Happy birthday to me! 28 August 2008 11:18 am
Posted by Tracy in : books,eating,good news,health,health at every size , trackbackHere’s some good news from the browser tabs I should’ve closed a week ago: for the past more than a month, the New York Times health blog, Well, has been reporting about researchers finally publishing some common sense about diets, weight, and health. I hope you all have read about this already, but it’s important enough (and makes me happy enough) that it seems well worth repeating. So here, some birthday gifts of good news:
July 16: More Evidence that Diets Don’t Work — but eating healthy food is good for you no matter how much you weigh. Apparently this is the place to go if you want to make hateful, obnoxious, or just plain ignorant comments about dieting and fat and of course especially fat people…
…because Well author Tara Parker-Pope had a few things to say about the comment storm in later posts, including July 25th’s Rethinking Diets, Weight Loss and Health. This one is great! Parker-Pope features comments from Gina Kolata, author of the fantastic Rethinking Thin, including (if you follow through that article) a podcast link to the audio version of an interview between the two writers, which is well worth a listen.
But wait, there’s more! (And yes, that is a completely shameless plug over to the right. Seriously check this book out if you haven’t — you’ll be glad you took the trip to the bookstore or library.)
August 13: For Health, Body Size Can Be Misleading — “Many overweight and obese people are metabolically healthy, while large numbers of slim people have health problems typically associated with obesity, a new study shows.”
August 15: Flawed Logic In Obesity Forecast — just a reminder to be skeptical about predictions about how in the future, we’ll all be too fat to live.
August 18: For the Overweight, a New Definition of Health — again, cholesterol, blood pressure, metabolic rates, and fitness don’t correlate as well to body weight as we’re often trained to believe.
And finally, the article that got me browsing the Well archive to begin with, an August 19 post that ran with the headlines “Better to Be Fat and Fit Than Skinny and Unfit” and “Weight as Main Measure of Health May Be Misguided.”
All I can say is “hell yes,” and “science rules, even if it’s kinda sad that it’s needed to prove something this basic.” Also, happy birthday to me. I plan to celebrate it with a walking tour of the West Village, a cruise on the East River, and whatever delicious treats happen to catch my eye in addition to all this NYU orientation-sponsored activity. I hope the year brings everyone reading this equally awesome opportunities for enjoyment.
-
cj
-
Coyote Karrick
-
Mom Boothe
-
Peter L.
