Some of my thoughts on reviews

You may have heard about certain authors paying for reviews on Amazon.  I'm sorry- they paid for positive reviews on Amazon, because in the New Publishing World, authors live and die by their Amazon reviews.

I stopped reviewing on Amazon last year.  I discussed why here, but it comes down to the fact that even Amazon is gaming their own system.  I'll repeat what I said in that post: it has nothing to do with the people who have been reviewing on Amazon since before Amazon reviews were some kind of currency.  I haven't checked the Top Reviewer forums, but I know that in addition to a little head banging, there's got to be some serious laughter.  Because, well, algorithms aside, someone is paying someone for a review.  Lame.

Other people have talked about it from the author's point of view, and I'm not going to bother giving links to people who have argued in favor of it.  (But I am going to say, dude, if you really think getting a review copy of a book- to review- is compensation- for a review!- you need to go back to Logic 101.  And trust me, if I gave it a 1- or 2- star review, the book wasn't compensation.)  I want to talk about reviews from the Reviewer's point of view.

When I review I try to look at it from the reader's point of view.  What do I want when I read a review?  At the very least, a review that explained itself.  I don't want to see an extended summary of the plot, and I don't want to see someone gush, spew or otherwise explode with emotion.  You can tell me you cried, laughed or wanted to throw the book against the wall, but if you can't give me any details that help me understand why, I don't care.  Everyone is entitled to opinions and anyone is free to put them on a website or blog as a review, but if you can't explain why you felt that way, you're not adding much to the discussion.

That, in essence, is what I try to do.

In case you were wondering, no one ever paid me ever for a review I left on Amazon about anything.  (Okay, my kids really liked one of the toys I reviewed- but I left a four-star review for that because it was so difficult to use and required a lot of adult supervision.)  I was honest there and am honest here.  More importantly, I explained myself.  I can't prove anything, but I think that's why my reviews were well-received.

Someone is probably thinking that my criteria may be reasonable for a single review- or even reviewer- but what if you're seeing literally hundreds of short "I hated it" or "It's the best thing since canned beer"?  Maybe they're just two sentence reviews, but if hundreds of people agree, isn't that worth something?  To which I will say please see the links above.  I can only guess, but in my estimation, authors- and publishers?- are counting on that presumption when they pay for people to leave positive reviews... of something they've never read.

This whole review business is an imperfect thing.  That's exactly what you'd expect from a system that's dependent on opinion, and stars don't really change that.  Imperfect is one thing, but dishonest is another.  If I'm paying someone to not only to give an opinion but to express a specific one, that's not a review, that's a scam.  Fortunately, this is one of the easier scams to suss out.

Review for Hades: Lord of the Dead by George O'Connor

There are a couple of myths I can't stop thinking about, and one of them is the myth of Persephone, daughter of the harvest goddess Demeter and wife of Hades, lord of the realm of the dead.  She is everything from a symbol of the transition from childhood to adulthood to an explanation for why the seasons change (well, at least in temperate climates).  In more obscure (older?) stories, she also plays an important role in the story of Dionysus, which makes sense in light of the cycle of life/death/rebirth that both divinities embody... but that might be another story for another day.

Every version of the story that I have ever read features a young girl who is completely without agency.  For the most part, Demeter doesn't have any either.  She reacts in rage, but ultimately she must comply with the will of her brothers Zeus and Hades (and in some versions even Poseidon).  This myth embodies the tension between men and women in the ancient civilization and to some extent also our own.

If anyone else has ever been bothered by that, you're going to love George O'Connor's version.

Persephone is kidnapped by Hades, Demeter grieves and the earth turns barren, Helios tells her about the collusion between Zeus and Hades, Persephone comes back but only for half of the year.  Yada yada yada- every major plot point you remember is there.  It's what O'Connor fills around them that makes this delicious.

