Obesity craze's dangerous message: Size, not health, counts
By Patricia Pearson
Arkansas has tipped the scales on the childhood-obesity crisis *
literally.
Last week, officials there announced that they had weighed 276,000
schoolchildren during the past year and discovered that 40% were
overweight or obese. Notes have been sent home to parents. Diets,
presumably, advised.
Laudatory as this effort sounds, the focus on poundage sends chills up
my spine. Are we quite certain that a focus on weight, rather than on
health, is the one we wish to convey to our children?
I ask because my 7-year-old daughter and I came across the final
episode of Fox's plastic-surgery makeover show, The Swan, a few weeks
back, and it was a striking reminder that this society remains one in
which the cruel adage still holds: You can never be too rich or too thin.
Even as we wring our hands about the obesity epidemic, we look to
television and see ordinary American women submitting to a months-long
regimen of dieting, fitness and plastic surgery, to be, not strong and
fit, but pretty.
A putative swan song to self-esteem, the show crescendoed to a
pageant, in which the ladies were pitted against one another in
bathing suits and lingerie, and one got to become the Swan Queen. The
lunacy lay less in the liposuction than in this final pageant, in
which every woman but the winner was made to feel that she was still
lacking a certain je ne sais quois.
-snip-
By Patricia Pearson
Arkansas has tipped the scales on the childhood-obesity crisis *
literally.
Last week, officials there announced that they had weighed 276,000
schoolchildren during the past year and discovered that 40% were
overweight or obese. Notes have been sent home to parents. Diets,
presumably, advised.
Laudatory as this effort sounds, the focus on poundage sends chills up
my spine. Are we quite certain that a focus on weight, rather than on
health, is the one we wish to convey to our children?
I ask because my 7-year-old daughter and I came across the final
episode of Fox's plastic-surgery makeover show, The Swan, a few weeks
back, and it was a striking reminder that this society remains one in
which the cruel adage still holds: You can never be too rich or too thin.
Even as we wring our hands about the obesity epidemic, we look to
television and see ordinary American women submitting to a months-long
regimen of dieting, fitness and plastic surgery, to be, not strong and
fit, but pretty.
A putative swan song to self-esteem, the show crescendoed to a
pageant, in which the ladies were pitted against one another in
bathing suits and lingerie, and one got to become the Swan Queen. The
lunacy lay less in the liposuction than in this final pageant, in
which every woman but the winner was made to feel that she was still
lacking a certain je ne sais quois.
-snip-
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