The implication of this article is that agencies would be obligated to use what the article calls "more obtainable" bodies. Is this actually the case? I think it's vastly more likely that this will do little more than sharply increase the demand for people that actually have the bodies that other individuals were being photoshopped to have.
It'd be like if a country banned all voice processing software when singing (which has become ubiquitous today). It's not like studios would simply begin accepting people with less than ideal singing voices. Instead they would actually have to seek out talent that can sing without having their voice filtered through digital signal processing software. And in the end, I think this would (and will) be a good thing. Authenticity should be encouraged and incentivized.
I do not think that agencies will stop retouching photos. I suspect that they will just indicate "Photographie retouchée" on each picture and that's it.
Indeed, while the article talks about a "cigarette-packet style warning", I don't think there is any requirement for the warning to be especially prominent. Here is the relevant decree (in French): https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do;jsessionid=150.... The relevant part is Art. R. 2133-5. It just says that the warning should be "easily readable". I think in practice it will just end up as part of the small print that you already find on many ads.
> Is this actually the case? I think it's vastly more likely that this will do little more than sharply increase the demand for people that actually have the bodies that other individuals were being photoshopped to have.
It's true, companies could no longer photograph some schlub and transform him into an adonis with power of photoshop. But then again, nobody actually attains the a Platonic ideal of flawless skin and impossible proportions that we see in today's ads. The closest we get have are a handful of elite supermodels, and even they get photoshopped. At the end of the day, advertisement models will look more like people.
>It'd be like if a country banned all voice processing software when singing (which has become ubiquitous today).
I actually don't get it and don't give and fcuk if voice was tuned or real. I like [subjectively] good music, and find bans on some techniques of sound production as weirdo club decisions. Let's ban electric guitars, synthesizers and much more just because one can't play the same tunes on a violin.
Of course there are contests where bare voice is evaluated, but these are not the only way to sing a song or make the music. If people don't like tuning anyway, then why ban? If they do, then what the hell?
Bogdanovich retells the story in his spot on Cary Grant impression, explaining that when they approached the ticket taker Grant said, "I'm terribly sorry, I forgot my ticket. May I get in please?" As the ticket taker was looking for his name, Grant says, "It's Cary Grant." "You don't look like Cary Grant," said the ticket taker. And Bogdanovich remembers that Grant, "as quick as wink" said, "I know, nobody does."
> The implication of this article is that agencies would be obligated to use what the article calls "more obtainable" bodies. Is this actually the case?
Obligated overstates the case, but certainly economically encouraged to compared to the status quo ante, as the benefit (where manipulation is required) is lower and/or cost (of finding models and constructing shoots where it is not required) for not using obtainable body images.
> I think it's vastly more likely that this will do little more than sharply increase the demand for people that actually have the bodies that other individuals were being photoshopped to have.
And that's good. There's only a limited number of them. Either they'll get paid so high only few will afford them, or they'll just run out of time to do the photo shots for everyone.
Then the studios will have to use "less ideal" people. That's encouragement and incentives.
>The implication of this article is that agencies would be obligated to use what the article calls "more obtainable" bodies. Is this actually the case? I think it's vastly more likely that this will do little more than sharply increase the demand for people that actually have the bodies that other individuals were being photoshopped to have.
You could always insist that the distribution of bodies shown in a magazine follows the distribution of weights/heights in the general population (with some margin of error). And heavily fine them out of business when it does not. Problem solved.
(The voice processing ban example doesn't capture the problem with body photos, because people don't go out of their way to sound like their favorite singers -- auto-tuned or not--, nor does it have many adverse psychological or health effects to have singers voices be unattainable to most people. Whereas body image from ad/fashion/etc models influences the self-perception of billions of people, and leads a multiple-100s billion dollars industry).
> You could always insist that the distribution of bodies shown in a magazine follows the distribution of weights/heights in the general population (with some margin of error). And heavily fine them out of business when it does not. Problem solved.
That sounds like an infringement on the freedom of speech, in countries where it applies.
It also seems ridiculously difficult to judge and enforce. The government would need to do periodic surveys of height/weight in the country (or get the data from doctors), prove data is correct, set up an office that reads magazines all day, tries to judge the heights and weights of the people in the pictures by looking at them...the more I think about it the worse it sounds. EDIT: Or mandate that every magazine files the height/weight details of every person pictured in every issue with the government.
It's like the premise of some dystopian black comedy or satire.
EDIT 2: No seriously that would be quite funny. "Sorry Bill we can't do that feature on the Indian women's volleyball team, we got Shaq on the cover this month. We're over our height budget"
But is it really fair that surgeons or NFL players don't match societal distributions for their respective traits? Think about how this makes all of the low-dexterity, low-coordination little boys and girls feel. For the sake of feelings, I demand mandatory mediocrity for every profession. Anyone trying to be exceptional should be hampered accordingly.
First, yes, being a 6'5" athletic model is NOT a skill. In fact, being a 6'5" anything is not a skill: it's genetics.
But even more so, whether it's a skill or not it's irrelevant. One is sports, the other is advertisement. We always have the ability to restrict one domain but not the other.
>That sounds like an infringement on the freedom of speech, in countries where it applies.
Bah, sounds as totally irrelevant to the "freedom of speech" as not allowing cigarette ads and other such things.
And of course not every country considers marketing drivel and fashion as parts of such protected speech worthy of freedom.