Ask yourself: how many young girls want to be so tightly held by their mothers?  What kind of a goddess is willing to destroy mankind in vengeance for the loss of her daughter?  And if someone were offered a throne, how many people would willingly say no?  Sunlight is warmer than the underworld, but sometimes warmth is stifling.

It's not all Hades and Persephone's love affair.  As O'Connor hinted a few months ago, we also get to see why Tantalus is related to the word "tantalize".  Importantly, O'Connor isn't just throwing that in here because we're talking about Hades and Tartarus.  In most versions of the myth, Demeter's behavior is, um, anti-social because she's distracted by her search for her daughter.  I loved the way O'Connor followed the strings of those two stories about starvation, human sacrifice and cannibalism.  In this version, Tantalus is an indirect contributor to the resolution of the story, and it makes sense.

At the risk of being presumptuous, I'm going to disagree with O'Connor's characterization of Hades as "emo".  For me, that conjures up images of a darkly dressed Hamlet moping through his palace, unsure of what to do next.  Hades is darkly dressed, and we could argue he mopes.  But Hades, too, has agency, and here it is as meaningful as Persephone's.  And what good is a myth if it doesn't provide us with meaning?

Highly recommended.

Review of Avatar: The Last Air Bender- The Promise Part 1

I am not a hardcore sci-fi or fantasy person.  What I've come into contact with in those genres are inescapable cultural phenomenons.  Some of it I like (Star Trek!) and some of it I could live perfectly happily without (Star Wars).

Add Avatar: TheLast Airbender to the list of things I do like.  If you're unfamiliar with the animated Nickelodeon series, it's the story of a world where people are born into states dominated by elements.  (Yes, the network that brought us Sponge Bob Square Pants and Fairly Odd Parents also gave us one of the finest anime-inspired series ever.)  Some can "bend" or control the elements and are called "benders".  The Avatar, the one person who can control all of the elements, is reincarnated after the death of the previous Avatar and into the next element in the cycle.  The states are the Fire Nation, the Earth Kingdom, the Water Tribes and the Air Nomads.  At least, they're used to be Air Nomads; after the Avatar was born into the Air element, the Fire Nation killed all Air Nomads in an attempt to establish world domination.  Fortunately, they just missed Aang, the twelve-year old Avatar, who had run away from home and wound up trapped in a glacier.  The story picks up 100 years later, when the world is dominated by the Fire Nation and Aang is miraculously rescued by Katarrah and Sokka, adolescent siblings from the Southern Water Tribe.

The three season series is as much about Aang accepting his responsibility as The Avatar and acquiring both the skills and the wisdom to defeat Fire Lord Ozai as it is about the slightly older Prince Zuko, Ozai's banished son.  His quest is for redemption, first from his father, then from his own conscience.  He is easily the most fascinating character in the well-drawn cast (pun intended).  His conflicts run deep and are symbolized by his power-mad father and his wise uncle Iroh.  We discover later in the series that his dual nature goes back even further: he is the great-grandson not only of Sozin, the Fire Lord who started the world war, but also Avatar Roku, the avatar who immediately preceded Aang.

The Promise, Part1 picks up after Aang has defeated Ozai by depriving him of his ability to bend.  (FYI, that's something most avatars can't do, but that's how bad ass Aang becomes.)  Aang, Zuko and Earth King Kuei take upon the task of removing the Fire Nation from their colonies in the Earth Kingdom as the first step toward healing the wounds of the long war.  Zuko, however, is tormented by his memories of his last encounter with his father who refused to tell him where his mother was and taunted that Zuko would need his help to be a good ruler.  Upon reflection, Zuko asks Aang to promise him that if Zuko becomes like his father, he will put an end to him.  Aang is horrified, but reluctantly agrees.

