Brilliant two part article via bigfatblog.
The big difference of course is that fat is hated by both the left and the right.
Exercise: Read the quotations from the New England Journal of Medicine, the editor of the Harvard Medical School Health Letter, and the Clinical Psychology Review, summing up what is known about the relationship between eating, exercise, and weight, and the existence of safe, reliable techniques for making fat people not fat anymore.
Then go back and read the “left” and “right” links. Do either the Bush Administration’s CDC or the politically correct filmmaker seem to have any grasp of reality, or are they working from unscientific, disproven folk beliefs about weight, exercise, and obesity? If eating too much and failing to exercise does not actually correlate with obesity when one controls for socioeconomic class, does it matter whether McDonalds gives us big portions or not, or whether helpful government programs encourage us to eat less?
(The comments are interesting…. a lot of them seem to go along these lines: “despite the fact that 80 years of science gives us no indication that weight equals calorie input minus exercise, it is clear that weight does equal calorie input minus exercise, because that’s what I have always been told and what I prefer to believe. Therefore….”)