up to the tills, is about 60 feet of bottles of soft drinks, while the other side of the aisle is sixty feet of fun packs of chocolates and crisps. From the big bags of flakes for parents to give to their kids to appease them, to the 100 gram bars of expensive dark chocolate for the adults. These things are relatively so much cheaper than when I was a kid, and are so fucking prominent that I would start here. You can buy twice your daily energy needs in sweets form for about a fiver almost without being aware of it, with no sense of exactly how much sugar is in a 2 litre bottle of coke. And it's as much a deliberate part of supermarket layout as having the bakery and vegetables just inside the door.

A few years back, there was a study that (somehow) calculated the total calorie production of the US food system over time and then concluded that the rise in obesity in the US since 1970 can be entirely attributed to that increase without any difference in our collective exercise patterns. A lot of the doctors commenting on the article refuse to believe that.

I think it's plausible. Maybe people walk less than they used to, but there really wasn't a fitness industry in 1970. Smoking rates were much higher. Women's sports were barely a thing at all. But the availability and marketing of cheap calories is much higher now than it was then.

i agree very strongly with this, even if weight lifting isn't quite as big a thing in Europe as it is in the US. For women, there's a lot more emphasis on yoga, pilates and the like, which are fine for what they are. But despite some success with eg the parkrun movement there are still socio-psychological barriers to being seen to run / wobble / sweat / look like shit in public, exacerbated by the constant shaming of 'fat' bodies in public places in women's media, from pap pics in the sidebar of shame to reality tv to tut-tutting 'news' stories illustrated with headless pictures of young women's 'shameful' bodies, a byword for the dangers of obesity.

Weight-lifting seems to be a bigger thing in Scandinavia. Especially Iceland.

There's been a little movement on the "fat in public thing." This "healthy at any size" thing might not actually be 100% true, but it certainly is true that anyone at any size benefits from exercise and shouldn't feel bad about trying.

A lot of pundits - usually ex-pro athletes, it seems - lament the loss of phys ed classes in schools, but most people know that those classes are a huge part of the problem. They made exercise feel like drudgery and they rewarded the kids who were already athletically gifted rather than encourage everyone to just work on improvement, and the kids who succeeded in that scheme were usually the one's whose parents had been D1 athletes. It just another caste system.

I hope that educators now understand the damage they do by discouraging kids from an activity at a young age. And yet that happened to me in sports, art and music and to a lesser degree, in math. And the situation is much worse for most kids. These are actual "wounds" that last into adulthood.

[hobbes]

I would always be sceptical of a quasi moral crusade launched by the living embodiment of the seven deadly fucking sins.

This isn't meant to achieve anything, it's just meant to give the impression that they're doing something while allowing some shrill fuckers to be judgemental at other people's expense, and maybe expand another front in the culture war.

The thing I find myself noticing more and more as I queue in the socially distanced supermarket, is that one side of the aisle leading up to the tills, is about 60 feet of bottles of soft drinks, while the other side of the aisle is sixty feet of fun packs of chocolates and crisps. From the big bags of flakes for parents to give to their kids to appease them, to the 100 gram bars of expensive dark chocolate for the adults. These things are relatively so much cheaper than when I was a kid, and are so fucking prominent that I would start here. You can buy twice your daily energy needs in sweets form for about a fiver almost without being aware of it, with no sense of exactly how much sugar is in a 2 litre bottle of coke. And it's as much a deliberate part of supermarket layout as having the bakery and vegetables just inside the door.

At least it's all in one place now. So you can just bypass it like the pet food aisle.

[Gangster Octopus]

A lot of pundits - usually ex-pro athletes, it seems - lament the loss of phys ed classes in schools, but most people know that those classes are a huge part of the problem. They made exercise feel like drudgery and they rewarded the kids who were already athletically gifted rather than encourage everyone to just work on improvement, and the kids who succeeded in that scheme were usually the one's whose parents had been D1 athletes. It just another caste system.

This is very true.

Oh, and I associate weight-lifting with south-east Europe and the 'Stans.

[ursus arctos]

Alekseyev and the Pocket Hercules

I think of Scandinavia in general, and Iceland in particular, as being more Strongman territory

[Hot Pepsi]

Olympic weightlifting seems to be most popular in the stans and the middle east, but the World Strongest Man and Crossfit Games etc, seem to have a conspicuous number of people with -son or -dottir in their last name as well as people from Latvia, Poland, etc.