The story picks up one year later.  Although Zuko's guards believe he's paranoid, he's proven correct when a young Fire Nation colonist from the Earth Kingdom makes an attempt on his life.  He returns her to her father, who chastises him for not protecting his people in the colonies.  Zuko is enraged until he meets the man's wife- an Earth Bender.  He realizes that his would-be assassin is also an Earth Bender who is loyal to the Fire Nation like her father.  After a tour of the city, Zuko realizes that everything isn't as clear as it had seemed to him and Aang a year ago.

Aang and his friends are outraged when Zuko calls off the return of the colonists without any explanation.  When Aang and Katarrah confront Zuko in the colonial city, Aang comes close to keeping his "promise" to Zuko until Katarrah makes the same realization that Zuko did: it's not that simple.  Aang and Zuko grudgingly agree to meet with the Earth King to discuss a resolution to the problem of the colonies.

When the story leaves off, Zuko visits his father in prison to ask for guidance.  The last frame is of Ozai's smile.

I wouldn’t recommend this for someone who didn’t already know the basics of the animated series and hadn’t seen at least a few episodes.  The reader needs to understand the struggles both Aang and Zuko endured to defeat Ozai to appreciate the disappointment both feel on different levels when they realize that that the work doesn’t end once the fighting stops.  As we see when we read history- or current events- most people are shades of grey.  Frustrating at times, but it makes for a much more interesting story than black and white.

This is the first of three graphic novels set to bridge the 70 year gap between the end of The Last Air Bender series and the upcoming Legend of Korra, the story of the Avatar who follows Aang. From what we've seen of the previews, we know that Korra is a Water Bender from Sokka and Katarrah's tribe who is trained in all of the elements except Air.  The beginning of the story is about her journey to get training from one of the few Air Benders in existence.  In this case, Tenzin- a son of Aang and Katarrah. Interestingly- maddeningly- little so far has been released about the fate of the Fire Nation or Prince Zuko. In other words, if you want to find out, go buy volumes 2 and 3 of The Promise.

For $9.99 per copy, I should probably say no.  However, I'll not only get them, I'll probably get them the first day they're out.  If you're a fan of The Avatar: Last Air Bender series, I recommend you do the same.

An Interview with Susanne Freidberg, author of Fresh: A Perishable History

Whether a devout vegan or hardcore carnivore, almost all of us want to know how fresh our food is (or was).  But what does it mean for food to be fresh?  How does food stay- or in some cases, become- fresh?  And what, exactly, does freshness do for us?

Susanne Freidberg’s Fresh: A Perishable History takes on those questions.  The reader will discover quickly that there are few definitive answers.  So how did freshness become so important?  

Ms. Friedberg kindly agreed to speak with me about some of the early history of modern fresh food, the local food movement and how much our quest for freshness has altered our food system and even our food.

Would it be fair to say that your book documents part of the story of the creation of our modern food system?

In a word, yes. But many books have told that story. My point in Fresh was to show that freshness—a food quality that we tend to consider natural and naturally appealing—is in fact a product of this modern food system. I also wanted to show how freshness came to be valued as an antidote to the ills and downsides of modern industrial life. I don’t just mean antidote in the nutritional sense, though I think it’s significant that in the 1920s fresh fruits, vegetables and dairy products were called “protective” foods. Freshness also became associated with other qualities that early 20th century consumers felt nostalgia for, such as purity and vitality.

What were some of the concerns about the healthiness of refrigerated and frozen food?  Once refrigeration and freezing became acceptable technologies, what were some of the supposed health benefits of shipped foods?

In the early days of refrigeration—meaning the 1870s and ‘80s—consumers often had good reason to distrust the foods it touched. For starters, the technology itself was not very reliable, due to erratic temperature control and poor insulation in cold storage warehouses. But the bigger problem was how merchants used the technology to store goods that were already bad, such as rotten eggs, or fish unsold at the end of a market day. It was easy enough to blame cold storage itself for the poor quality of whatever came out of it. The problem with this kind of scapegoating was that consumers came to believe that refrigeration really was the source of harm. They thought that even if the food looked, smelled and possibly even tasted fine, it might actually be somehow spoiled. This notion faded after the first decade of the 20th century, but even then consumers were suspicious of merchants that used refrigeration to manipulate the availability (and price) of seasonal foods.

