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Myths of Obesity and Millennials

By | | Regional planning
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Nine years ago, the Antiplanner called claims that suburbs caused obesity “junk science.” Research since then has validated that view.

For example, Health and Place journal is focused on “all aspects of health and health care in which place or location matters,” so might be presumed to have a slight bias for an assumption that place influences obesity. Yet it published a 2012 literature review of dozens of papers on the subject that concluded that most failed to account for self-selection bias, that is, that people who might be overweight prefer to live in the suburbs. Thus, any relationship they may have found between weight and suburbia “cannot provide strong support for causality.”

A paper published by MIT’s Center for Advanced Urbanism reviewed several other metastudies that reported “the inconclusive nature of the relation between urban form and public health.” The MIT paper was written specifically in rebuttal to a paper by people associated with the Congress for the New Urbanism, and chided the authors of that paper for failing to disclose their association with that group, “an organization known for certain urban biases linked to their design agendas.”

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No Obesity Epidemic After All

By | | News commentary
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“There is no childhood obesity epidemic,” writes Paul Campos in an article in the New Republic. Campos bases this on a recently published study that found that obesity rates have not increased in the last decade, and in some age classes they’ve actually declined.

This is vindication for Campos, whose 2004 book, The Obesity Myth, argued that claims of an obesity epidemic were not only overblown but could lead to policies that were hazardous to people’s health. Campos points to a more recent book, End of the Obesity Epidemic, by Michael Gard, that uses worldwide data to show that obesity rates are leveling off.

This doesn’t mean obesity isn’t a problem. But, Campos states, “No one knows why the average weight of Americans was relatively stable in the 1960s and 1970s, or why it went up significantly in the 1980s and 1990s.” If no one knows why these things happened, then any policies aimed at reducing obesity are no more than shots in the dark. Unfortunately, the collateral damage from the shots is likely to be far greater than any possible benefits.
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Who Should Cure the Obesity “Epidemic”?

By | | News commentary
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The United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) is worried about “controlling the global obesity epidemic.” A recent report from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) on “The State of Food and Agriculture” frets over obesity almost as much as it does malnutrition.

The U.N.’s increasing attention to this issue have conservatives worried about another threat to our sovereignty. “The last thing the world needs is yet another anti-liberty, wealth-redistributing response to an alleged crisis,” says Michael Tennant, a writer for the New American, which is published by the John Birch Society.

The Antiplanner isn’t too worried about the United Nations trying to control what Americans eat. But the same type of UN people who want to “control” obesity inhabit the U.S. Department of Agriculture and other federal agencies. Moreover, their agenda is often less oriented to fixing obesity than it is toward using obesity as an excuse for regulating land-use patterns.

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Peer Review? So What?

By | | News commentary
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“If you’re so smart,” people sometimes ask the Antiplanner, “why haven’t you published any articles in peer-reviewed journals?” Part of my answer is that I’ve seen so many peer-reviewed articles that are simply junk science that I don’t have much respect for the process. (The other part of my answer is that I am not seeking academic tenure, which used to be the major reason for writing peer-reviewed articles.)

A prime example of peer-reviewed junk science is the spate of articles a few years ago linking obesity to suburban sprawl. As noted here before, back in 2003 a group called Smart Growth America breathlessly announced a peer-reviewed study supposedly proving that sprawl “has a hand in the nation’s obesity crisis” which “demonstrate[s] the urgent need” for smart growth. Actually, the results of the peer-reviewed study were much weaker, only claiming that sprawl “had small but significant associations” with obesity.

Small is right. As Wendell Cox discovered, the data used by Smart Growth America indicated that residents of dense Boston weighed just 1.7 pounds less than Boston suburbanites, while those of denser Chicago weighed just 1.4 pounds less than that city’s least-dense suburbs.

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