I used to be fat, and then I decided I wanted to become a model. So I did. Simple - exercise and eat well and fat goes. Eat crap and you look like crap.
Poll: Obesity: fat people or true illness?
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Your equivocation is somewhat startling. If someone dies of a heart attack without having developed cancer, has cancer been prevented? If someone dies without developing obesity, has obesity been prevented?Mazty said:
How in the world is "avoiding risk factors" the same thing as "preventing"? I'm pretty sure that some people are more susceptible to cancer, as some people are more susceptible to obesity. To state that you can decrease the chances of developing obesity, but cannot decrease the chances of developing cancer is answering the same question two different ways. If the baseline assumption is "no cancer, no obesity", then there's nowhere to go but "higher chance of cancer, higher chance of obesity".
How is "doing a bit more exercise, or eating less" not equivalent to "not sunbathing" insofar as it decreases the risk of developing a disease vis-a-vis the alternative?
Your statement that obesity can be prevented is a false flag. Obesity can be avoided in the majority of cases by avoiding the risk factors. Some people develop obesity even without overeating or underexercising, but they're the outliers. Some people similarly develop cancer without engaging in risky behavior. The majority of people, though, have differing levels of risk for either. If a low risk person sunbathes, he probably won't get cancer (cancer in the general population is about 1 in 10,000). If a low risk person overeats, he probably won't become obese. If a high-risk person sunbathes, he'll probably develop a melanoma. If a high-risk person overeats, he'll probably become obese.
The breakdown seems to be in your normative judgement of what "normal" behavior consists of. In your mind, the risk behaviors for cancer (except lung) are part of normal actions as a human, and thus the baseline is already at some risk. You can increase the risk by smoking, but you cannot make it less. On the converse, the risk factors for obesity you see as being abnormal in and of themselves. That's fine, but doesn't make your normative correct.
Everyone has some chance of developing obesity, and everyone has some chance of developing cancer. That chance, combined with exposure rates to risk, defines whether one develops the disease. Why is a person who sunbaths and gets melanoma any more diseased than someone who overeats and becomes obese? Both people were at natural risk, and then put themselves at risk.
And please don't say "not everyone becomes obese", because that's my point. Not everyone develops cancer. It takes a predisposition toward the disease, combined with doing things which increase the chances of getting it, to get either disease. What's the bloody difference?
edit: Okay, the bloody difference is that obesity is something that both shows externally, and is gradual. Cancer doesn't really "sneak up" on people, it grows gradually, but we don't notice it until it's big and honking. On the other side, obesity is something both slow-growing and visible. But that doesn't make one a disease and the other not, it just makes one more easily treatable. I promise you, if we could all sense cancer growing inside of us, we'd have it detected a lot sooner. But ease of treatment does not make something not a disease. Chlamydia is still a disease even if you can knock it out with a round of penicillin.
You're jumping over a few things, here. Study after study tells us that people with higher risk for obesity can eat the same diet, and get the same exercise, as people with less risk, and still gain more weight. So, it's not just "they can't put the fork down" it's "they put the fork down at the same time, and become obese". Goodness, we shouldn't be sympathetic for people who get in accidents in cars (they knew the risk of driving, or walking, or leaving the house, yet they chose to). You said earlier that getting cancer is sometimes "just bad luck", and that's true. Even if someone does the same things as everyone else, they can still get cancer when others don't. Why do you not accept the same idea for obesity? Yes, some people eat grotesque amounts (analogous to smoking), but many more do nothing much more extreme than the "normal" population. You have the perception of a gluttonous man who does not exercise at all, but your perception does not reflect reality.Mazty said:
Well, this is where we need to define what counts as "overeating" and "too little exercise". If you mean that any eating that makes someone obese is by definition "overeating", and any amount of exercise that allows someone to be obese is "too little", that's fine but circular. If, instead, we define overeating and too little exercise in relative terms, it becomes very similar to the "bad luck" behind most of the illnesses mentioned above. If two people eat the same meals, and exercise the same amount, one of them will likely gain more weight than the other. In the same way that if two people sunbathe exactly the same amount, one is more likely to get cancer than the other. How is it "overeating" if you eat the same amount as someone who isn't obese, but become obese because of your body chemistry?Mazty said:
There's this underlying assumption to your statements that the probability of any individual becoming obese is the same as any one else's. That's not at all backed up by research. Car accidents were a less apt analogy than cancer, true, but I dislike beating dead horses. You've skipped over any logical points and analogies I, or Cheeze_Pavilion, make and instead fall back to "well, other diseases are just bad luck, obesity is a choice, plain and simple." If you're unwilling to see the ways in which it isn't just a choice, then this discussion is just using increasingly large number of words to express two diametrically opposed positions.