>It also seems ridiculously difficult to judge and enforce. The government would need to do periodic surveys of height/weight in the country
Which countries do already, and is not at all difficult (plus it's good information to have for medical, policy advice reasons too).
>prove data is correct
That doesn't make much sense as a separate "problem". They already gathered the data with a certain approved methodology. They don't need to prove they are correct any more than they do for any other kind of data the government measures and uses to determine law policy.
>set up an office that reads magazines all day, tries to judge the heights and weights of the people in the pictures by looking at them...
Or, you know, just sample and fine (or not). The same thing we do with restaurants and many other kinds of establishments and businesses. Health inspectors don't eat at a restaurant 24/7 either.
>EDIT 2: No seriously that would be quite funny. "Sorry Bill we can't do that feature on the Indian women's volleyball team, we got Shaq on the cover this month. We're over our height budget"
It's only silly if you exaggerate it for comedic effect or for slippery slopism. It can be applied with certain tolerances (which I already mentioned in my original comment).
> Bah, sounds as totally irrelevant to the "freedom of speech" as not allowing cigarette ads and other such things.
I'm sorry I just don't see comparable public harm between smoking and idealized images of people. Second-hand smoke is bad for everyone whereas I'd have to deliberately open up a fashion magazine to get the worst effects of idealized images. And AFAIK there hasn't been a concerted effort by the fashion industry to suppress research that shows harm caused by such images.
> And of course not every country considers marketing drivel and fashion as parts of such protected speech worthy of freedom.
I would argue that fashion is an art form (and many in the industry do as well). You may find its message mundane or uninteresting or "drivel" but that's beside the point.
What about niche magazines (eg. particular music subcultures, hobbies dominated by a particular gender) that would find it much harder to reflect the general population?
All of this doesn't even take into account that magazine publishing is a declining industry and a lot of this activity happens online. How do you even begin to regulate Pinterest, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube and Facebook in terms of the proportions of images they carry?
Summing it all up, I don't think that a regulation like this is practical to enforce and there's very little evidence that it'll accomplish anything useful. Why not spend the government's limited time and resources where they may have a larger effect?
> They don't need to prove they are correct any more than they do for any other kind of data the government measures and uses to determine law policy.
Currently that data is used to determine health policy, not for deciding how to hand out fines (I could be wrong about this). If you start fining magazines based on that data it seems likely to me there'll be lawsuits flying all over the place contesting the veracity of the data.
> Health inspectors don't eat at a restaurant 24/7 either.
No but their primary job is performing healthy and safety inspections [2]; they don't need to eat at restaurants. At restaurants they inspect the kitchen and service areas, bathrooms, trash handling and disposal procedures, making sure employees follow health codes etc. And I don't see the connection anyway: you're obviously going to task someone with the job, whether part-time full-time, and prioritize it over some other work they could be doing.
> It's only silly if you exaggerate it for comedic effect or for slippery slopism.
Sorry that was a line from the dystopian satire that I said this idea sounded like the premise to (I can see how that might've been confusing). That's why it was silly.
> You could always insist that the distribution of bodies shown in a magazine follows the distribution of weights/heights in the general population (with some margin of error). And heavily fine them out of business when it does not. Problem solved.
That magazine will go out of business. No one remembers how much of a flop Dove's products endured when it tried to advertise them with real bodies?
"Nice try of subverting the spirit of the law -- here's your 100K fine" -- see how easy it is?
(Also I'm not sure how pics of the "top 100" staff of the magazine will fix an already skewed distribution in the models shown. Assuming the top 100 staff follow the regular population distribution, the skew will still be there after adding them).
> It's no secret that images of models are often retouched
Well it's not a secret, but it's not obvious for most teenagers. And may be not either for people without high degrees education.
A lot of people, and I suppose not only in France, are not at peace with their body shape, even if they're not obese nor anorexic. Been exposed to not really existing bodies images can be painful for self esteem.
Of course, computer modified photos are recent, but fashion already used lightning and tricking exposure when producing photos from film since, well, the fashion press exists I guess.
> Well it's not a secret, but it's not obvious for most teenagers.
Fair enough but the list of things that can harm a teen's self esteem is endless. So in a way there is no way around learning how to deal with issues of imperfection on a personal level. And this, in turn, makes you wonder whether you couldn't spend the money that goes into this project more worthwhile. For instance, you could invest it in free sport programs. That way teens wouldn't just improve their body image but also do something for their health.
IMHO these kind of initiatives are mostly egotrips of people who want to make their mark.
of course, it’s not clear that there’s an actual, rational reason to believe this will have any positive effect, so it’s probably option c) must be seen to try something
if they could eludicate the mechanism that has this impact, they would likely also have evidence that violent video games cause male violence, or that bowser kidnapping princess peach causes sexism.
my guess is the operative pressure arises from peer groups, and this initiative is pissing in the wind
It doesn't matter if it's a secret or not. Constant exposure to lies can change perception even in highly rational people. Critical thinking takes effort and nobody has time or energy to digest every bit of information that hits their brain. Slowly but surely people begin to subconsciously accept the lies.
This is why propaganda is so effective. It doesn't have to even be convincing to be successful so long as it is pervasive.
My mother and wife were both photographers at some point and basically every photo is modified, touched up, and otherwise "enhanced" in Photoshop or other tools. It doesn't matter if it's a landscape, a room setting, or a person.
While saying "this has been modified" might be valuable, without knowing how this seems misguided at best.
