Obesity and choice

A nice anti-PC piece here, discussing a new obesity study and the media response to it. Saletan’s conclusion:

Come on. Everything in the study belies these mealy-mouthed conclusions. To resist a fattening norm, you need willpower. To reverse it, you need to promote responsibility, which implies blame. You almost certainly need stigma. And realistically, to add normal or underweight friends to your circle, you have to relegate others who are overweight. That may be bad for your fat ex-friends, who will lose your friendship as well as your thinness. But it’s fine for you, since you’ll have just as many friends as before.

Maybe it’s not nice to speak these truths. But maybe being nice, when you should be speaking the truth—especially to your friends—is the problem.

I agree with most of what he writes. In short, obesity is not a disease, it is not contagious. Culture matters, but it doesn’t overrule personal choice: The main reason why most people are fat is simply because they eat too much and exercise too little.

However, his conclusion does raise some questions. Does responsibility imply blame and stigma? Should fat people be punished for their behaviour, that is, for being overweight? These are different questions altogether, and I think the answer to these questions is no. Being overweight should not be without consequences, as being overweight has consequences. But people should not be punished for being fat. Granted, Saletan argues solely on an individual level (ditch your fat friends), he does not talk about collective action, but I still think he’s wrong. Fat friends don’t force you to eat that second hamburger. Even if you have a weight-”problem”, you are strong enough to overcome it without ditching your fat friends. Of course you are.

On an institutional level it’s quite easy to argue how the market system is, when it comes to what might be called “fairness”, superior to a socialized system: In a non-socialized healthcare-system you pay a price for being fat, in that price and personal responsibility go hand in hand. In a market driven system, obese people would be required to pay higher insurance premiums to cover the costs related to their obesity. In a socialized system everyone is required to pay for them.

As it is, if you want fewer people to be fat, there’s no denying that punishment, social stigma ect. is a way to achieve this end. But why do so many people think of this end as inherently better than the alternative? Why are so many people, who are in other areas very tolerant, so intolerant when it comes to people who weigh too much?

The “disease angle” is often used when the nanny state wants to create new “victims” that “require” (or “demand”) government “aid”. It can’t be because some people prefer to eat that extra piece of pie, even if it does cost a half an hour of their life in the end – no, it has to be because they are hoodwinked, it has to have something to do with lack of information, it has to be because people don’t know what’s good for themselves.

Health fascists would like everyone to be as healthy as they are, and they don’t think this can be accomplished without government “aid”. These people treat obesity as yet another “disease” that the government needs to take care of, because they perceive most people as small children that cannot and should not be allowed to take choose for themselves and take responsibility for their own actions.

If anything, they are the ones to be pitied.

[partial disclosure; no, I don't weigh "too much"]

Update:

Here’s Russ Roberts’ take on the study.