Deadly Vanilla Sunshine

newsweek:

Obesity. Making American children more snuggly since 1972.

This week’s cover features this blue-eyed little angel warning us of America’s coming obesity crisis. We’re fat, she’s (he?) saying, and we’re only getting fatter. So why is she on our cover? A new four-part HBO documentary (premiering next Monday and Tuesday) called “The Weight of the Nation” warns that the coming generation of Americans could even have shorter lifespans than the previous one. In Newsweek, Gary Taubes, author of “Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It,” takes a critical look at the film, and writes about the greater issue of obesity in America.

Whatchu think, tumblr?

This is problematic.

• this reinforces a stereotype about Americans that is untrue and harmful.
• don’t get your facts about health and diet from sensationalist video sources. do your research and read. for people criticizing obesity, you’re awfully lazy if you’ll only watch a film written and produced to make money to get your “information” on such a complicated issue.
• obesity levels tapered off about 12 years ago; people are not still slowly ballooning into 300 lb lard monsters. 
• health cannot be determined by weight alone. so what if this baby grows up to be 300 lbs? he/she could be perfectly healthy, or some of that weight could be muscle.  the latter is problematic because it leads healthy people to believe they need to lose weight when they don’t.
• this baby does not have enough teeth to eat french fries, and even if he/she did, they would only be able to eat a few. young children need a higher fat diet than adults for proper development so there’s that too.
• if we’re REALLY concerned about health, replace those fries with a cigarette. smoking does much worse long term damage than being obese and despite regulations, people continue to do it. but for every anti-smoking campaign I see (which is a chosen behavior), I see ten anti-obesity campaigns (which is not always a chosen behavior, especially in children.)
• TL;DR - don’t start body shaming before the kid can fucking walk. ideally don’t do it at all but come on Newsweek, you can do better than this. it’s kinda hard to do worse without it being a joke.