Posted on 03/20/2015 8:56:04 PM PDT by Steelfish
To Many, Fat Stigma Makes Obesity Smell Foul
New evidence of our unconscious prejudice against obese individuals comes in a study from UCLA psychologists. ( By MELISSA HEALY
Below our level of awareness lies prejudice, and it doesn't smell good Obese people have been shown to prompt more disgust than such stigmatized groups as the homeless Has the "war on obesity" claimed casualties among the obese? Experimental subjects who were tricked into thinking they should smell something reported they smelled less pleasant odors when they viewed pictures of overweight and obese people than when they gazed at trim individuals, new research has found.
The experimental exercise, conducted by psychology professors at UCLA, is a clever way to smoke out "implicit association "-- or prejudice that lies beneath the level of conscious awareness. While similar exercises have been used to explore racial and other forms of prejudice, heavy individuals in this case were shown to receive the stigma.
Diet and exercise alone are no cure for obesity, experts say Diet and exercise alone are no cure for obesity, experts say The new findings "suggest that the extent of negative bias toward overweight individuals may be greater than previously assumed," the authors of the study wrote. Previous research, they noted, suggests that prejudice against the obese -- in employment, healthcare and education -- is on the rise. They cited studies in which overweight individuals have been found to provoke "more feelings of disgust than 12 historically stigmatized groups (homeless individuals, persons with mental illness, etc.)."
The latest research, published in the International Journal of Obesity, reflect the judgments of 245 undergraduates who were asked to sniff "scent samples" and rate the odor they were presented while also viewing images of people and things.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Maybe it’s just memories from having been in close proximity to some obese people in hot and sweaty circumstances and the fat folks haven’t been able to reach all the folds to ensure they are truly clean....
LOL! My pet peeve is people who can’t be bothered to dress in anything but gym or yardwork clothes, no matter what the occasion.
I don’t care how fit and skinny you are: put on a suit!
Likely the lead study to new fat anti-discrimination laws.
People have different metabolisms.
I was once very fat (about 400lb) and the effort to not be is absurd. Today I’m 6ft+ 200lbs+ and can run a half marathon. BUT I can only eat 1500 calories per day IF I work out that day. If I’m sedentary, I eat 1000. My meals are typically half portions of very nutrient-rich food and people don’t believe I eat so little. My metabolism is designed to eat very little and run around constantly (a rare lifestyle today).
Yet I know 100lb females with desk jobs that starve if they don’t eat at least 3000-4000 calories and have never worked out or eaten a salad as a meal their entire life!
You CAN’T tell me there isn’t a huge range of metabolisms among people.
I've had about 2500 calories a day per day for over a week, and still weigh about 101 lbs. I move fast, though, and do more on accident than most people do during a week on purpose.
/johnny
People like to blame genetics, but really, diets are genetic. It can be hard, my SIL is quite heavy and she said that when you are large, people(even family) assume you are tough and will be quite blunt and sharp with you.
Though I haven’t read it, The Fat Switch would be a good book for who are struggling with their weight. One disappointed reviewer gave enough info that you don’t need to buy it.
It doesn’t take much to go in the wrong direction. I am on the smaller side, my husband is a barrel chested broad shouldered guy. Our kids are all slender to average but one. Even as a young child she has slid into being overweight by bad habits
“The fat” can thank MICHELLE for demonizing them, a lot more than our side. She’s the one saying how terrible it is to be fat.
“In a very fundamental sense, people get fat because they take in more calories than they use.”
I’m with you. A human body burns about 2000 calories per day. With a decent amount of exercise (like walking 4 miles), maybe 2500 calories.
A person can easily eat 3000 calories in a day, even 4000 (trust me, I know). A healthy body will process that food, as it simply doesn’t know if the next meal is in 3 hours or 3 days (or 3 weeks, for that matter).
I didn't always have this problem. It didn't start until my mid-thirties, so I do know the difference between normal and abnormal. Abnormal sucks!
Honestly....If food is needed in heaven, I am leaving. Hell couldn't be worse.
“If anyone wants to know why marriage rates are down, it’s because most American women are disgusting hippos.”
While that isn’t helping their cause, I put the number one factor on our legal system. Everyone knows someone that has been screwed big-time by a beach that wound up listening to her girlfriends and family, rather than trying to keep the marriage together. That’s why I went halfway around the world to find a wife from a culture that still looks down on divorce.
Oh, you ARE a piece of work!...
You'll infer lurid fantasies about the hygiene of fat people, but those who blanch at sodomy, a practice that virtually requires the ingestion of fecal material, are "self-righteous."
Your kind of preening sanctimony is, sadly, the default setting for Lot's family.
oh, please....divorces happen because of sweatpants. /s
“oh, please....divorces happen because of sweatpants. /s”
Yep, or the toilet seat. “He is just so INCONSIDERATE.”
Funny, my wife never had that problem...
This assumes, of course, that the obese do not have substantially worse body odor than those who are slender. But this might not be true.
Body odor is caused by bacteria breaking down protein into certain acids.
“People who are obese, those who regularly eat spicy foods, as well as individuals with certain medical conditions, such as diabetes, are more susceptible to having body odor.”