Eventually shipped fresh foods came to be valued for the variety and vitamins they added to the middle class daily diet. The popularization of vitamin science in the 1920s provided support for the idea that consumers needed fresh fruits, vegetables and dairy products everyday and ideally all year round. So did consumers’ growing preoccupation with calorie-counting and staying slender.

You write the story of a number of different foods: beef, milk, eggs, fish, lettuce and fruits- even, in a way, the story of ice.  I'm guessing a lot of people reading this will be as surprised as I was to learn that eggs used to be a seasonal food.  Which food yielded the most surprises for you?

The history of eggs contained the most surprises, because I also didn’t know they used to be seasonal. Nor, it turns out, did most people I told about this, including those of older generations. But if you think about it, other birds lay eggs seasonally, so why wouldn’t chickens?  It certainly makes evolutionary sense, in that chicks hatched in spring would be more likely to survive than those hatched in fall or winter. Similarly, many of the ways that people used to procure fresh foods—walking beef cattle hundreds of miles to market, keeping dairy cows in the middle of cities, transporting live fish by barge (still practiced, by the way, in East Asia)—might now seem surprising to us, or at least extreme. But they were in fact practical adaptations to the highly perishable nature of highly desirable foods. Given the constraints, in other words, they made sense. Refrigeration and rapid transportation have changed what we consider commonsensical about freshness.

There are things that make locally grown food attractive (particularly supporting local businesses in a weakened economy), but is that a realistic option for everyone?  Can everyone afford that? If they could, is that going to provide sufficient food for everyone?

As a geographer, one of my first questions is always: what scale? If local means 50 or 100 miles from market, then no, an entirely local food supply is not a realistic option for New England, among other places. Alongside the climatic limitations (even many ardent locavores would prefer not to give up coffee and olive oil!) are spatial ones, especially if the average American diet continues to include a lot of livestock products. That said, increasing the proportion of fresh foods sourced locally would be viable, given adequate infrastructure and support for farmers. Such support might include government loans or subsidies to make farmland more affordable in densely populated regions, because this is currently a big obstacle (and one of the reasons local food sometimes costs more).

So some re-localizing and re-regionalizing of food supply is certainly possible and— if fuel prices continue to rise—likely. But I don’t think it should be a top priority for food system transformation (and I say that as a longtime farmers’ market shopper). For one, there’s now abundant evidence that local food does not always have a smaller environmental impact. For another, while it’s appealing to support local businesses—especially businesses run by people we come to know and care about—it’s not entirely clear why their proximity makes them automatically more deserving of our support than businesses elsewhere. The idea that nearby farmers treat their land and workers better than do farmers elsewhere—well, it may often be true, but it also reflects what we like to think about an imagined local community, and what we fear about the distant and unknown. We often hear these days how important it is to know where your food comes from. Well, I’d prefer to know that I could trust my food regardless of where it comes from. Or, to put it in less pie-in-the-sky terms: Getting to know food producers can be educational and socially satisfying. But the health and wellbeing of people, animals and the environment—wherever they are—should be protected by laws; they should not depend on our figuring out who seems like the most trustworthy farmer at the market.

Along the same lines, measures to promote local food will not by themselves do anything about the sharp geographic inequalities even within our own country, not to mention across the world.  Would a more just food system be one in which the immense disposable food income of New York City only flowed into the Hudson River Valley? That’s an extreme example, but the point is, I think it’s dangerous to assume without questioning that “local” means greener, fairer, healthier, or better, period.

What would you like to see readers do with what they learn from your work?

Question their assumptions about what they think is fresh, and why that matters.

For more on food, globalization and nostalgia, please see my interviews with Charles Mann and Pankaj Ghemawat.

