Flashback – Blame the Sugar

[In February of 2012 I provided another example of how Americans are encouraged by the media to shift the blame rather than take responsibility. Each time we do, we give politicians and regulators a new target for bans and restrictions. This in turn relieves us of the responsibility of making choices along with the risks that some of those choices might turn out to be wrong, but it also deprives otherwise responsible people from making any choices at all. At the time I wondered if sugar would be next on the list.]

In past blogs I have warned that if we don't begin to change our behavior, especially by acting responsibly, bad consequences will continue. This lax attitude can force the government to step in, threatening our freedom. The idea of a threat to freedom may seem like an abstract concept, perhaps a little difficult to pin down. Now we have another concrete example.

Published Wednesday in Nature, a study by three scientists from UC San Francisco finds that sugar is as bad for us as alcohol and tobacco and should be likewise regulated.  This article from the LA Times gives the details. The study's authors make recommendations to the Federal Government including: taxation, distribution controls, age limits, and a limit or ban on television commercials for processed foods containing any form of added sugar. This is what I mean by loss of freedom.   Besides the alcohol and tobacco restrictions, there have been local bans on transfats. Today it's sugar. What next?

This article is interesting because I find the wording, "sugar...is responsible" near the beginning and "sugar itself is to blame" further on. It's the sugar's fault and we are the victims! How long are we going to let inanimate objects take the rap for us? If we don't step up and take responsibility for our behavioral failures and begin to make some changes, well-intentioned people will call for government action and our freedoms will slowly erode. Meanwhile, we will be standing around wondering how it happened!

Flashback – Responsibility and Excuses

[How things have changed from when I originally titled this “Evidence Abounds” back in 2011. These days news is dominated by coronavirus and politics (or the mixture). What hasn’t changed is the tendency to use excuses in place of responsibility and the media’s willingness to encourage this behavior. First see the flashback comments.]

How hard is it to find evidence of problematic behavior in one or more of the five dimensions or of institutionalized support for these habits? – Surprisingly easy.  There are days when I have to pick and choose among available topics.

Today I have an Associated Press article left over from 3 weeks ago presenting research that tells how hormones make it more difficult to keep weight off after dieting.  The headline begins, “Not your fault!”  This is right out of the poor discipline/poor responsibility playbook.  It gives people the excuse that they can’t stick to their diet because of their hormones.  Ironically the header above the article features six advertising links, five of which are for weight-loss products, programs or surgery – the easy answers that everyone looks for when faced with the hard work of getting back to and staying at the right weight.  This is practically the definition of discipline and responsibility failures that bubble up into many other societal issues and crises (budgeting, smoking, and alcohol abuse, to name a few).

How, in the first place, can any reputable scientist say that hormones are the problem?  Didn’t humans have the same hormones many years ago when the number of overweight Americans was less than half of what it is today?  It just doesn’t add up.

Second, how can the parent of a teenager use hormones as an excuse for regaining weight and not let that teenager use hormones as an excuse for any of their own destructive decisions?  This sounds like a can of worms ready to be opened.

I have sometimes jokingly said that if I ever got arrested for anything, I’d just tell the police that what I was doing was performance art and protected under the First Amendment.  Now, I guess, if that doesn’t fly, I have the excuse of hormones to fall back on.  

[Well, that was then, but in 2020, a NOVA episode was dedicated to blaming obesity mostly on genes using examples of rare cases. It's a little hard to believe that our genes are so much different from Americans living in the 1950s and 60s. Does evolution work that fast, or is it just another handy excuse?]

Paying Attention to the Wrong Things

How many Americans spend their lives paying attention to the wrong things and to the wrong people? About once a month I’ve explained how celebrity endorsements of various products are mostly misleading, resulting in wasted time and money, sometimes putting people and their families in serious danger. Vaccine-hesitancy is just one small example of this in the present-day news.

This came to mind when the tomatoes I had raised from seeds in the back window and planted in the garden were devastated by the storms of May in the Midwest – no tornados, but enough wind to tear the delicate leaves of the stems. I was forced to buy hardier replacements at the local nursery. On one pot were the words, “FOODIE FRESH,” whatever that means. I began to wonder, where did all this foodie business come from, and why do people pay any attention?

First found in print in 1980, the dictionary definition of a foodie is a person who has an ardent or refined interest in food. 