To be fair, the law seems to be quite a bit more specific than that. It applies to commercial use of models "whose physical appearance has been modified through the use of image processing software to slim down or thicken the model's silhouette" according to the translation on this site. [1]
It's not even fair to say they have been modified or touched up, really. Cameras are not true to life. The bare data (straight out of camera) does not look just like what you see with your eyes, and occasionally the photographer also made a minor technical error, leading to a crop or an exposure adjustment or white balance change or...
This will probably just end up being another warning that is stuck on everywhere, and doesn't mean much. Just like the "we use cookies" popup, or all the "x may cause cancer" warnings, it is easier to just add the warning than change the product/advertisement.
Well that's a bit different. That would be a direct misrepresentation of the product. i.e. you can not make anyone look like that with the advertised product.
Seriously, or whether the lighting is non-natural to make someone's picture appear different.
Prediction: Like with the cookie law and other unnecessary and trivial save-my-dumb-citizens disclosure regulations, they'll just put the retouched-photo on every image and at least alter one pixel every time.
Images of those ultra-thin models are themselves typically photoshopped to remove signs of anorexia and bulimia (arm hair, gray pallor, dental discoloration, pronounced tendons). This is (according to an acquaintance whose day job used to be retouching fashion photos) a frequent enough need that language like "remove visible signs of anorexia" is included in the boilerplate instructions given by agencies to post-production teams.
Stupid. Are they going to tell us when men's physiques are photoshopped too? How about wrinkles or hair color changes or blemish and scar removals? What about wearing makeup?
It applies to men and to women, and not to blemishes or colours but to reshaping silhouettes. It's worth taking thirty seconds to read something before attacking it as stupid based on your imagination.
Of course she is photoshopped. All photos you see in magazines are by default heavily photoshopped, even of "flawless" models. You literally don't see a single photo straight out of the camera where retouching wasn't applied when it comes to women.
Nah, if there is a bad shadow or they want to remove a few hairs from the fringe, they have to add the same warning. They ant write "This image is 99% not Photoshopped.".
How absurd. Virtually every single photo of every male or female that is printed is photoshopped. A lot of people photoshop their pictures before posting to Facebook even. Should that all be declared too? What about those filters on social media apps that make peoples eyes bigger and clear the complexion?
And why the emphasis only on pictures of women when pictures of men have just as much photoshopping? Seems a bit sexist.
i can't really speak to their claim of subtext. however,
> How does tackling one prevent tackling the other? Or even trade off from it?
this seems like a red herring question, but to answer literally: in an economic sense, resources are finite. as such, it must be decided how to apportion efforts.
Good, now if only they would do the same for male models who use illegal performance enhancing drugs to achieve their physiques. According to many male fitness models, anyone who earns money based on their body is almost guaranteed to be using them.
I find it really strange how the topic of "enhanced" male models never comes up, but these articles about women pop up several times a year.
>Reminds of the Fast Food ads here in the US. Looks Gourmet on TV while the real thing is not even close.
In that case there should be a warning that what is in the images isn't even edible (often wax and plastic replicas are used in photo shoots and videos), and even if the food is real almost anything is added to it to make it look better JFY:
On the other hand, there was a very interesting documentary of McDonald's about how they prepare the hamburgers for the photo. [tl;dv: It's true food, but it's cooked in a very strange way.] "Behind the scenes at a McDonald's photo shoot" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSd0keSj2W8 (I remember that it was discussed here a few years ago, but I can't find the submission.)
What kinds of ads are required to have this warning and what kind of edits are counted as edits? Does debayering, remapping brightness or denoising count as "digitally altering"? Then all ads will have such warnings.
I can't find the actual article, but i was reading that the rise of instagram or just selfie cameras has lead to an increased amount of face surgery.
Just the fact that people spend all their days looking at the imperfections of their own body and compare it to perfect ones(the photoshoped) will lead to surgery.
I think adding a photoshoped disclaimer is a step up, but it is not the ultimate solution. At some point we will end up with a mandatory 200by200 picture of a failed surgery plastered on every doctored photo.
In Argentina it has been the case that digital alterations of the human figure must be stated for several years, and people still use photoshop and just add a tiny disclaimer below.
Pictures are roughly the same.
Same reason the photo app/features of instagram and snapchat took off, makes people look really good or even better than they expect themselves with filters etc.
We've seen first steps toward this in the UK. Ads for mascara now have to say if the image is photoshopped or not. This is mostly policed by the companies themselves, reporting each other to Advertising Standards.
The mascara thing you mention is about avoiding false representation of the effects of the product.
This is very different, it is specifically about thinness, I believe that anorexia (or if not anorexia at least the psychological troubles that can lead to it) are becoming very common among teens, so it is more than anything else a "public health" campaign to remove the (false, or retouched) images of impossibly thin models from becoming the "reference model" of the youngers.
There was already something similar in a few EU countries, where Laws or Codes of Conduct were made prohibiting to hire fashion models with a BMI lower than 18 for the catwalk:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_mass_index#Legislation
The debate was at the time (and still is) whether the BMI in itself is a good metrics.
I don't understand, this seems like someone never bothered to learn about anchoring. Is there research that I've missed which shows anchoring doesn't apply in body-image situations?
The underlying problem we're talking about is that people are seeing these unrealistic images of what a body should be, and are comparing themselves to that. I would argue that given what we know about how anchoring works, even if you tell someone that the image they're seeing is fake, the damage has already been done. Consider the Barbie doll; everyone knows that Barbie is a plastic doll and not a real person, yet there was a generation which grew up with that body being the goal.