An Interview with Charles Mann, author of 1491 and 1493.

Charles Mann, science journalist and author of the paradigm-shifting 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus and 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, graciously agreed to speak to me about globalization, immigration, race, disease and food.  As with all good works of history, his books provide as much insight into our present as they do into our past.

Charles C Mann

We used to believe that when the Europeans got to the Americas they found an Eden with abundant flora and fauna and not too many people.  The best part was that the people and the rest of nature lived in this magically harmonious state.  What you show in 1491 is that there were many more people and the plant and animal species weren’t as numerous because those people did a good job of controlling them. 

They were outstanding land managers by and large.  This was a technology that the original Americans were quite good at, and better in some ways than Europeans.  That’s an entirely different thing than saying that they lived in a timeless harmony with nature, like perfect Sierra Club tourists.  Nobody really knows how many people were here, but [for many years] the most widely accepted estimate for the population in North America, north of the Rio Grande, in 1492 was about 900,000.  I think it’s fair to say that almost nobody believes this anymore.  Typical estimates [now] are 10 to 15 million, and that’s a whole lot different than 900,000.  Although that makes North America less populous than Mesoamerica, that still leaves plenty of room for human imprint on the landscape. 

Do smaller numbers alleviate guilt about what happened?

The logic seems to be: if there are only 900,000 people, much of the landscape is empty, so it’s okay if we move in.  That’s a little bit like saying that it’s more okay to take over part of someone’s land out west if they have ten acres than it is someone in Massachusetts if they only have an acre.  Under our laws, it’s equally bad no matter what you do.  [Native] property right systems were different from ours, but they certainly had a clear idea that this was their land in ways that are similar to ways we think about our land.  The fact that they were thin on the ground wouldn’t be a defense. 

But the destruction of those civilizations wasn’t as much through war but more through diseases.

[Diseases were] a weapon we didn’t understand or control.  Neither side did.  Both of them understood the disease as manifesting somehow the will of the heavens or the spirits.  The English people saw that the natives fell to sickness and said to themselves in essence, “Wow, God must really like us!”  Native people made the exact same calculation but from the reverse and said, “Wow, we must have done something wrong.” 

1491 is about the Americas, but 1493 is about the post-Columbian world.  We think about post-1492 as a European story, but it wasn’t just the Europeans.

Obviously, the Europeans had a directive role.  But if you look at it with a different lens, you see different things.  If you look at it demographically, you’d see that before Columbus Europeans were largely in Europe, Africans were almost all in Africa, Asians were almost all in Asia, Indians were almost all in the Americas.  After Columbus, the human species gets tremendously jumbled up.  You end up with places like Argentina and Australia dominated by Europeans, Brazil dominated by Africans and Chinatowns all over the world.  The driver of all of this is the slave trade, and what you would see if you were a biologist or an ecologist is this huge die off in the Americas followed by this enormous wave of Africans coming from Africa with Europeans playing a peripheral role.  From that perspective what you’re seeing then is a meeting of Africa and the Americas rather than Europe [and the Americas]. 

We’re taught that there are large numbers of Africans in the New World, but we think of them as cattle or sheep.  We don’t think of them as actors.

And they were actors.  That’s something that we really have trouble with for a couple of reasons.  One is that most people in this country are of European descent, so naturally we tend to think that our ancestors were the most important.  The second thing is that a lot of what the Africans did they did out of sight of the Europeans.  The relations they had with the native populations were something that was deliberately done outside of the European purview. 

Not that those groups had an automatic affinity for each other, but as you describe in 1493 they saw that in some cases that they had good reason to work together.