Surely this is a new phenomenon, unlikely to be driven by some inherited predisposition from ancient times. I can’t imagine our hunter-gatherer ancestors being overly fussy about the food they ate, perhaps complaining that the wild boar from one jungle was more tasty and tender than one from another field. That would have led to quick extinction of the race – or at least of the foodie-oriented genes. No, they were more concerned with survival, a factor that is easily taken for granted today.

More recently, in the Great Depression, or even in most of the second half of the last century, food was not as plentiful as it is today. Foodies were non-existent and those who were considered gourmets usually came from the upper class, the idle rich.

But in this century things have changed. We have a Specialty Food Association, who sponsored the 2012 Culinary Visions Panel Survey, that gave us the following:

• Three-quarters (76 percent) of U.S. adults enjoy talking about new or interesting foods. 53 percent of U.S. adults regularly watch cooking shows. 
• 54 percent of casual diners are considered foodies because of their desire to always or usually try new menu items when going to a restaurant.

Percentages are likely higher today as being considered a foodie has become a status symbol.

Another, more recent source tells: “A study of 2,000 Americans examined the rise of the foodie phenomenon and found that 62% would go to an event just for the food.” And “Seventy-seven percent say food is important when attending any public event.” Perhaps foodie is more closely related to a gourmand, a word that carries in addition to refined or discriminating taste, the “connotations of one who enjoys food in great quantities.”

The simple promotional statement on the side of a plastic tomato pot plus a little research leads to the conclusion that in the middle of a so-called “Obesity Epidemic” advertisers and consumers themselves are glamorizing the idea of an obsession with food, especially more exotic choices. Being a foodie becomes a source of pride, an opportunity to boast of one's discriminating taste and giving the show-off implicit permission to indulge. And any effort to disparage the movement would be considered shaming.

A little more perspective might make people appreciate the true blessing of having regular access to ordinary food, that is, to pay more attention to the right things.

Weight Loss and Diets

In America the news media tell us that we are in the midst of an obesity epidemic. This is clearly a discipline issue. As in most cases about the dimension of discipline, the answer is simple to understand and hard to do. Apparently though, and typically, a great number or people think there is some easy path to weight loss.

That’s why Americans buy about 5 million diet books every year. Millions are looking for that magic answer and presumably going back to buy a second and third book as each particular formula invariably fails them. Hundreds of different diet books are listed on Amazon, many labeled as best sellers. I found from another source a list of the ten best books on the Ketogenic diet. How many books do we need on a diet described as an “extreme form of low-carbohydrate diet” originally used to treat epilepsy in children a century ago. But today, by way of “celebrity endorsement it has become a popular weight-loss fad diet, but there is no evidence of any distinctive benefit for this purpose, and it risks causing a number of side effects.The British Dietetic Association named it one of the ‘top 5 worst celeb diets to avoid in 2018’.” 

This article in the Guardian from earlier in the year challenges these diet programs with all their accompanying hype by presenting five myths about weight loss. The thrust of the argument is that people tend to misjudge the dangers of their condition as well as their personal progress toward their goals.

People can hugely misjudge their calorie intake, and overweight people have a strong tendency to grossly underestimate the calorie content of their food (by about 47%). Those who believe they are fat but healthy, according to the writer, are deluding themselves. Being overweight is inherently unhealthy. “Their risk of becoming ill was eight times higher than that of the healthy group with normal weight. The risks include, but are not limited to: diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, sleep apnea, arthritis/joint problems, fertility problems, asthma, back pain, incontinence, gout and stroke.”

The BBC reinforces the seriousness by proclaiming in this headline “Obesity-related cancers rise for younger US generations, study says.”

The other side of the problem has to do with the fact that people also misjudge other factors including: how many calories they burn through exercise, how overweight they are, that the extra weight doesn’t slow them down or that they can blame it on genetic differences. (See last Friday’s comments.) 

The most reliable advice comes from people not trying to sell books or diet programs, for example, advice from the book, The Cure for Everything, which I also referred to last Friday. Exercise is necessary and healthy, but it does little toward weight loss without a change in eating habits. (This is backed up by over 60 independent studies.) It’s not about a diet, in the popular sense of the word, but in a lifestyle choice. To make good choices the author recommends paying close attention to what you eat, either by calorie counting or any other method. This “forced self-monitoring…causes you to eat less, which is the only way to lose weight” (p. 54). The tendency to give yourself special treats for being successful or to treat the whole exercise as a temporary “diet” yields only temporary results – an outcome familiar to so many. It’s all about portion size.

