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| Why Too-Thin Models May Save Your Child's Life. | |
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The Anorexia Scare: How Too-Thin Models May Save Your Child's Life.
You see articles about Anorexia awareness all the time. There are months dedicated to educating parents of the warning signs, seminars designed to make people aware of this terrible mental disorder. Just this month, the fashion industry took additional steps to prevent young girls from being influenced by the overly thin, banning models under 16 years old from participating in major fashion shows. Already there are rules in place in some areas that prevent
models with too low a body weight from the catwalk. Everywhere you look American and European society is training people to be terrified of anorexia. We shield our children from the images of skinny models and frown when we hear that a teenager is dieting. And we're wrong to do it. We should be terrifying our children of fat.
In 2005 I saw a poster hanging on the hallway of a nearby university. "Children are more afraid of being fat," it read, "than of dying in a nuclear war. They're more afraid of being fat than of terrorist attacks or dying in a car crash." The point of the poster was to highlight the absurdity of our culture's fear of fat. Instead, it drives home the point that our society is terrible at judging risk.
A child should be more afraid of being fat than of nuclear war, terrorist attack, or of dying in a car wreck. Quit frankly, being obese is more likely to kill them than any of those (reference). In fact, the only thing that children should be more afraid of here in the United States than being obese is smoking, as it's the only cause of death that's more likely to end up killing them than being extremely overweight. Statistically, parents should be far more concerned with what food goes into their children's mouths than whether or not they wear seat belts or take drugs.
On the other hand, only about .6% of the American
population is anorexic, a number that's stayed fairly constant over the years (reference). We are trying to make sure our children are unafraid of eating at the very time that eating too much should be the most scary thing in their lives, next to smoking. We have to stop beating around the bush and address the weight issues in the United States for what it is. At the current rates of increase - smoking aside - weight issues are the most likely way that any single person born in the last twenty years in the United States is going to die. Not car accidents, not being shot in a crime, not drugs, and certainly not anorexia. In other words, in the year 2000 there were over 84 million people that qualified as obese, and just under 1.7 million people that qualified as anorexic.
Yet the mortality rate of people with anorexia is only slightly higher (.56%) than that of people that qualify as obese (.43%).
Someone who is obese is about as likely to die as someone who is anorexic, yet a person in this country is 50 times more likely to be obese. And yet we still worry about the thin models on the runway acting as negative role models for our children. I propose that we need thin and healthy role models, and - failing that - simply thin role models. Period. Eliminating thin role models because they are too thin and might skew people's perspectives about their own weight - and make them feel they need to loose weight - is simply ridicules. For the sake of fighting a disease that threatens a
small portion of the population, we are banning one of the tools used to battle a disease that threatens pretty much everyone. Because no matter how concerned we are with weight at the moment, it's not working - we're still eating ourselves to death in droves. And it's not like we can't change.
There are no substantial differences between our physical makeup and those of other countries, which have less prevalence of obesity. Genetic makeup is important to issues like weight, but genetics simply can't account for a tripling of obesity prevalence in just 20 years; the birth rate simply isn't that high. The cause behind the U.S.'s growing weight problems has to do with diet and lifestyle; things that we can change, but simply don't. We need to make people more afraid of carrying around too much weight, not less. In a country in which 63% of the population is overweight (not necessarily obese) and growing heavier, we need to spend less time focusing on the possibility of anorexia and focus instead on the much greater threat to ourselves and our children - the gradual expanding waistline. The problem is that the solutions to the two diseases counteract each other; obesity is the unhealthy side effect of successful anti-anorexia campaigns, and anorexia is the unhealthy success of anti-obesity campaigns.
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| Photo taken by Peter Duhon and is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 License. |
A child should be more afraid of being fat than of nuclear war, terrorist attack, or of dying in a car wreck. |
In 2005 I saw a poster hanging on the hallway of a nearby university. "Children are more afraid of being fat," it read, "than of dying in a nuclear war. They're more afraid of being fat than of terrorist attacks or dying in a car crash." The point of the poster was to highlight the absurdity of our culture's fear of fat. Instead, it drives home the point that our society is terrible at judging risk.
On the other hand, only about .6% of the American
Someone who is anorexic is about as likely to die as someone who is obese, yet a person in this country is 50 times more likely to be obese than they are to be anorexic. |
Yet the mortality rate of people with anorexia is only slightly higher (.56%) than that of people that qualify as obese (.43%).
Someone who is obese is about as likely to die as someone who is anorexic, yet a person in this country is 50 times more likely to be obese. And yet we still worry about the thin models on the runway acting as negative role models for our children. I propose that we need thin and healthy role models, and - failing that - simply thin role models. Period. Eliminating thin role models because they are too thin and might skew people's perspectives about their own weight - and make them feel they need to loose weight - is simply ridicules. For the sake of fighting a disease that threatens a
We need thin and healthy role models, and - failing that - simply thin role models. |
There are no substantial differences between our physical makeup and those of other countries, which have less prevalence of obesity. Genetic makeup is important to issues like weight, but genetics simply can't account for a tripling of obesity prevalence in just 20 years; the birth rate simply isn't that high. The cause behind the U.S.'s growing weight problems has to do with diet and lifestyle; things that we can change, but simply don't. We need to make people more afraid of carrying around too much weight, not less. In a country in which 63% of the population is overweight (not necessarily obese) and growing heavier, we need to spend less time focusing on the possibility of anorexia and focus instead on the much greater threat to ourselves and our children - the gradual expanding waistline. The problem is that the solutions to the two diseases counteract each other; obesity is the unhealthy side effect of successful anti-anorexia campaigns, and anorexia is the unhealthy success of anti-obesity campaigns.
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