In some cases, and in some cases they didn’t.  In some cases they cooperated at a distance, like the “Red Seminoles” and “Black Seminoles” in Florida where they set up parallel societies.  In some cases they completely mingled with each other, which is mostly the case in Brazil.  In some instances one society would be more dominant, and you find this in the case of the Cherokee.  Lots of Africans became Cherokee, and they essentially preserved Cherokee society.  In the coast of Ecaudor in the Esmeraldas, you had an African society which many native people joined and essentially became Africans.  In some cases they just fought.  In the Yucatan, the Maya, who were never really subjugated by the Spanish, lots of Africans said, “these look like good people,” and they declared that they were Maya, but the original Maya didn’t like that.  There was lots of tension between the “Red Maya” and the “Black Maya”.

As an Asian American I felt vindicated when I read about the amount of Asian activity in the Americas, specifically Chinese and Fujianese.

By Chinese we’re speaking very broadly.  The biggest complement [in the Americas] were the Fujianese who weren’t Han [the dominant ethnic group in China], although there’s tons of Han involved.  The other thing that makes this difficult is that a lot of the readily accessible records are Spanish.  They didn’t know who these people were; they called them all “chinos”.  [Asians] are busy, active partners in this world that we’re all creating willy-nilly together.

And you don’t usually have that many people migrate without some significant interbreeding or intermarriage.

That certainly happened in Latin America.  This is another area where American historians have been timid.  There is a tendency to think, “English people didn’t do this.”  This just isn’t true, and this is the reason we’re finding all sorts of surprises when people get their genes tested. 

Why is it that in Northern North America we are predominantly a European people with a smattering of Americans? 

Right after the Civil War there was a huge wave of immigration from Europe to the United States.  That is when Europeans really became dominant, in the latter part of the 19^th century.  It begins with a lot of Irish that come in the 1840s and 1850s, then continues for a couple of decades.  The Germans come in the 1870s, 1880s, 1890s, then the Russians.  That’s when the United States takes on a strongly European character.  As the country becomes more “multicultural”, it’s really tending back toward its origins. 

The second part is that the US is split apart by the malaria line [which corresponds to the Mason-Dixon Line].  There’s a dramatically different demographic history in the southern part of the east coast than the northern part.  In places like Brazil, if you were a plantation owner, you had to import all of these foreigners because Europeans wouldn’t go.  In New England, Europeans could go and probably wouldn’t die.  New England is a weird outlier among all of these colonial societies because they were a European majority in a way that most other parts of the Americas were not.  Because a lot of American historians come from New England, people have a natural tendency to look around them and imagine that what they’re seeing is true everywhere else. 

Have you noticed the nostalgia people have for a “pure”, back-to-our roots history?

There’s all kinds of nostalgia, but they hearken back to an imagined past.  I experience it when I grow vegetables in my garden, and some part of that is some imagined simplicity in the past. 

Like the myth that we had food security until modernization and globalization interfered? 

The average 17^th century European did about as well as somebody from Zimbabwe today [see A Farewell to Alms for more].  It’s really striking to see that Europe couldn’t feed itself for centuries upon centuries.  Then globalization happens and they get the potato and maize.  It’s hard to be glib about globalization when you think about this. 

For much more on these topics- plus slavery, agriculture and how the Columbian Exchange just might have caused the Little Ice Age- please pick up a copy of 1493 today.  The younger reader in your family will also enjoy Before Columbus: The Americas of 1491, co-authored with Rebecca Stefoff, which covers much of the material in 1491 in a way that younger readers will appreciate.

An interview with Mike Schatzki, author of "The Great Fat Fraud"

Mike Schatzki, author of The Great Fat Fraud, agreed to chat with me about the obesity "epidemic", fitness and public health.  (Please see my review of his book.)  

At a time when we are blaming childhood obesity on bad mothering, perhaps Mr. Schatzki can help inject a little common sense into the conversation.

What is the fraud you refer to you in your book? 

The fraud is that fat and obesity are diseases.  They are not.  However, it is very much in the interests of the $60 billion weight-loss industry to continue to perpetuate this fraud. 
 

Why are you an authority we should listen to about this? 