This certainly seems Spartan and the opposite of fun, but simple-to-understand-and-hard-to-do is the hallmark of discipline. Unfortunately, the search for magic answers continues; but doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different outcome is the mark of insanity. Quoting from the book one more time: “If you see the word detoxify, cleanse, supplement or metabolism associated with a product or process, be suspicious. Someone is trying to sell you something that likely does not work and, in fact might be harmful” (p. 92). (I would add celebrity endorsements to the list of warning signs.)

Always a Good Excuse

Studying pea plants during the years around 1860, Gregor Mendel, a scientist and Augustinian friar at St. Thomas' Abbey in Brno, suggested the presence of discrete inheritable units in nature. He studied inheritance patterns in 8000 varieties, tracking the transfer of identifiable physical characteristics passed down from the parent plants to next generations. Almost 50 years later Wilhelm Johannsen coined the term “gene.” After almost another 50 years Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins use X-ray crystallography to try to detect these inheritable units, leading to Watson and Crick’s discovery of the double-stranded helix DNA molecule.

Today we hear references to genes every day, but the science is still developing. Regardless of that, many people know just enough about genetics and inherited traits to use it as an easy excuse for any fault they don’t want to correct. Genes represent the hand nature has dealt us, and there is nothing we can do to change them – no diet, no exercise, no vitamin, nothing.

This point was made in a book I recently read, The Cure for Everything by Timothy Caulfield. In the introduction to the chapter about genes as health factors, he lists several headlines telling not of the scientific advances in the field, but of how the field has become popularized by promising cures for these immutable factors through some type of gene technology. (These are another variant of the news philosophy that I described back in early March when I wrote Stoking the Fear.)

His list of popular headlines included:

• Is Laziness Gene to Blame for Couch Potatoes?
• The God Gene, Does Our DNA Compel Us to Seek a Higher Power?
• Always Lost? : It May Be in Your Genes
• Party Animal: It May Be in Your Genes
• Marriage Problems?: Husband’s Genes May Be the Problem
• Genes May Affect Popularity, Researchers Say.

Since the book was published in 2012, I thought I could go on line and add to the list of handy  excuses:

• Pity the poor murderer, his genes made him do it
• "Mom gene" discovered in mice: Do you have it?
• "Binge-drinking gene" discovered
• Intelligence genes discovered by scientists
• Sweet-tooth Gene Discovered
• Obesity gene Discovery Could Lead to New Treatments
• Anxiety, Aggression Gene Discovered

So if you are not too bright, overweight due to your sweet tooth, tend to binge drink, are lazy, unfaithful to your spouse, a bad parent, unpopular and may be prone to anxiety or aggression or even more brutal forms of violence, not to worry. It's not your fault; you're not responsible. You can blame it all on your genes, sit back and wait for science to fix you! Of course if the headline, “First 'placebo gene' discovered” applies to you, you don’t even have to wait. With your increased susceptibility to the placebo effect, you can look up the first charlatan or natural medicine guru selling a sham treatment or a miracle cure and talk your self into getting better.

Gene research is important and may lead to some significant progress toward real cures, but so far all these somewhat outrageous health-related headlines are just a distraction. Responsible people don’t go looking for easy excuses.

Irresponsibility: Finding Excuses

Last time I was very pleased to find an example of strong behavior in the dimension of responsibility. The woman attacked by the jaguar at the zoo admitted her part in the incident and hoped that others would learn from her mistake. 

When someone is in the wrong, the common reaction seems to be denial or making excuses. The news lately is filled with celebrities, politicians and their defenders quick to deny a charge, downplay the seriousness of a charge or call attention to all the celebrities or politicians in the past who did the same or worse without ramifications. So it’s OK?

Making excuses covers a multitude of sins, and it serves as a convenient, and often accepted, way  if covering up for behavioral slip-ups in any of the five key dimensions.

One area where this comes into play is when weak behavior in the area of discipline leads to unwanted consequences, for example, lung cancer from smoking, retirement insecurity from failure to save during the working years or obesity.

Along the lines of the latter I found this article on line: “10 Reasons Why Obesity Is NOT About Gluttony and Sloth.” First, the author obviously used the most provocative words possible to describe a situation characterized by a simple lack of discipline, too little exercise or too large portion sizes. Use of the terms gluttony and sloth, boarders on name-calling; they arouse a sense of resentment to prepare the reader to be receptive to a litany of ready-made excuses.