The problem is how to define 'Retouched.' Being an amateur photographer and having met a number of commercial ones, the sentiment and knowledge I picked up over the years goes something like this:
Retouching a photo has been done since the (physical, real) lightroom days. Many of the strange phrases and techniques in Photoshop (dodge and burn, and probably crop and most others with photo-specific context) came from techniques in the lightroom.
Even the most famous photographers adjusted their photos in the lightroom, making alterations that are absolutely in the 'retouched' category. You can find these online (Cartier-Bresson did this, and many others). Source: https://petapixel.com/2013/09/12/marked-photographs-show-ico...
Therefore, it's extremely common for any portrait or wedding or any other photographer to retouch. Do 100% do it? Probably not 100%, but damn close.
It's not considered cheating to remove an element, lighten or completely darken/render invisible an element of the photo.
So is taking a model and making her thinner, taller and tanner retouching to the point of portraying something that isn't there? Which is a vague phrase, admittedly. Perhaps.
But what about removing a pimple from the face? If you get a portrait done professionally, it'll be almost automatic. Maybe it's not so bad. But if it is, let's say, then what about giving you a better skin tone? Because a bare flash without a CTO gel, or the mid-day sun, with a daylight white balance, is going to make you look potentially weird (if you're caucasian in this example; you might look ghostly). A lamppost nearby, or a store sign nearby might change your skin tone too. So what if you change the white balance in Photoshop/Lightroom/Gimp/whatever and make it look a little bit like sunset? Is that cheating?
But if you do nothing, there's automated settings in cameras that will auto-set skin tone and adjust lighting conditions. Is that cheating?
It's all extremely vague because the BBC article failed to explain the criteria for retouching: the word retouching is too broad.
This is an endlessly debated topic in the photographic community, but banning ALL retouching would, I am convinced, be reviled by almost everybody.
I'm disappointed and appalled how this headline is in gross violation of Adobe®'s General trademark guidelines (http://www.adobe.com/legal/permissions/trademarks.html). It should read "Is her image enhanced using Adobe® Photoshop® software? [...]"
Maybe that's the next thing that should be legally enforced somewhere in this world.
The food we have in the U.S., particularly in low-income areas is atrocious. However there are a lot of excuses being made about obesity, including that it's caused by poverty. Yes poverty is a component, but the obesity epidemic is striking all income groups, with no particular correlation to income [0]. It's more about the diet and exercise choices that people choose to make, include the middle class and upper class who most definitely have the ability to make choices around the food and beverages they consume.
Further many of the most wasteful calories are not caused by high-sodium, high-fat processed foods but by excess sugar consumption in the form of sugary drinks. Switching to water, black coffee, or unsweetened tea could help the "Big Gulp" demographic big time.
Almost everyone in the US is a prisoner of their car. Our built environment presumes that you have a car. We make it very challenging to live without one. And then we have to listen to Stephen Hawking be judgy about how we "choose" to not be active, which he can't understand from his wheelchair.
Most Americans are confined to a wheeled chair for many hours a week. We just call it a car, but good luck getting free of it.
(I have lived without a car for about a decade, so this comment is not expressing discontent with me feeling trapped. I escaped that trap and walking everywhere has helped me shed a lot of weight without intending to.)
We switched to one family car around 7 years ago, as I quickly realized it would be a lot less hassle and expense for me to just use public transportation to get into the city.
Fast-forward to now and I'm seriously contemplating buying another car (which I am utterly loath to do), solely because of how unreliable public transport is in my part of the world.
Besides the above, I had a conversation with a cyclist in work earlier this week who is considering giving it up and going back to driving (also against his will) because he finds it hard to breathe with all the diesels on the road that have had the particulate filters ripped out (a law that is completely ignored here, so is commonplace).
(As a side note, if you're wondering how he knows which cars have had this done, Google "coal-rolling" and you'll understand quickly.)
This is far more nuanced (and ridiculous) than people understand. While it might be healthy in the US to walk and cycle rather than drive, in Europe it's borderline hazardous.
Half of the problem is not the infrastructure, but peoples priorities and the public perception of the pros/cons of a car. Also the value of the car as a symbol.
A couple will make 3 kids and say "I can't do without a car". But the couple never ponder the cost of making a family. The fact or having a car or not, and other matters of life style, are an after thoughs. And if you raise the issue, you are a cold robot for thinking that way instead of with your "heart".
The vast majority of human babies are the result of either "Whoops! Babies happen!" or "We tried for years for this one!" The families that try for years tend to have one or two kids, not three or more. The people with many children who complain of being trapped typically have a lot of other things going on that lead to them having too little control over their lives.
I am super uncomfortable with statements that suggest people just need to exercise some self control and stop cranking out babies. That position is incredibly dismissive of very complex issues, including lack of access to health care in the US. Historically, health insurance that paid for Viagra did not pay for female birth control. We have this underlying assumption that men have a right to get laid, even if they need chemical help to get it up, but women do not. Yet, most of those men are getting laid with women, not with other men.
Questions of reproduction and sexual morality are incredibly complex and a very touchy subject because when two people have sex where the result may be a child, there are a great many people impacted. It isn't as simple as her rights vs his. The rights of the child are an issue, but so are the rights of the rest of society.
It really isn't a discussion I care to see injected here.
A couple will make 3 kids and say "I can't do without a car". But the couple never ponder the cost of making a family.
This is simply mistaken. The cost of making a family is nearly always what people are thinking about in that situation.
