Category Archives: Obesity

An American classicIn the 1960s the average American man weighed 166 pounds. Today, the average American man weighs 195 pounds. In the 1960s the average American woman weighed 140 pounds. Today, the average American woman weighs 166 pounds. According t…

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The Insight Show Notes — Season 2, Episode 31: Obesity & Genetic PredictionThis week on The Insight (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, and Google Podcasts) Razib talks to Dr. Amit Khera, a cardiologist, and geneticist. We talk about the relationsh…

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Unless you have been hiding under a rock you know that people of South Asian are at more risk for metabolic disease than is the norm. More concretely we tend toward “skinny fat.” My current BMI 24. By normal calculators I’m normal weight (barely), because the cut-off is 25. But for South Asian we should … Continue reading “Brown fat, the bad kind”

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After the post on fatness and homophobia I decided to query the GSS on the extent to which people think that fatness has a strong biological element, similar to homosexuality. There’s a variable, GENENVO1. It asks:
Character, personality, and man…

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I was browsing the front page of The Atlantic and I noticed that it featured a “headless fattie.” This is the standard illustration of obese people in the American media which omits their heads, and tends to focus on their mid-section. You …

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Paul French talks about his new book, Fat China: How Expanding Waistlines are Changing a Nation. And rest assured, this is one measure by which America is still #1 in relation to China….

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There’s a lot of media buzz right now about a new report in JAMA on the empirical trends on prevalence of obesity in the United States. You can read the whole paper here (too many tables, not enough graphs). Interestingly, like George W. Bush it seems …

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Since The New York Times put up the csv file which they used to generate their maps of food stamp usage, I thought I’d look at the data a little closer. In particular, look at this graphic of change in food stamp usage by county (dark equals more usage…

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Hope readers have a happy Thanksgiving. I assume this is also a day when you’re not going to think too much about your diet and eat what you want to eat. But I thought this map on diabetes and obesity for those age 20 and up was interesting. These are …

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Razib Khan