And here they come, all the reasons an unmotivated person can fall back on:

• Obesogenic Environment: where living in an area without sidewalks or safe walking routes coupled with a lack of accessibility to fresh fruits and vegetables along with other environmental factors may add challenges. (People would be thin as rails if only they had sidewalks.)
• Culture of Beauty: drives people toward an unattainable standard, encouraging “self-starvation, exercise abuse, and other eating disorders. It really only serves those who make money off of it.” (This stems from a perspective problem, being manipulated by external values.)
• Mental Health problems “from depression and anxiety to chronic stress and past trauma” can become an issue. “Weight gain can be the result of emotional eating as a way to cope or a result of medications.” (See addiction below for the same excuse in different words.)
• Genetics: While genetics does not predict obesity, over time the combination with other factors may predispose individuals to have obesity issues (though that doesn’t explain why it would suddenly become a factor in the last 50 years.)
• Social Networks: Social influences “play a role in our health behaviors including eating, exercise, weight loss or gain.” (Blame it on your friends.)
• Food Addiction: works like other addictions as “a way to cope with uncomfortable feelings and situations in life.” (Is it realistic to expect life to be comfortable all the time? How easy to forget that life in this century is more comfortable than at any other time in history.)
• Lack of Awareness: too many confusing “messages about what to eat, how to exercise, and ways to lose fat” leave “most of us…scratching our heads.” (But most of these confusing messages come from the purveyors of easy solutions, miracle diet plans and magic answers or from scientists trying to secure funding.)
• Family Income: “Soda is less expensive than water…” (Last I checked water is so inexpensive that I take a shower in it! It falls from the sky! Unless you live in a place like Flint, MI, this argument is as bogus as they come! See here for more about the expensive healthy food myth.)
• Environmental Chemicals in lab experiments alter the metabolism and increasing “the size and number of fat cells in animal exposed to chemicals.” (Blame it on the chemicals, while ignoring the difference between lab experiments and reality.)
• Fat Shame: causes the internalization of society’s fat phobia…creating the most harm. (But change is hard; it doesn’t happen without some discomfort as a motivation. If anything, society has become overly sensitive to the idea of fat shaming and many other attitudes labeled as intolerant.)

So there they are, ready-made excuses to maintain an unhealthy lifestyle. Just spouting off one or two of these (and ignoring the comments in parentheses) is a lot easier than taking responsibility for lapses in discipline.

To Breakfast or Not To Breakfast?

That continues to be the question.  When I was growing up many years ago, we were told that breakfast was your most important meal.  The government still subscribes to this as many communities provide breakfast as well as lunch to qualifying students, subsidized with federal funds through the USDA’s School Breakfast Program (SBP).

It wasn’t too long ago that the news took the opposite view of breakfast.  Only 16 months ago I published the original To Breakfast or Not To Breakfast telling how breakfast had been declared optional based on a paper in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.  This opinion was backed up by an earlier (Summer 2014) study reported by the Huffington Post and USA Today.

The emphasis was on whether people who were skipping breakfast to lose weight were making a good decision.  They surmised that from a standpoint of weight loss, skipping might hold a slight benefit.  If you are hungrier at lunch and eat a little more, it will usually not be enough to offset all the calories missed from skipping breakfast.  So the net intake would be favorable.

But that stance was so 2017! The latest study is in and we are back to eating breakfast as a better solution.  (I originally saw the story on a TV health segment but these two sources are available on line here and here).

Researchers at the Mayo Clinic divided 347 healthy adults into three groups, those who never ate breakfast, those who ate infrequently (one to four times a week), and those who regularly ate breakfast (five to seven days a week).  Then they followed them for 12 years and found that the breakfast eaters ended up with “smaller waistlines and were less likely to be obese.”

But the really scary part of the report came next. The “people who ate breakfast regularly only gained about three pounds over the past year. People who ate breakfast occasionally put on five pounds, while people who skipped a morning meal entirely gained eight pounds and developed dangerous belly fat.”  (Since this was a 12-year study, it is unclear why they only reported on weight gain over the past year.)  In any case, notice that the breakfast eaters did better, but on average no single group lost weight!  Isn’t it interesting that success is now defined not as losing weight, but as not gaining as much as the other guy.