If you're saying that people aren't careful enough when they have sex, then yeah, that's always been a problem. But what's to be done? The kids exist now and you need to provide for them. Now what?
The complain here is about practicality of car vs bicycle/walk. What does that have with cost of making a familly? They don't complain about car being expensive.
And no, in many places in USA a car is just about the only way how to get kids to school. Which you have to. And yep, cycling along unsafe road when you are adult and when you are 8 is not the same. So ype, familly with children needs car more then single healthy adult.
And yep, unless you want to face aging population problem later on, 3 kids should be doable. Just to get replacement level of population.
Its effecting all income levels, but I suspect not evenly. The pattern I see (which is anecdotal) is higher income people appear healthier (i.e., are on average less overweight).
Sometimes I wonder if that's cause or correlation. That is, ill and wealthy just don't go together.
I am rich enough to not need a second job, of which the time I have not working allows me to educate myself on nutrition and cook for myself regularly.
But has is also a function of decisions, which is also related to knowledge / awareness. No doubt, lower income areas have less / worse selection. But that kinda doesn't explain why the better off don't choose and consume those same things as they are just as available to them.
I am a strange mix of privilege and poverty. I was in gifted programs in public school and I have six years of college. I also am a woman and I have serious health issues.
I am getting healthier and I am getting more well off as a consequence. I think a lot about the details of the very complex relationship between health and wealth.
It is a really complicated thing that cannot be pinned down to any one thing. Education, social fabric, enhanced personal agency, greater de facto rights and a whole raft load of stuff tends to be involved in who is both rich and healthy and who gets access to neither.
I do agree with you. There's no magic bullet. But I still have a hard time comprehending why soda is a good choice. Even juat switching to water would make a difference. I think.
Some sodas have medicinal effects. I have a genetic disorder, so my diet is absolutely not the root cause of my health issues. I was diagnosed late in life. That empowered me to finally start getting healthier. With getting healthier, I consume less diet coke.
A couple of excerpts from my food blog:
I basically live on diet coke. Coca cola products contain extract from the coca plant. This has medicinal benefits. No other cola products have this. Other cola products tend to be mostly sugar water -- though I do sometimes drink ginger ale because ginger helps with nausea.
Bad food, far too little sleep, and sedentia... the perfect trifecta to cause depression, anxiety and obesity (and later diabetes, heart disease and Alzheimers).
Yup. But, evidently, the cost of healthcare is due to the system. What those critics fail to admit is that the biggest component of that system are the people seeking care, and the average baseline health there of.
Americans want to abuse their bodies (and minds) and expect healthcare to remain cheap. It doesn't work that way. Healthcare resources are limited. Increase demand and prices increases.
Not just France, but most European countries.. every time I travel in Europe there's always this initial realization that I'm no longer surrounded by obese people. None of the places I've been to over there encourage the same eating habits that you find prevalent in the US.
It does not help that in the US (or at least in California) you have to drive everywhere. I live in Europe now, but when I lived in the US I barley walked anywhere since it was just too far.
In Europe I do not even own a car anymore. Most things can be done with a bike, by foot, or by public transport. For a few things where I prefer a car, I just use car sharing. So now I am way more active every day.
And thanks to certain trains always be running late, I am running at least once a day as well!
Well portion sizes are smaller, but most people walk, bike or transit to work. For example this week I haven't done any exercise due to a "sports"-related injury, and yet managed to burn an average of 2571 calories -- and before you think I'm lucky to live near work, my one-way commute is 30 miles. Even just 40 minutes of daily physical activity built into a commute can make a huge difference.
Oh yea, totally. I bicycle to work almost every day (it's ~6 mi one way), but I'm lucky enough to live in a location with decent cycling infrastructure. I think another aspect of why most folks drive here (the US) is because a lot of locations have little or no infrastructure for getting around without a car. In the area where I am originally from (different part of US), you'd get smashed by cars pretty fast because you'd be forced to travel on highways/freeways.
Besides different eating habits, one of the reasons is that there is a huge stigma of being obese in most of Europe. The fact that it is relatively rare makes any such person stand out even more, and makes it harder to justify (since your peers somehow manage to keep their weight in check)
Not sure we should be giving advice. Our situation has worsen during the last 15 years. The quality of food is going down (and the prices for good food up), the health habits are too. Not in the same proportion of the US yet, but it's significant.
Compared to my parents or grand parent generation, the new ones:
- spend much more time seated;
- spend much more time in front of a screen;
- have much less people knowing how to cook. Or choose tasty fruits or vegetable for that matters, and hence they believe good food taste like crap.
- have more fat people, especially young ones;
- eat less home made food;
- consume more cereals, dairies, meat and refined sugar and less vegetables or fruits;
- eat more, and more often;
- consume products with less nutritional density, and a bigger concentration of additives of all sorts;
- eat while doing something else, faster, with less mastication.
So clearly our society is starting to fail on the health part as well.
Look at how much more expensive cigarettes are in France and the graphical warning labels that accompany them and then look at how much more commonplace smoking is in France, particularly among the youth. Regulations don't change cultures to nearly the effect many want them to.
Yes and no. I live in the USA. I shop in a few different supermarket each catering to a particular class (if you will). Mind you, the overall selection reflects the income level the store serves. But that doesn't completely explain what goes into the carts.
Long to short, I'm not so sure the less well to do are making decisions that keep them healthy. Soda, ice cream, sugary cereals, etc. These things are in the upper class stores aw well, but it seem less people are interested.