I am the tour guide to the experts.  Over the last 20 years scientists and researchers have conducted hundreds of experiments involving hundreds of thousands of people in order to develop a clear understanding of how the body responds to weight and fitness in terms of morbidity (illness) and mortality. 

The results of those experiments directly contradict all the prevailing myths surrounding the so-called “obesity epidemic.”  However, these researchers are far more skilled at understanding how the body functions than they are in publicizing their work.  As a result, their findings have been overwhelmed by the massive propaganda efforts of the weight-loss industry. 

The purpose of The Great Fat Fraud was to bring together in one place, in an easily accessible and readable format, all of the research that has been done that exposes the fraud of the “obesity epidemic.” 
 

You make it pretty clear in your book that, with very few exceptions, weight and even BMI is a vanity issue, not a health issue.  However, you still talk about dieting and weight loss.   

There are really two very valid reasons why people might want to lose weight.  The first is that some people are simply not happy with the way that they look when they are heavy.  I am not sure I would use the word “vanity” since that tends to have some negative connotations.  I would prefer to say that people have every right to make “aesthetic choices” about how they look. 

The second reason is that there’s some pretty convincing research showing that people who are heavy experience wage discrimination in the workplace.
 

For both of those reasons I felt that it was important to discuss weight loss and some of the myths and misconceptions that have surrounded it.  The research is fairly conclusive that: 

1.  Exercise and fitness alone will not result in weight loss for the great majority of people.  To lose weight, you still have to diet.

2.  Without a continuing fitness regimen, the overwhelming majority of people will, over time, regain whatever weight they have lost.
 

I've met a number of people who genuinely do have trouble losing weight, even with a fitness-focused plan like the one you suggest.  They will lose some weight, but not very much- easily less than ten pounds over the course of a year.  Are those the kinds of "results" people should expect? 

The research is pretty clear that for most people fitness alone will not result in weight loss.  The reason is that the body’s set point recognizes the calorie deficit created by fitness activities and increases one’s hunger level so that they compensate by eating more.  So even with a fitness program, most people who want to lose weight will have to consciously diet. 

It is also true that some people have enormous difficulty in losing weight.  People who find themselves in this situation should seriously consider the precepts of the Health at Every Size movement.  Health at Every Size emphasizes body acceptance and intuitive eating among other things.  However, even with Health at Every Size, fitness is a critical component of being healthy.
 

It's very hard to dissociate health from appearance.  When we see someone who is "heavy", many automatically assume that they are unhealthy and/or a drain on our public finances.   

It is critical here to make a distinction between individuals who are sedentary and individuals who are fit.  People who are fit do not have a health problem regardless of their weight.  However, high levels of weight when combined with a sedentary lifestyle is a lethal combination. 

A thin person who is sedentary has twice the mortality risk of a person who is BMI 30 but fit.  A person who is BMI 30 and sedentary has three times the mortality risk of a person who is BMI 30 and fit.  And since fitness can be achieved either through exercise or through a 10,000 steps per day walking program, it is a lot easier for most people than losing weight. 

And even if someone still holds firmly to the position that fitness is all well and good but you still have to lose weight to be healthy, they’re still going to have to embrace fitness because without fitness, whatever weight someone loses is surely going to be regained.
 

There's talk about instituting higher insurance premiums and taxes on those with high BMIs.  Not coincidentally, we're also talking about taxes on sodas and candy.  How do we "decriminalize" the un-thin? 

Someone who is heavy and sedentary is most definitely going to have higher health claims costs than someone who is thin and sedentary.  But someone who is heavy and fit is going to have substantially lower health claims costs than someone who is thin and sedentary. 

It would be massively unfair to penalize someone who is fit but heavy when that person is likely to have half the healthcare claims experience of someone who is thin but sedentary.  Corporations who impose or are planning to impose obesity penalties must have a fitness exception.  People who are heavy must be given an opportunity to prove that they are fit with a simple treadmill test, and those who are fit must not be penalized.
 