After reporting on the study, each of the news sources turned to their expert who dazzled readers with such earth-shattering observations as:  people should “stick to healthier foods in the morning [and]…avoid high density, sugar-filled foods.” They should also “consider how many nutritionally empty foods they eat during the day – and then cut those out.” (Not earth-shattering after all - just common sense.) This sounds more like the dimension of discipline than any magical link between breakfast and weight loss.

This whole breakfast question, like so many others in the health-research category, is like being on an amusement park ride with abrupt corners, twists and turns only to end up in the same place we started.  Of course, no one can explain why there would be a link between eating breakfast and weight loss, so the issue is still up in the air until the next study is published. 

More Responsibility Examples

Responsibility is the behavioral trait that distinguishes those who own their actions and admit their mistakes from those who try to find someone or something else to blame.  From sports to politics to everyday experiences the practice of good responsibility seems to be getting more unusual.  The sun got in my eyes, I’m addicted, I’m a victim, the cards are stacked against me, it’s the computer’s fault and a host of other excuses with the full support of “advocates” have become common.

Problems with responsibility have significant drawbacks.  Passing off the cause of the problem onto some outside influence never leads to a solution, just more of the same.  And as I have emphasized many times in the past, when we step away from our responsibilities, someone else, often the government, is happy to step in to force behavior on us – even if that new rule turns out to have unintended consequences.

This is common in corporate America as well where executives claim ignorance of corporate wrongdoing or in everyday customer service.  Here are a couple of strange examples from the world of casino gambling.

At one casino in Illinois a woman was startled by the bells and flashing lights on the slot machine she was playing.  The machine told her she had won $28 million!  She immediately heard the call for a supervisor, who told her not to touch the machine.  She remained calm enough during the ensuing chaos to take a couple of pictures of the machine.

The casino refused to pay her after an internal investigation found a computer error responsible for the jackpot message.  Executives would not comment directly, but continued to blame computer error for the mistake and offered her a free dinner instead.

In another casino a 90 year-old woman from Antioch, IA put her money in the slot and soon found a message on the screen awarding her a 185-credit along with the message, “The reels have rolled your way! Bonus Award $41,797,550.16.”

Again the casino refused to pay, again blaming a computer error, and paid her the $1.85 for the initial credit.  After a couple of years in court, the casino won the case.

The slot machine manufacturer had warned these casinos of a problem, which they were supposed to have fixed.  Perhaps some admission of fault was in order.  A free dinner or $1.85 hardly seems like an adequate settlement for a problem they were supposed to have dealt with.  But even a judge agreed that it wasn’t their fault; it was the computer – as if the computer were some distant third party and not their computer!

The other point is that when individuals fail to take responsibility, institutions take over. For a recent example, we turn to the Nebraska schools.  Apparently some parents couldn’t be relied on to track their children’s health numbers, so the schools have been conducting routine health screenings including a measurement of body-mass index (BMI).  If this ratio of weight to height is too high, the parents are notified of possible diet or exercise issues.

Some parents thought this could cause potential embarrassment for children, affecting their psychological health while trying to look out for their physical health.  Others felt the time would be better spent on traditional school subjects like adding and reading rather than measuring body size.

As of this month, the schools are allowed to decide whether to include that measure in routine health screenings.  In those schools that do not drop it, parents can send a note to school opting their kids out.  Some districts have already announced that they will continue the practice unless they receive the note.

Still, for some reason the state feels it is necessary to screen the health of students.  That reason is surely related to their perception that parents will not or cannot take responsibility for health screenings of their own children.  (BMI calculation can easily be done at home at no cost with a bathroom scale and a tape measure.)

These are just a few of so many examples.  Responsibility failings are easy to spot.  And when institutions spot them in a few citizens, they are quick to take over, imposing rules even on those who are conscientious and capable.

Confused By Science and the Media

It’s no wonder Americans are confused.  Last time I wrote about randomness and how it relates to the need for several well-designed experiments to validate each other as we search for the truth.  It is especially confusing in the area of health where single studies seem to be nearly tripping over each other trying to get to press.

Just a few days ago during the health segment of the local news the anchor referred to a new study or an international study four times in the course of one minute.  Each was backed up by a few pictures and a brief explanation.  That was one broadcast on one day with all that information packed into one minute, and it’s not unusual.  Tomorrow’s health news will be a similar list of studies and new findings.  How do we keep track?

