Thursday 2 October 2014

Don’t ask questions if you don’t want the answers

Back in August I blogged about a lecture on the “obesity epidemic”. Since then (under the roar of the election) it’s become clear that the scientific consensus, at least within the Health Sciences Division of the University of Otago, is that
  • Obesity is a major contributing cause of a lot of health problems, most especially Type 2 diabetes
  • The Body Mass Index (BMI) is a reasonable measure for most people, as long as you use a bit of common sense about people with high muscle mass
  • What determines your BMI is a simple matter of calories in minus calories out; where complications arise is in what determines calories in and calories out
  • However, shouting at people to eat less and exercise more accomplishes little to nothing
As I think I’ve said before, the scientific consensus is not always right. For about half a century after somebody thought up the idea of continental drift, the scientific consensus was that it was silly. Now it’s the underlying explanatory theory of geology, or rather plate tectonics, which explains why continents drift, is. However, the scientific consensus is always a better bet than politically-motivated maverick hypotheses. So I’m sorry, I can no longer endorse arguments against fat-shaming which rest on the BMI being nonsense, or weight being unrelated to diet and exercise, or weight being irrelevant to general health. Not until you show me well-evidenced scientific studies showing that (as it might be) weight is a confounder for the effects of diet and exercise, or something.
I think it is reasonable, however, to draw the conclusion that the free market is failing horribly to distribute food in anything like an optimal manner. The human brain’s appetite networks are not calibrated for a world where you can get fat and sugar on tap and you don’t have to walk ten kilometres a day if you don’t want to. We who live in developed countries consume more than is good for us and expend less energy than is good for us. That’s not so much a matter of us being wealthy – these effects hit the poor in unequal developed countries hardest – as of us being urbanized, industrialized, having work schedules that rely on pre-processed foods which give us a quick hit of energy to the brain. Meanwhile as people continue to starve in undeveloped countries, supermarkets throw food away by the tonne on the pretext of it not being “fresh”, and then prosecute people who retrieve it. I don’t believe most of the scaremongering that goes on around genetically engineered foods (because science, again) but I don’t think they’re going to solve nutrition poverty in the undeveloped world. Those GM supercrops are just going to end up in Western supermarket dumpsters.
So capitalism is not doing what it’s supposed to. But the one alternative to capitalism that anybody’s seriously tried in the past couple of centuries, that of course being communism, did even worse. That’s partly because queuing is not such a great system of goods distribution either, but it’s also in large part because they let their politics dictate their agricultural science. Crops were supposed to grow stronger if planted close together, out of class solidarity, you see. It didn’t work out. Can we please start letting the evidence drive our thinking, instead of the other way around?

8 comments:

  1. Sorry BMI is largely nonsense as anything more than a rough guideline - unless - as say you factor in muscle mass. And that's a big unless. My doctor has no idea whatsoever of my muscle mass, yet uses BMI as an absolute guideline when prescribing drugs etc.
    That's not to say that arguments against fat-shaming which rest on the BMI being nonsense are necessarily correct. But they're not necessarily incorrect either if that unless above isn't considered.

    PS - without evidence you crave (or at least some measures), it's difficult to say that Russian "communism" fared worse that capitalism. Russia when from being a very poor imperialist nation to being a very poor nation that was a superpower, had dramatically better access to many social services than before, the lot of women improved in many ways. Yes it was indeed flawed for many reasons including food shortages, but comparing it to richer capitalist nations isn't really comparing apples with apples.

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    1. It is my duty to tell you that a university-full of human health scientists disagree with you on the BMI thing. The Human Nutrition lecturer last week said that most people have roughly the same proportional muscle mass, except for those who do body-building exercises or play rugby for a living or similar.
      I guess I wasn't completely clear -- when I said communism was "worse" than capitalism, I mean specifically at food distribution. I think a few minutes Googling should convince you of that.

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    2. I guess I'm not "most people". :)

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    3. Wait, so your muscle mass is proportionally different from most people's -- and you know this, but your doctor "has no idea whatsoever"? Shouldn't you tell them?

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  2. Thanks for the thought-provoking article.

    I do however, have to disagree with your absolutest statement about communism. Communism has primarily failed, not because of flaws that are intrinsic to the system, but because of the context that it has arisen in. Namely a competitive state system. At the start of it all - the Bolsheviks became militant and took over the revolutionary movement, because they were fighting a revolutionary war. This set the tone for the rest of the existence of the USSR, and resulted in psychopaths like Stalin coming to lead it. Eventually the USSR couldn't sustain the massive military expenditure it was taking to try and stay in the arms race with the US. If at some stage we can get beyond a competitive state system communism may be the perfect set-up. That seems to be slowly happening, with the EU leading the way, and various regional trade agreements. The world may become so integrated one day, that the nation state becomes an anachronism. Potentially then, global communist system could be the only socially and ecologically sustainable way forward for humanity. Let's face it - humans are never going to vote to make the world sustainable - which would go well beyond what the Greens are proposing (who are already seen as extreme by most). Perhaps this globalised communist system is what the financial elite have in mind eventually, after they have achieved comprehensive integration. They must know that our current trajectory cannot work. The following article is part of an excellent series which will provide a context for what i'm putting forward here. http://www.globalresearch.ca/forging-a-new-world-order-under-a-one-world-government/14712

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    1. I have to beg to differ on your evaluation of the linked article. Trade and government are not the same thing, and while I'm sure there are lots of conspiracies in high places I think they're mostly competing with each other.
      If you want to Google the facts about Soviet and Maoist agriculture, the name to look for is Trofim Lysenko. I can assure you he wasn't driven by state competition; he was driven by ideology. I think you are probably right that the violence committed by communist states resulted from their having been born in violent revolution, but you have to remember that it was part of their ideology that only violent revolution could sweep the world clean of the old order.

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  3. Would you accept the argument against fat-shaming that no-one should be shamed? Especially when it’s due to a problem that may in many cases be self-created, but is still hard enough to live with without the derision of people who often have less visible but just as unhealthy habits.

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    1. Generally, yes, I guess. Shaming is an attack on personal dignity and autonomy. It is a weapon, a way for people to harm other people.
      (In fact there is one circumstance under which shaming is a reasonable tactic, but it clearly doesn't apply here; when there is a culture of honour around some practice which is harmful to others, shaming the practitioners can be an effective means of change. This is how duelling in the West and foot-binding in China were abolished.)

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