I agree with you. But I want to added that the consumers' choices factor in as well.
The way I’ve heard it explained is that poor people will base their grocery purchases based on price, and that gets to GP’s point about not subsidizing corn. The reasoning goes: cheap corn leads to low-end food being filled with corn syrup, which leads to poor people eating tons of sugar, which leads to health problems among poor people. The solution, under this scheme, is to help steer the schedule of food prices so that it’s cheaper for people to eat healthy food (eliminate corn subsidies).
In fact approx 10+ yrs ago the NY Times Sunday mag ran an article that said what you just did. In short, corn subsidies lead to cheap sweeteners, and those to cheap (but frutose based) foods.
Ironic that cities (e.g., Philadelphia) have a (so called) sugar drink tax" but their tax dollars (via subsidies) were already used to lower the cost of those drinks. Ultimately, the consumer pays. The consumer always pays.
Yet we're all hypersensitive about telling women they are overweight or obese.
One of the reasons for this is that women don't really get told they should work on their fitness to improve their own quality of life. The framing is almost always that the only real value a woman has is as a sex object. Telling women they need to lose weight is also a blame game where people with relatively little control over their lives are tasked with yet one more standard to meet instead of being given the support they need.
I am a woman. I am still alive when I should not be in part because I refused to cave to enormous social pressure to diet and force my body to conform to certain expectations. After getting the right diagnosis in my mid thirties, I was empowered to finally take proper care of myself. I shrank dramatically, even though that was not a goal of mine and my doctor was not trying to get me to lose weight because my condition usually leads to people being severely underweight and this helps kill them.
Our built environment used to be designed with fitness is mind. Now, many Americans are prisoners of their cars, spending long periods driving to and from work or school and finding nothing within walking distance. Elevators and escalators have replaced stairs. Sedentary office jobs are more the norm than hard physical labor. Everyone is too time stressed to go home and cook a real meal from scratch, so folks eat crappy microwave meals or get fast food at the drive through window or some other equally unhealthy option.
From my perspective, women giving push back and saying "I'm not your bitch, don't hang your shit on me. Quit judging me for how I look and pressuring me to conform." is actually the essential first step for trying to take control of their lives. That control leads to better health. Women starving themselves to try to conform does not lead to better health. It is just one more source of stress and problems for people who already tend to have too little control over their lives.
Or maybe some people legitimately were concerned for your health? The statistics are indisputable, being obese causes permanent damage to your body and reduces both the quality and length of your life. Wanting someone to frame this differently is a bit of an odd complaint.
I also used to be obese, and I also made my own decision to become healthy. I don't think you can force someone to become healthier, but I doubt that I would be in my current state today if nobody mentioned my weight to me. Maybe you feel differently, but ignoring a problem rarely helps make it go away.
Blaming your environment (Elevators? Really? Every building has fire stairs...) or society at large for people not being motivated to lose weight is an odd perspective (especially blaming people who are trying to help by bringing the problem to your attention). Letting things slide, and a lack of constant affirmation is what caused to me to remain obese for several years. There are better ways of helping (offering to go for a run with someone), but ultimately that's just a nicer way to remind someone of their weight.
Also, GP was pointing out the double standard when it comes to how anorexia and obesity are treated by society.
Or maybe some people legitimately were concerned for your health? The statistics are indisputable, being obese causes permanent damage to your body and reduces both the quality and length of your life. Wanting someone to frame this differently is a bit of an odd complaint.
No, not at all. If you don't frame it differently, you won't change anyone's mind. That reveals the goal for what it is: to feel good about thumbing your nose at obese people, rather than actually persuading them to do something about it.
If you want to persuade people, it's best to be clear about that in your own mind. But if you only want to feel superior then being like "You're fat, yo" is a fine way.
Or maybe some people legitimately were concerned for your health?
I know the motives of the judgy people who were a part of my life better than you do.
This kind of comment really should just never happen. In one sentence, you are casually dismissing conclusions about my own life that have taken me decades to arrive at.
Also, GP was pointing out the double standard when it comes to how anorexia and obesity are treated by society.
The article is about France, not the US. The observation that Americans are oversensitive about this could be deemed "off topic." The article lays out the completely valid reasons why France is concerned about a) excessive emphasis on thinness in its country and b) photos not simply lying to you about how people look.
Really, it is kind of BS to act like there is something wrong with requiring a two word label notifying you that the photo has been retouched. We are inundated daily with endless photos. Knowing which are legitimate representations of what actual people look like vs photo shopped fantasy bull seems like a completely valid desire for a long list of reasons.
Most likely very little of the kind that qualifies them to express such opinions.
I've had experiences that are reminiscent of Michele's over the past 10+ years.
I can tell you that neither your own comments, nor the comments others made to Michele that you're now trying to defend, are at all helpful, and in both cases can be quite damaging.
> Or maybe some people legitimately were concerned for your health?
If this was the case, why specify women and not men, why use shaming techniques that are scientifically proven not to work, why argue that this is to protect the feelings of women as if it is a bad thing, when there is proof that making women feel bad about their bodies with unrealistic media actually contributes to obesity?
You talk about these like they are two distinct problems, but they're closely related. Unhealthy body image drives a lot of unhealthy food behaviors and weight gain [1]. That negative body image is driven by many things, including fashion culture promoting atypical or fictional bodies [2][3]. It is also driven by a culture of fat shaming. [4]
So if you are really serious about reducing harm from obesity, promoting more realistic, healthier body images is a valuable step in that direction.