Olympic weightlifting has weight classes (for the competitors, I mean) whereas events like the World's Strongest Man and Highland Games only favor the biggest competitors, and it seems like Northern Europe and the Pacific Islands have the most people, per capita, with "big frames" as they say in American football.

If Iceland ever took up American football, they'd probably produce a number of NFL players.

[Flynnie]

If I could go on a little sports tangent here, it’s kind of surprising they haven’t. They all speak English and have for years, they had a Naval Air Station at Keflavik for decades (eg how Germans got into American football), they don’t have any sport that would immediately suck up that kind of athlete (eg rugby in the UK), they have the strongman tradition.

obviously the fact there’s about 12 of them isn’t helping.

[Benjm]

I visited a restaurant in Reykjavik once and noticed a signed picture of Jon Pall Sigmarsson above my table. Apparently it had been a favourite spot of his. I should have ordered four whole chickens or something suitably strongman-esque to honour his memory.

[ursus arctos]

I wonder if there is an age angle to that.

The Strongmen seem to be in their late 20s or early 30s, and I'm not sure if there is an adolescent scene that feeds into the pros and could provide guys who could see it as a way to get a free ride at a US university.

The relative health of the Icelandic economy, even after the financial crisis, also plays a role.

[Janik]

they don’t have any sport that would immediately suck up that kind of athlete (eg rugby in the UK)

My Dad's observation, when watching Handball at the 2012 Olympics, was that this sport was destined to never be big in Britain as the ideal body type was already playing Rugby. Once he said it you could see exactly what he meant, particularly when considering the modern sort of Rugby player physique. Iceland are very serious about Handball - the took Men's silver at the 2008 Olympics, one of just four summer medals the country has ever won. So, um, yes, they do already have a major sport that sucks up precisely that kind of athlete.

[Flynnie]

I wonder if there is an age angle to that.

The Strongmen seem to be in their late 20s or early 30s, and I'm not sure if there is an adolescent scene that feeds into the pros and could provide guys who could see it as a way to get a free ride at a US university.

The relative health of the Icelandic economy, even after the financial crisis, also plays a role.

I did a deep dive and here’s what I found out:

— there was a league in the late 80s after Icelandic TV began showing the NFL. As expected, they got a lot of help from Keflavik in coaching and refereeing. The Icelandic amateur sports system is very organised so they got funding and administration help very quickly.

I don’t think there’s much doubt that if this had continued, they’d have come across somebody who could have played Division I football.

— Unfortunately, they had a double whammy of the Cold War ending and the NFL disappearing from Icelandic TV (but before the internet), so the league slowly faded due to lack of interest.

Maybe even a triple whammy if you think of the 90s as the emergence of Strongman as an ESPN late night staple, which might have enticed a college coach to enquire about Icelandic American football.

— the sport is back on TV now, and there is a club, but Keflavik isn’t the base it used to be (it got decommissioned in 2006). Although this is now changing because of the Russians.

so stay tuned, I guess?

[caja-dglh]

Olympic weightlifting seems to be most popular in the stans and the middle east, but the World Strongest Man and Crossfit Games etc, seem to have a conspicuous number of people with -son or -dottir in their last name as well as people from Latvia, Poland, etc.

Olympic weightlifting has weight classes (for the competitors, I mean) whereas events like the World's Strongest Man and Highland Games only favor the biggest competitors, and it seems like Northern Europe and the Pacific Islands have the most people, per capita, with "big frames" as they say in American football.

If Iceland ever took up American football, they'd probably produce a number of NFL players.

There is a massive amount of history on why the 'stans are a powerhouse in olympic lifting. A lot based around the whole training process / thesis (a place where there is so much more written than you might imagine about key lifts, components, approach).

WSM and Crossfit games are similar to each other, but not. A huge amount of each is based on complex strength / odd object stuff (yolks, wallballs / atlas balls), though crossfit has this nasty athletic / gymnastic component that WSM does not. Both very much not a disciplined approach where there is a *correct* way (bar olympic lifts in crossfit) and highly multi-disciplinary (strength, grip strength, endurance and whatnot).