Our views on society frame the way in which we look at science.

An example, one of my colleagues attacked the article I reblogged for it's emphasis on fighting obesity as opposed to an emphasis on overall health. The argument they presented was that obesity was not a health issue outside of other health issues and, therefore, focus should be placed upon overall health rather than a single issue. Further, she intimated the point that health and "thinness," as in the appearance value, have been conflated within the popular opinion and therefore the direction of research would be towards not looking "fat" versus actually being healthy.

I must pause here, to state that I agree with her perspective: the social construction of the american body has conflated "fat" with "unhealthy" and "unattractive," when it is anything but. Health, cannot be measured by physical appearance (except, perhaps, in the case of sucking chest wounds, flesh eating diseases, etc) as a person who weighs upwards of 250lbs can be perfectly healthy relative to someone who weighs 120. If we are to take the stable functioning of the human body as the standard for what it means to be healthy, then physical appearance, in terms of our socially constructed ideals of beauty, fatness, and thinness, is usually not an indicator of the health of a person. An example of this might be Jiang Mi-Ran, Olympic superheavywieght weight lifter.

While her intentions were noble, I felt, at that moment, she was attacking the science from a position of social advocacy that the science was only mildly complicit in. The article in question, reblogged below, was pushing the issue that healthy weight could be maintained by increasing one's physical exertions to match the intake of food so that the energy would not be retained as fat. The position, as quoted by one of the scientists, was one of eat smarter rather than eat less. The science, then, advocated the position of eating to compliment the exertions of energy of the person to prevent excessive weight gain, which could lead to health complications.

My well intentioned friend, keying on the issue of obesity, seemed to ignore the other points, particularly that eating less did nothing for the body and eventually forced the boy to return to its previous eating habits and that preventing excessive weight gain was easier that treating the results of excessive weight gain, obesity. That is, her view on the damaging perceptions of body image in this country shifted the way in which she read the article: instead of seeing the research as a positive thing, something that could be saying "you can be healthy at any weight by matching your energy intake to your energy output," she viewed it as promoting the "party line," of fighting obesity and a war against "fat" people.

I have, actually, nothing against combating the way in which weight and body image issues are discussed in this country as we are less focused on the health of the individual and more focused upon their external appearance, however, I would advise caution when taking science to task for promotion of this country's harmful relationship to the body. That is to say, I believe a part of the issue was terminological, as my colleague pointed out, there exists a difference between fighting obesity and promoting healthy. In this case, the science sees the two objectives as not distinct from one another.

That is, managing energy consumption so that it matches exertion, as the article argues, prevents excessive weight gain and obesity. In doing so, the individual would remain healthier and, perhaps, lose weight in the process. I think, here, the point is that we need to be careful about reading our ideologies or the ideologies of others into the research that comes out of the scientific community.

I want to be careful on this point as it is certainly possible that the ideologies that promote harmful body images can influence scientific research: certainly most of the dieting programs, exercise programs, and weight loss programs that exist now are based upon some form of scientific research, or have appropriated that research for a commercial end. In this, I acknowledge that science, like any other field, can be driven by confirmation bias and ideologies, but it is important that we, as people who read science and some times seek to integrate it into our lives, try not to bring our own presuppositions about the research to the table.