I don't think the first link really provides any real insight into the problem. First of all, the study isn't experimental. There could easily be many confounding variables here, such as depression causing more body satisfaction issues. Another issue could be that overweight people with low body satisfaction are less satisfied because they have been warned more about it (chicken-and-egg); for example, if a child had a binge eating disorder to begin with, their parents/doctors/friends would intervene more to try to stop them from gaining so much weight. The study also doesn't clearly define how the survey worked, and the study referenced for the survey didn't explain much either [1]. It doesn't seem like there's any measure of whether low body satisfaction means weight is too high/weight is too low (I think there's some nuance to this, for example someone desiring larger breasts may want to gain weight even if they see themselves as fat, and there's a big difference here based on culture). Finally, keep in mind the jump back to weight gain with "Very high body satisfaction". These are separated into 4 groups (apparently by quartile, although clearly every group is a different size just by looking at the chart), but this information could reveal a sharp spike as you get to the top 1% or something. Also, look at the difference in size between the 4 groups, the first is 4x larger than the last, which seems really strange.
Sorry, when you say it isn't experimental, are you proposing a study where we abuse people enough to give them an unhealthy body image and then see if they gain weight? That seems... well, unlikely to pass an IRB, for one.
[ Disclosure: As Brit I have no idea how the US treats these issues, I'm only going on how the UK does ]
> Yet we're all hypersensitive about telling women they are overweight or obese.
The UK already tackles these issues by banning a great deal, if not all food adverts on TV channels at times that children will typically watch, it's very easy to say that we should be focusing more effort on some subject but actually in fact we are focusing on the problem of obesity the one of the things we haven't really focused a huge amount of effort on is anorexia which still kills people ( and even more tragically, typically young people )
> Deaths from Anorexia are about 150/year
I actually went through and read the paper that you sourced that quote from and I think the author actually misses a big issue source of possible fatalities, primary it's not focusing on the suicide numbers. Instead it goes to focus on the death certificate counts for anorexia, there's probably doesn't mean that it's going to have a very good representation in the same way that you can't directly blame a lot of deaths on obesity directly because it causes other long-term issues
Generally people know they're overweight, and there is no shyness about telling people so. Especially women.
What there is a lack of is compassionate, practical help. It's quite a bit like smoking; few people would argue that they didn't know they were smoking, the issue is whether they care about the negative health effects and how they can actually do something about it that sticks.
In Australia (after we introduced plain packaging laws for cigarettes, banned advertising, and made many other related laws) smoking has dropped significantly[1]. It's amazing how much advertising and education plays into this. What if it was not legal to advertise junk food to children, or you had plain-packaging style laws for junk food?
I used to be obese, so I completely agree that fat people usually are somewhat aware of how fat they are and of the health impacts. It's just hard to make them care, and they need help with going through a lifestyle change that they are going to make mistakes during.
One problem is that "junk food" is an ill-defined term, even though it may seem obvious.
For example, years ago Greek Yogurt became popular in supermarkets in the U.S. If you look at the nutrition label of a yogurt like Chobani, it contains roughly 4 teaspoons of sugar in one small container. And yet yogurt is advertised as a healthy food.
If you "quit sugar" in the U.S., you'll quickly realize just how many items at supermarkets have added sugar. I'm more concerned about "sneaky calories" then straight-up junk food.
You make a good point about defining junk food, buy I'm not sure Chobani yoghurt is the best example; the only sugar in plain Chobani yoghurt is lactose from the milk that was used to make it - lactose has a much lower glycemic index than that of glucose.
And there's no "shyness" of overweight people telling healthy-weight people they're "skinny". I hear it every day, and my weight is dead-smack-in-the-middle of the "healthy" range for my height.
> Yet we're all hypersensitive about telling women they are overweight or obese.
Also smoking is very normalised in many parts of the world, thanks to American lobbying. I really wish more countries would follow Australia's lead on smoking legislation. Smoking kills ~500,000 a year[1].
> It would be like spending weeks in urban schools talking about how to avoid poisonous snake bites and spending 15 minutes on automobile safety.
As an aside, in Australia we teach both (not to mention spider, tick, blue bottle, jellyfish, and octopus safety).
There was a kids' cartoon from the U.K. I think, where one of the episodes was about how spiders are our friends and you don't need to be afraid of them, etc.
When the show was broadcast in Australia they left that episode out, because all the spiders in Australia probably will kill you. :)
Is it American lobbying? As an American, I could never live in Europe since the cigarette smoke everywhere disgusts me. Too bad because they have a lot of other things figured out but will still be smoking the cigarettes outdoors in a crowded restaurant seating or worse, around children. I've never seen anything like it in the US though the current riser of ecigs is concerning.
Quite a lot of lobbying to prevent anti-smoking laws all over the world is done by the American tobacco industry (Marlboro is a particular offender). To be clear, some EU countries (Germany especially) have had a bad track record with smoking legislation as well as EU lobbying. But usually they are lobbying for the goal of protecting an EU directive from being passed that affects their own country (which is effectively just standard lobbying).
But I don't recall stories about Reemtsma trying to interfere in Australia's laws about anti-smoking. Marlboro did (they failed spectacularly, but that's a separate topic).
