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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2010-09-22 11:43 am (UTC)This has proved pretty much impossible to hold to, but whatever.
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Date: 2010-09-22 12:25 pm (UTC)* On the AD36-obesity link: this has been bubbling under for a couple of years now, but this is the first hardcore study by a first rank western research institution (the original finding came out of India where a postgrad student noticed that chickens that had survived an infection put on a lot of fat). I'm betting on this as a major viral pandemic that's been hitting us for decades; like CFS, it's one that takes a long time to recognize as such because the symptoms arise post-infection and are relatively subtle.
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Date: 2010-09-22 12:30 pm (UTC)I hope you didn't read the comments on the obesity link. They made me want to punch people.
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Date: 2010-09-22 03:28 pm (UTC)The ancient greeks equated beauty with good (if you were good, the gods smiled upon you and made you beautiful; if you were bad, you would be cursed with ugliness), and even today we have hang-overs of this attitude -- look for beautiful villains and ugly heroes in Hollywood movies, for example.
Among these, there's the fat == gluttonous == sinful thing in Christianity. In ancient China, being fat meant "wealthy", i.e. "lucky". We just happened to fall victim to the meme-complex of an ascetic religion (the Esenes) that considered eating too much to be un-Godly ... and which spread via its bastard offspring, Christianity. So that now "fat" people are assumed somehow to be sinful and responsible for their condition, either by eating too much or living badly or something else.
I'd be utterly unsurprised to discover that there's another pathogen out there that has been unrecognized because of a blind-spot in our cultural outlook which insists that its symptoms are evidence of immorality. After all, look at AIDS. (And note that, given how widespread the obesity epidemic has become, and the negative impact of obesity on life expectancy, it could be killing more people than HIV.)
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Date: 2010-09-22 03:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-22 07:06 pm (UTC)At the time (70s? 80s?), my first thought was that people wouldn't be that stupid, and my second thought was that they just might.
In other news, on the first reading I thought The Sparrow was unfair to the Catholic Church.
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Date: 2010-09-22 02:29 pm (UTC)I was just going on my own vague biological knowledge, plus observations of the world around me and thoughts like "Even if I went on the mega beer, sugar + cheese diet for ten years I just would not get *that* fat - what is going on?" And that the younger generation were almost all as fat as the "fat kids" were when I was at school. Watch film footage of crowds from the 70's to see what bodily norms were back then... it's kinda shocking the change.
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Date: 2010-09-22 02:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-09-22 03:52 pm (UTC)