So people may not be odorifically biased against the obese because they are obese, but because they actually are *stinky*.
It might help to adjust your intestinal flora.
While there are between 300-1000 different kinds of intestinal bacteria, 30-40 kinds take up almost all of the physical space. And this group is dominated by two phylum of bacteria, the Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes.
The Firmicutes are evolutionarily newer, are aerobic, and they are very capable of digesting what you eat to provide you with a lot of nutrition. When people consume “probiotics” it means almost exclusively Firmicutes. Most carbohydrates are digested by them.
The Bacteroidetes are evolutionarily much older, are anaaerobic, and exist in the lower bowel and colon, where they mostly digest resistant starch and fiber. They do not provide much nutrition to us while doing so.
Importantly, the Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes exist in an about 75:25% ratio. If you have more Firmicutes in the ratio, your nutrition is better and you tend to gain weight. If you have more Bacteroidetes in the ratio, you do not get as much nutrition from your food and tend to lose weight. But there are many twists and turns to this.
Most people also have a kind of “Archaea” in them, that sort of looks like a bacteria, but isn’t, so much that it is evolutionarily closer to us than to bacteria. Importantly, Archaea eat things that bacteria don’t, especially hydrogen gas, a waste product of bacteria. The Archaea convert it to methane.
This matters, because bacteria digestion is limited by the hydrogen it produces, which poisons the bacteria. Since the Archaea consumes this hydrogen, the bacteria can digest more and for longer. Providing more nutrition to their host.
A bacterial villain is a genus of bacteria called Enterobacter, that is strongly associated with obesity, to the point that when it is put into slim test animals they become obese. In an obese person, they so dominate all the other bacteria that they take up as much as 1/3rd of the space.
More information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firmicutes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacteroidetes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterobacter
Archaea:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanobrevibacter_smithii
Iowacornman, I was just wondering...are you a former fat person? Or have you had a bad personal experience involving a fat relative, perhaps? Your extreme reaction makes me wonder.
she was already modeling when she was in high school... also wasn't see class valedictorian? how could they think she would be nothing?
Now they're in their 60s. When we were kids and young adults, both of them had those 4000-cals-a-day-and-never-gain-weight metabolisms, human sea otters who need to consume three times their body weight a day in food.
One of them got married and his wife took him the direction of what most people think is "eating smart," except that it's all wrong. It's screwed up six ways to Sunday. It tells them to avoid fat, especially animal fat. It tells them to eat contrived man-made substitutes such as Crisco instead of lard, and margarine instead of butter. It tells them to eat way way way more starches and carbs than proper proportion for protein and vegetables. The average American food choice is loaded with wheat, as well as heavily processed wheat, like flour. It frowns on eggs, or at least the yolks, one of nature's rare food sources of vitamin D, so "healthy" folks eat just the white! *rolls eyes* Cooking is dominated by olive and other seed oils, like coconut. It attempts to replace animal protein with estrogen-rich vegetable Soy protein, and all kinds of bad things happen.
So that brother, who eats what is called "smart" by convention, got downright beefy at one point, but now has it mostly under control, but it's a chore. The other brother, who remained a bachelor, eats super-simply. And he has retained that metabolism, because he can sure put it away; you have to see it to believe it. When these two were teens, they each burned through a gallon of whole milk a day. They had cloned metabolisms. So to say one is still skinny because of genetics while the other isn't, is clearly in error. They're clones.
So I'm skeptical of what "healthy" is. I know what works in people I see, and it indicates that conventional medicine has it pretty well wrong much of the way.
Also ... I'd been drinking non-fat milk for 35 years, thinking it healthier. Mom (wise mom) suggested I switch back to whole milk. I did, and almost immediately lost four pounds, and it has stayed off. So I am now thinking dairy fat is probably okay, especially hard-cheese and buttermilk dairy fat.
I have a real weakness for sugar, and will ingest a thousand calories easy in a moment of weakness!!! Curse Brach's spice drops!!!!! Believe me, if I didn't burn it off, I'd be a walrus. I try to avoid it and am a lot better at resisting than I used to be.
I do see guys like John Travolta and Val Kilmer, and think, "leave em alone, they're built that way" -- some body types are meant to be heftier and heavier. I think we have standards of "obesity" that are insane. I don't consider many people "fat," that others do.
“I know of a true story about a fat warthog. Her HS classmates even teased her and stated “you are fat and ugly and you’ll be nothing when you graduate.” Well, that fat and ugly toad turned into Cindy Crawford.”
Is that the same CC that was a model during high school?
No one says or believes this in 2015. This story must have happened a long, long time ago.
It tells them to eat way way way more starches and carbs than proper proportion for protein and vegetables. The average American food choice is loaded with wheat, as well as heavily processed wheat, like flour. It frowns on eggs, or at least the yolks, one of nature's rare food sources of vitamin D, so "healthy" folks eat just the white! *rolls eyes* Cooking is dominated by olive and other seed oils, like coconut. It attempts to replace animal protein with estrogen-rich vegetable Soy protein, and all kinds of bad things happen.
You can believe what you want, but I think that people who want to believe that fat isn't fattening, or consuming cholesterol doesn't raise cholesterol are in denial or are believing some serious BS.
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