I live in the EU and agree on the smoking issue; thankfully more places are disallowing smoking in their outdoor seating now, and chewing tobacco and vaping are becoming much more popular.
treatment for anorexia has got very much better. It used to kill about 20% of people with the diagnosis. More people get full recovery than used to, and more people live long term (either maintaining low weight, or relapsing & remitting) with anorexia.
But, also, deaths from anorexia are often coded as something else.
I don’t have the expertise to comment on the effectiveness of this legislation, but your simile doesn’t work. Both anorexia and obesity are symptoms of the same problem: society projecting unrealistic body imagery, more generally over focus on physical appearance over health indicators, contributing to serious body image psychological issues, particularly among females. People with either diagnosis often have related eating activities like restriction and many overweight people have been underweight or undernourished previously. These are complex physiological and psychological topics and we won’t make holistic progress as long as diet and health advice, including government programs, are dominated by pseudoscience — case in point, the joke that is the food pyramid.
Both anorexia and obesity are symptoms of the same problem: society projecting unrealistic body imagery
It is interesting to note that several centuries ago, when far more of the population was underweight, being somewhat overweight or even obese was considered the ideal. Now that the average weight has increased significantly, it seems the "unrealistic body imagery" has gone in the other direction.
It would have been more accurately if I had included psychological unrealistic body imagery. Others in this thread have suggested that the manipulation is to make people look fit, but there are regular articles that describe those clicks of the mouse resulting in physiologically extreme, if not impossible body proportions.
This observation distracts from the fact that that nutrition and body science is young. Hypothesizes that have experimental support come from the last 130
years, but even then most of popular theories of the last decades have contradictory evidence.
What I do like about your observation is that it brings to my mind that although there has always been artistic license in previous centuries, for the most part the images were attempting to accurately represent the specific persons show.
What is your point here, beyond "Fat people are fat"?
Do you believe that obese women don't know they're fat? What would telling them they're fat accomplish? None of this makes sense and it's just an excuse to be unkind.
TFA is about France targeting advertising that is known to cause anorexia. GP's point is that (in the US) obesity is a much larger issue and should have far more resources put into tackling that problem. Not being allowed to advertise to minors would be one idea. But since TFA is about France the situation is different.
Your comment is a perfect example of being hypersensitive about this issue. As someone who used to be obese, I find it quite horrifying that more isn't being done to protect children from harmful advertising. I'm lucky that I found my motivation to combat my weight problems in my late teens, many people aren't so fortunate.
I didn't see the 300,000 number in your CDC link. I'm curious where you found a number so low.
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/deaths.htm says that some 2.6 million Americans die each year. I think it's safe to estimate that more than the 36.5% obesity rate for the entire population applies to this group, implying that some 958 thousand people died while obese (ignoring cause). The top 10 causes of death include heart disease at #1, strokes, and diabetes; these factors alone total to 853 thousand deaths due to conditions largely caused by obesity. Furthermore, studies suggest that some fraction of the almost 600k cancer deaths are caused by obesity. I think you're at least a factor of 3 too low.
I will play devil's advocate for a moment, though, and say that among high school girls, anorexia is a much more frequent problem than death by heart attack. No, it doesn't lead to death, but that doesn't mean it's not a problem.
> Yet we're all hypersensitive about telling women they are overweight or obese.
Women don't need to be told they're overweight and obese, all fat people know it, they think about it every day. Are you really so insensitive that you think they need to be told?
Humorously going through K12 in Texas I remember multiple safety lessons before doing (literal) field trips in grade school about rattle snakes and I never received drivers education through a school.
Seems like a facetious over-simplification of what the poster said.
If it's hard (socially) to approach something, because people are hyper-sensitive, then it's simply hard to help those people.
In a lot of Western culture it generally seems accepted to tell people they're too skinny, but not to tell people they're too fat—obviously I don't just mean walking down a street and saying this to a stranger, but in appropriate settings.
You're right. I wrote the comment without having read the article, which is why I wasn't able to put it in context. After having read the article, I agree, I think he makes a good point.
Although I still think telling a person that you consider he or she to be either overweight or skinny is quite meaningless. If they ask you for your opinion, it makes sense to answer, but I have a really hard time believing that an over/underweight person wouldn't have noticed this already while looking in the mirror.
It's a bit like telling a cigarette smoker that smoking is unhealthy and that they should quit. The chance that they didn't know this already is practically zero, which means you're not offering any help.
I don't think it's about not knowing if they're under- or over-weight or not. I'm sure there's a massive amount of research into why we knowingly do things that are harmful to our selves too.
What I took away from the original poster is that, it seems more appropriate in many Western societies to make available help for those who are under-weight or who smoke. It also seems more appropriate to proactively try help others too.
AFAIK too, we don't have the equivalent with smoking of people promoting that being severely overweight is okay. As for the equivalent with being under-weight, from what I see, many years ago the focus was being on skinny for the sake of being skinny as it's attractive. These days it seems to be a focus on being fit (and healthy), which generally means not being skinny, but having a more toned body, or rather, simply not excess fat.
So you think the problem lies in obese people being unaware of how much they weigh?
Actually, yes. Maybe not obese, but everyone compares themselves to the general population. In a society where everyone's carrying a couple of stone more than is really healthy, noone thinks of themselves as "fat", they think they're just average.
It'd be like if a country banned all voice processing software when singing (which has become ubiquitous today). It's not like studios would simply begin accepting people with less than ideal singing voices. Instead they would actually have to seek out talent that can sing without having their voice filtered through digital signal processing software. And in the end, I think this would (and will) be a good thing. Authenticity should be encouraged and incentivized.