The Myth of the Childhood Obesity Epidemic

Today is a very special episode: You are all going to be the very, very first people to hear me read Chapter 1 of FAT TALK: Parenting in the Age of Diet Culture, which comes out in just 5 days, on April 25. We are excerpting this from the audiobook, which I got to narrate. If you love what you hear, I hope you will order the audiobook or the hardcover (or if you’re in the UK and the Commonwealth, the paperback) anywhere you buy books. Split Rock has signed copies and don’t forget that when you order from them, you can also take 10 percent off anything in the Burnt Toast Bookshop.

If you want more conversations like this one, please rate and review us in your podcast player! And become a paid Burnt Toast subscriber to get all of Virginia's reporting and bonus subscriber-only episodes. 

Disclaimer: Virginia and Corinne are humans with a lot of informed opinions. They are not nutritionists, therapists, doctosr, or any kind of health care providers. The conversation you're about to hear and all of the advice and opinions they give are just for entertainment, information, and education purposes only. None of this is a substitute for individual medical or mental health advice.

LINKS

That photo by Katy Grannan

archived in the National Portrait Gallery’s Catalog of American Portraits

Anamarie Regino on Good Morning America

Lisa Belkin's NYT Magazine article

a report published in Children’s Voice

a judge ordered two teenagers into foster care

2010 analysis published in the DePaul Journal of Health Care Law

Fat Shame: Stigma and the Fat Body in American Culture

Fearing the Black Body

Hilde Bruch's research papers

National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA)

Judy Freespirit and Aldebaran wrote the first “Fat Manifesto”

Several studies from the 1960s

researchers revisited the picture ranking experiment

the 1999–2000 NHANES showed a youth obesity rate of 13.9 percent

reaching 19.3 percent in the 2017–2018 NHANES

Data collected from 1976 to 1980 showed that 15 percent of adults met criteria for obesity.

By 2007, it had risen to 34 percent.

The most recent NHANES data puts the rate of obesity among adults at 42.4 percent.

The NHANES researchers determine our annual rate of obesity by collecting the body mass index scores of about 5,000 Americans (a nationally representative sample) each year.

A major shift happened in 1998, when the National Institutes of Health’s task force lowered the BMI’s cutoff points for each weight category, a math equation that moved 29 million Americans who had previously been classified as normal weight or just overweight into the overweight and obese categories.

in 2005, epidemiologists at the CDC and the National Cancer Institute published a paper analyzing the number of deaths associated with each of these weight categories in the year 2000 and found that overweight BMIs were associated with fewer deaths than normal weight BMIs.

in 2013, Flegal and her colleagues published a systematic literature review of ninety-seven such papers, involving almost three million participants, and concluded, again, that having an overweight BMI was associated with a lower rate of death than a normal BMI in all of the studies that had adequately adjusted for factors like age, sex, and smoking status.

But in 2021, years after retiring, Flegal published an article in the journal Progress in Cardiovascular Diseases that details the backlash her work received from obesity researchers.

After her paper was published, former students of the obesity researchers most outraged by Flegal’s work took to Twitter to recall how they were instructed not to trust her analysis because Flegal was “a little bit plump herself.”

the BMI-for-age chart used in most doctors’ offices today is based on what children weighed between 1963 and 1994. 

a 1993 study by researchers at the United States Department of Health and Human Services titled “Actual Causes of Death in the United States.”

 the study’s authors published a letter to the editors of the New England Journal of Medicine saying, “You [ . . . ] cited our 1993 paper as claiming ‘that every year 300,000 deaths in the United States are caused by obesity.’ That is not what we claimed.”

“Get in Shape, Girl!”

The Fat Studies Reader

Too Fat for China

as I reported for the New York Times Magazine in 2019, it has become a common practice for infertility clinics to deny in vitro fertilization and other treatments to mothers above a certain body weight

Michelle Obama 2016 speech, another speech, a 2010 speech to the School Nutrition Association, 2013 speech

Marion Nestle, a 2011 blog post

food insecurity impacted 21 percent of all American households with children when Obama was elected 

TheHill.com story on SNAP

“I could live on French fries,” she told the New York Times in 2009, explaining that she doesn’t because “I have hips.”

Ellyn Satter's an open letter to Obama

several other critiques of “Let’s Move"

“I don’t want our children to be weight-obsessed"

The Burnt Toast Podcast is produced and hosted by me, Virginia Sole-Smith. You can follow me on Instagram or Twitter.

Burnt Toast transcripts and essays are edited and formatted by Corinne Fay, who runs @SellTradePlus, an Instagram account where you can buy and sell plus size clothing and also co-hosts mailbag episodes!

The Burnt Toast logo is by Deanna Lowe.

Our theme music is by Jeff Bailey and Chris Maxwell.

Tommy Harron is our audio engineer.

Thanks for listening and for supporting anti-diet, body liberation journalism!

This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit virginiasolesmith.substack.com/subscribe