I live in Boston.  We have banned the sale of sugary drinks and we have a campaign called "Don't Get Smacked By Fat".  In addition to showing teenagers literally getting fat thrown in their faces, it states this: "health costs of obesity in the United States are $147 billion annually".  Is this true? 

The $147 billion annual cost figure comes from a study entitled "Annual Medical Spending Attributable to Obesity: Payer and Service-Specific Estimates."  The major flaw in this study, like in so many similar studies, is that the population data base being analyzed (in this case the Medical Expenditure Panel Surveys) is not separated into fit and sedentary groupings.  If it were, we would undoubtedly see that those who are heavy and fit impose no additional healthcare costs on the system.  We would also see that those who are sedentary impose substantial healthcare costs on the system with those costs escalating as weight increases. 

Lack of fitness, not obesity, is the primary public health issue for the 21^st century. 

For a first person perspective on being overweight or obese, please visit My Body Stories on My Body Gallery.

The Great Fat Fraud by Mike Schatzki

The Great Fat Fraud by Mike Schatzki helps untangle the issues around fitness, weight, diet, surgery and the weight loss industry.  By the end of the book, the reader should walk away with the understanding that fitness does not equal thinness and that achieving weight loss is much simpler than Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig and LA Weight Loss would have you believe.

Within the first six chapters, the author cites the work of three large, long-term studies (some going back to 1953) that show conclusively that the most reliable predictor of mortality isn’t size but fitness and activity level.  (Although many define “fitness” differently, for this purpose it’s a measure of how well the body can use oxygen.)  An active, fit person has a significantly lower risk of mortality than a sedentary person- regardless of body mass index (BMI).  If mortality is the primary concern, activity is the answer.  Numerous studies have shown that walking 10,000 steps per day is the target for the majority of people to achieve optimal fitness levels.

The next chapters discuss losing weight.  For most people, fitness activity will not result in very much weight loss, if any.  In order to achieve lasting weight loss, people have to 1) reduce their food intake (in other words, diet) until they hit a weight plateau and then 2) follow that up with activity- ie, 10,000 steps per day.  This combination will prevent the body from going into starvation mode and hoarding fat, which is what it does when deprived of calories (ie, dieting).  Weight loss is doable- and in fact, most people on diets have done it before they regain some or all of their weight- but the author takes pains to note that for most people weight loss is an aesthetic choice, not a health imperative.  In these chapters he also cites a study that showed that people who focused on body acceptance improved their health (lipid levels, blood pressure, activity, etc.) more than those who focused on dieting and, not coincidentally, felt better about themselves.

Schatzki spends a brief chapter each on stomach reduction surgery (because of the risks, it’s only appropriate for the most unhealthy 1 or 2 percent of the obese), weight loss drugs (which, unlike other drugs, trick a healthy body into malfunctioning) and weight loss programs (most of them can help you take the weight off, but you won’t keep it off... unless you’re active).  However, the most damning section of the book deals with what he calls the “researchaganda” that promotes the idea that obesity is a public health threat when in fact is not.  

By 1998 the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Obesity Task Force of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) had been manipulated by the weight loss industry to the point that the BMIs for overweight and obese had been lowered (to 25 to 30 and over 30, respectively).  In 2004, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) published a report that obesity was responsible for 400,000 deaths every year.  

Although the CDC study was debunked shortly after it was published (by everyone from the Wall Street Journal and Science Magazine to the Government Accountability Office), the damage had been done.  The media now had a story: fat isn’t just something people didn’t find attractive, it's a dangerous public health issue, and there is nothing modern media loves like a story that scares people- even if it's not true.  

At the end, Schatzki asks readers to take up the challenge to spread the real story about weight, fitness and obesity and offers links to the information cited in his book.

Both well-researched and accessible, this is a short, easy read that debunks obesity hysteria.  Recommended for anyone with an interest in health issues.