8 Comments

Thanks for this. There's also the point that EVEN IF the correlation between higher weight and health issues is robust, that still does not demonstrate that causation exists, or the direction of the causation if it does exist. You touch on this with your example of baldness and cardiac events, but I think it's worth repeating!

For instance: according to my endocrinologist, there is growing evidence that insulin resistance causes weight gain, NOT vice versa. In other words, higher weight may well be a SYMPTOM of Type 2 diabetes, not a CAUSE of diabetes. If that is the case, then blaming fat people for "causing" their diabetes is as nonsensical as it would be to blame my swollen knuckles for "causing" my osteoarthritis.

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Thank you so much for this post!

One thing I think about a lot is the stress-health relationship and how damn hypocritical it is for a doctor to be shaming us for our size while simultaneously saying we need to lower our stress levels. They’re the cause of much of my stress! I’m just flabbergasted that these supposedly educated professionals can’t put two and two together here.

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I think you touch on this in the post, but even before I understood much about bias and was just living as a fat person in the world, a physical issue itself as a potential fourth causal relationship always seemed like common sense to me.

There's so much in science and medicine that continues to be discovered, it seems like a really lazy approach to say 'well, people who are fat also have a high rate of X therefore fat causes it' instead of looking for common factors that might be contributing to both. Thanks for continuing to connect the dots where actual evidence leads.

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I wish there was a button to SUPER-LOVE this post!!!

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Could you please offer cites for the baldness - cardiac events correlation? Thank you!

It doesn't surprise me; there's so many correlations with cardiac events. My favorite is when they found that C-reactive protein levels, a marker of inflammation, are higher in people who have had cardiac events. They concluded that means people with high C-reactive protein levels are going to have heart attacks! Then someone dug through the research and found that nobody looked to see what their levels were BEFORE. There were no comparisons. And for a bonus, they then realized that your C-reactive protein levels can go up from just about anything, from chronic allergies, a bad and stressful event, autoimmune diseases, etc.

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