Monkey Monday: weekend in review, week in preview 7 November 2011 10:10 am
Posted by Tracy in : books,economics,food snobbery,geekery,meta,monkeys,news,politics,random,society , add a commentToday’s Monkey Monday randomness starts with a a shoutback to the weekend’s successful continuation of my NaBloPoMo efforts, because they both include responses to recent food-relevant news events. (Also, and speaking of success, I am happy to report that as of checking in at NaBloPoMo Central on Saturday afternoon, I have at long last managed to sign myself up! I’m #2011 on the official blogroll, which seems auspicious.) There’s also a preview of what I’ve got planned for TracyFood this week: lots of pictures, a long-delayed recipe, and… um, I’m not sure what I’m writing about tomorrow. Open to suggestions over here…. but meanwhile, on with today’s show!
First things first, a bit of serious news: my former classmate Christine is in northern Italy, where flooding and mudslides have turned her blog away from a dreamy chronicle of emigration and gastrotouristic entrepreneurship, into the story of life in a disaster zone (the town of Monterosso, which was devastated, to put it mildly). There are links in her posts to various charities and other efforts to help support the region’s recovery, as I wrote in this weekend’s letter to global climate change, which I totally believe in and really wish would stop proving itself through dramatic, disastrous weather events. (more…)
The weird, wild world of childhood obesity statistics. 18 November 2009 5:48 pm
Posted by Tracy in : geekery,health,health at every size,news,politics,school,society,weird,whoops , 1 comment so farSo I knew I was going to have trouble with the reading for next week’s Food Sociology class when on the very first page I read the statement:
“We suffer from widespread obesity, particularly among children…”
Karl Weber, preface to Food, Inc.: How Industrial Food Is Making us Sicker, Fatter, and Poorer — And What You Can Do About It (New York: Public Affairs, 2009).
Oh, really? Last time I checked, I thought rates were way higher in adults than in kids…. oh, sure enough. According to the U.S. Center for Disease Control, “Results from the 2005-2006 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), using measured heights and weights, indicate that an estimated 32.7 percent of U.S. adults 20 years and older are overweight, 34.3 percent are obese and 5.9 percent are extremely obese….” That’s with your standard BMI >24.9 kg/m2 for overweight, BMI > 30 kg/m2 for obese, and BMI > 40 kg/m2 for extremely obese, and it’s a grand total of 72.9 percent of the adult population weighing in (har, har) as overweight or obese. Compare that to the CDC on childhood overweight and obesity, which says, “The most recent NHANES data (2003–2006) showed that for children aged 6 –11 years and 12–19 years, the prevalence of overweight (BMI ≥85th percentile) was 33.3% and 34.1% respectively.”
Holy cats! Adulthood makes you fat!
Ok, but seriously. First of all, at first glance those kid numbers don’t look nearly as bad as the numbers for adults. But wait — how the hell can 33.3% or 34.1% of a population be at or above the 85th BMI percentile? What in the name of monkeys does that even mean? (more…)
My weekend readings, they relate to current events. 10 November 2009 11:09 am
Posted by Tracy in : culture,geekery,health,health at every size,history,monkeys,news,politics,random,reading,school,society , add a commentSo like I mentioned yesterday, I read a lot this weekend (more so than usual even), because I had a new deadline on top of the stuff assigned for class: two of my NYU library books were recalled. (A third book is also now due the 20th, so I’ve got just a little time to keep that one on the back burner for a bit. Anyway.) Book #1 was Weighty Issues: Fatness and Thinness as Social Problems, edited by Jeffery Sobal and Donna Maurer (1999). We read the introduction to an earlier Maurer and Sobal book, Eating Agendas: Food and Nutrition as Social Problems (1995) earlier this term at the start of Marion Nestle’s food sociology class, and it was so interesting I got the whole book out of the library, which in turn led me to some of Sobal and Maurer’s other books, namely Weighty Issues and Book #2: Interpreting Weight: The Social Management of Fatness and Thinness (also 1999). Anyway.
The centerpiece for today’s post is from Chapter 3 of Weighty Issues, “Fat Boys and Goody Girls: Hilde Bruch’s Work on Eating Disorders and the American Anxiety about Democracy, 1930-1960″ by Paula Saukko. I promise you, it’s awesome. Saukko takes a historical case study about some early research into eating disorders, and uses it to demonstrate how health theory and practice is a reflection of its social, cultural, political, and historical context. I was so not expecting this piece to be great, and then (more…)
