I had the displeasure of trawling through celebrity
choreographer and Loose Women panellist Arlene Phillips twitter after she
posted a hashtag she was trying to trend: #fitnotfat. The usual apologetic
diatribe you’d expect from someone telling fat people to “close their mouths”
and “pick up a skipping rope.” Naturally, my heckles went up and I had a few
choice words.
But after I calmed down, and with cup of tea
firmly in hand, I started to think about why yet another hashtag, why yet
another anti-fat campaign was rearing its ugly head. January is a loathed month
for most fat people as our social media news feeds begin to clog with the “New
year, new me!” mantras as people’s self-loathing drips like sweat at the newly
joined gym.
Not that I feel it’s necessary but I want to preface this
with a couple of things.
Firstly I am not claiming to be, nor have I ever claimed to
be, a medical professional. These are my opinions, my thoughts, based off my
own lived experiences and my own reading. It is very easy for people to scoff
and undermine me because medical professionals allegedly know better than I do.
But know this: doctors are people too and therefore
will carry their own biases. Fat people are more likely to receive inaccurate medical care.
Twitter hashtag: #diagnosisfat
My doctor thought it
was appropriate to address the issue of bariatric surgery when I went in to
discuss HIVES.
In fact that was why the BMI chart was created in the first place:
by insurance companies and was
introduced in the early 19th century by a Belgian named Lambert Adolphe Jacques
Quetelet. He was a mathematician, not a physician. He produced the formula to
give a quick and easy way to measure the degree of obesity of the general
population to assist the government in allocating resources.
I’m not saying that weight doesn’t carry risks. But what I
am saying is question just how much risk, instead of what people are telling
you because you can't really be sure how much of their concern is pourely objective and factual. As you’ll read on you’ll see these figures being thrown at us are based
off very old research models.
There are a lot of scary figures out there about what
obesity costs the NHS. If there’s one thing that is going to put fat people in
place is the guilt of pressuring a precious, and already strained, resource
like our free healthcare system. Who would take you seriously then?
But I got to thinking, sure enough I’d seen enough figures
in the billions, but I’d never seen an actual breakdown of the costs. WHAT was
costing £4 billion? You can’t just say “obesity”. It’s a very vague term and
tells us literally nothing.
I found a
website hat stated the report was “.
.looking at current obesity and associated costs
and sought to model future trends in obesity and its impact on health. Doing
this, the study produced a series of cost estimates for obesity to the NHS, for
elevated Body Mass Index (BMI) to the NHS, and the wider costs to the economy
of elevated BMI. All of the projections are set at 2007 costs for easy
comparison.”
Wait..hold up. There’s that horrible little word again: BMI.
HELP! IT'S THE ATTACK OF THE MEDICALLY INACCURATE HEALTH MODEL!
Immediately my eyebrow went up in a quizzical stance. If we
are created a supposedly accurate report then why are we referencing a proven inaccurate
model like the BMI scale?
As I continued to read the website it stated that : “The
Foresight report goes into some detail on the associated conditions. For
example, the note that: “The risk of developing type 2 diabetes, for instance,
is some 20–80 (OK, anyone else think that is a huge jump?) times more likely for people who are obese compared with lean
people. Coronary heart disease (which itself is slightly more common among obese
people) is 2–3 times more common among diabetic men and five times more common
among diabetic women.) Other health risks are also mentioned, such as strokes,
many cancers, and osteoarthritis. “
Associated. Associated conditions. Herein lies the problem.
Many people fail to realise that correlation does not equal causation. So while
there is a risk factor, it is not fat exclusive diseases we are dealing with.
The only thing that I can think of that is directly associated with obesity is
mobility caused by a fat body, and even then this is only in extreme cases
where people have become bedbound by their size.
Another thing I found interesting was that since that report
was published in 2007 there has been no significant research into the economic
costs of obesity, according to the National Obesity Observatory. So everything
we are reading is based off an outdated model. These figures are also based on upon
obesity levels where no action is taken to address the problem. So general and
outdated still. Most research since has been based in the US and not from
Europe.
So where does that bring us? I don’t feel any closer to
understanding the real, factual impact of Obesity ™ on the NHS. Given
that all of the reports used an outdated, inaccurate, and medically false mode
in which to group people it gives it a crumbling foundation insofar as all
diagnoses made in terms of health and diseases are based off an inaccurate
guide. Simply put the bmi scale says you’re obese-you are “treated” for being
obese (medication, surgery, healthcare initiatives)-NHS picks up the bill. But
if the BMI is inaccurate then how much treatment is necessary?