The major networks are even more extreme.  Here is a headline from CNN earlier this month:  “Eating fried potatoes linked to higher risk of death, study says.”  It’s interesting that CNN doesn’t seem to understand that everyone’s risk of death is 100% and there is nothing you can do to make it higher.  What they meant to say was an earlier death, but that doesn’t have exactly the same ring to it.

In that case, an Italian research team, who were investigating osteoarthritis by observing the habits of 4,440 people aged 45 to 79 over a period of eight years, decided to take a short detour to compare potato consumption with death rates.  The reasoning was that at this time there is very limited scientific data to support the broadly held assumption that fried potatoes can be unhealthy.

After telling us about potato consumption in America and the percent of those potatoes that are processed – a dirty word lately among the health writers – CNN goes on to say that the study “found that those who ate fried potatoes two to three times each week doubled their chance of dying early compared to those who ate no fried potatoes.”  They never define in the article what dying early means nor do the researchers explain how those people originally being studied for osteoarthritis are representative of the rest of the population, Italian or American.

But then we find out that potatoes are not the bad guys; it’s the frying process and the trans fat in the oil.  Next I go to my freezer at home to see how much trans fat is in the processed potatoes we bought at the grocery store – zero!  Then I go to the McDonald’s website to check the nutritional information on their French fries – zero trans fats!

Ten paragraphs into the article is another interesting admission.  “The study is observational, meaning the researchers simply tracked the behavior of a group of people and found an association between one behavior -- eating fried potatoes -- and another factor -- early death. Because it is an observational study, [the researchers] note it cannot be said that eating fried potatoes directly causes an early mortality -- it would require more research to draw such a firm conclusion.”  (I would add, not only more research, but better research.)  CNN covers this technicality with the usual clever wording in their headline:  linked to rather than causes.

This looks like just another of many cases of much ado about nothing from science and the news media.  And it shows why critical thinking can help avoid panic over each instance of another dire health report.

Obesity Can't Be Healthy

A little more than ten years ago the “fat pride movement” began to pick up momentum.  The claim, supported by some studies at the time, was that it was possible to be fat and fit, that an active overweight person was healthier than a sedentary skinny person.  This was good news for those who felt they were being discriminated against and bullied due to their body shape and size.

When I list and describe the five behavioral dimensions, responsibility always follows discipline.  The simple reason is that it’s easier to find an excuse or justification rather than doing the hard work to address a problem, whether that be quitting a bad habit, saving more for retirement or maintaining the proper weight.  Dieting is hard; lifestyle changes are challenging.  A movement that advocates acceptance over change can be both refreshing and alluring to those who are struggling.  Why do the hard work when there may be supportive medical research as well as a possibility that the rest of society can be pressured into accepting us the way we are?

Last week the main argument for fat pride was undermined by a new study.  After examining the medical record of 3.5 million people in Britain over 20 years, this yet unpublished study found that “people who were obese but who had no initial signs of heart disease, diabetes or high cholesterol were not protected from ill health in later life.”  This contradicted much of the previous research.

In the study, people who were obese but metabolically healthy, that is with factors such as blood pressure and blood sugar within recommended limits "were at higher risk of developing heart disease, strokes and heart failure than people of normal weight.”

Other factors do enter in, such as weight distribution, genes and other lifestyle choices.  A very large sample is important because some overweight people live a long time, as do some smokers.  But the advice from medical professionals remains the same:  not smoking, eating a balanced diet, exercising regularly, getting the proper amount of sleep and limiting alcohol.

Except for the impressive size of the study, this is not exactly breaking news.  A few years ago, Forbes ran an article about an earlier study concluding “for most people, healthy obesity is just a phase that will likely give way to unhealthy obesity in the future” rather than putting them in the same risk category as healthy thinner people.

Losing weight and keeping it off is hard work.  It’s easier to grasp at excuses.  People should not be bullied or harassed for being overweight; they should be supported in their quest for a better, longer life.  This is true for a couple of reasons.  First, to tolerate poor behavioral choices that result in controllable consequences is to compromise our standards.  Second, in America, like it or not, the cost of everyone’s healthcare is charged back to all of society through insurance premiums.  The healthy support the sick.  The smokers, drug abusers, obese, etc. are an economic burden on the rest.  It’s everyone’s civic responsibility to be as healthy as possible to minimize the waste in society.