140: Mythbusting about fat and BMI with Dr. Lindo Bacon

This episode kicks off a series on the intersection of parenting and food.   We begin today with a conversation with Dr. Lindo Bacon, where we bust a LOT of myths about the obesity epidemic that is said to be plaguing people in the United States and other countries that follow a similar diet.   The messaging we get from government entities seems pretty simple: being fat is bad for you. It causes increased risk for a host of diseases as well as early death. If you're fat, you should lose weight because then your risk of getting these diseases and dying early will be reduced.   But what if this wasn't true?   What if this messaging had been established by people who own companies that manufacture weight loss products who sit on panels that advise international governmental entities like the World Health Organization?   What if body fat was actually protective for your health?   We dig into all these questions and more in this provocative interview.   We'll continue this series with episodes looking specifically at sugar, as well as supporting parents who have or continue to struggle with disordered eating, and how to support children in developing eating habits that will serve them for a lifetime, not just get the vegetables into them today.   Jump to highlights:

• (01:00) Introducing Dr. Lindo Bacon and starting our series of episodes on the intersection of parenting and food
• (02:22) Stripping the word ‘fat’ of it’s pejorative meaning and reclaiming the term while acknowledging that it may be jarring for some people
• (03:09) Kicking off the conversation with how we measure health using BMI and how it might not be accurate
• (05:03) The resistance to Katherine Flegal’s seminal research in weight and longevity
• (05:49) The development of the Body Mass Index was with scientific bias to fit the bell curve
• (07:30) Higher body weight does not necessarily mean a person has greater risk of poor health
• (10:59) We actually know that the research is highly exaggerated in terms on the role that it plays on health
• (13:16) Dr. Bacon’s turning point: When they found out that BMI recommendations were created by an organization funded by pharmaceutical companies who produce weight loss drugs and products
• (17:35) Taking the issue one step further with the American Medical Association’s recommendation whether to categorize obesity as a disease or not
• (19:19) The Obesity Paradox is an observation in the research that people who are obese who get the same diseases as those with ‘normal’ weight are living longer
• (21:15) The concept of dieting just doesn’t work according to the data
• (30:33) A story of Dr. Bacon’s and their father’s knee problems
• (34:40) Individual factors only accounts to 25% to somebody’s total health outcomes and social determinants account to about 60%
• (42:05) It is cool right now to be your authentic self but not everyone can so easily be their authentic self when their authentic selves are not valued by society at large
• (45:48) Improving the health of individuals is more communal than individual

  Resource Links:

• Health at Every Size, by Lindo Bacon
• Body Respect: What Conventional Health Books Get Wrong, Leave Out, and Just Plain Fail to Understand about Weight, by Lindo Bacon and Lucy Aphramor
• Radical Belonging: How to Survive and Thrive in an Unjust World (While Transforming it for the Better), by Lindo Bacon
• Association For Size Diversity and Health

  [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] Jen Lumanlan  00:02 Hi, I'm Jen and I host the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. We all want her children to lead fulfilling lives, but it can be so hard to keep up with the latest scientific research on child development and figure out whether and how to incorporate it into our own approach to parenting. Here at Your Parenting Mojo, I do the work for you by critically examining strategies and tools related to parenting and child development that are grounded in scientific research and principles of respectful parenting.   Jen Lumanlan  00:29 If you'd like to be notified when new episodes are released, and get a free guide called 13 Reasons Why Your Child Won't Listen To You and What to Do About Each One, just head over to YourParentingMojo.com/SUBSCRIBE. You can also continue the conversation about the show with other listeners in the Your Parenting Mojo Facebook group. I do hope you'll join us.   Jen Lumanlan  01:00 Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo Podcast. I'm very excited about our episode today because we're at the very beginning of what I hope is going to be quite an extended series of episodes at the intersection of parenting and food. And I'm hoping to look at ideas like eating disorders and intuitive eating and how sugar impacts our children and what we should do about that, if anything, how we should approach eating issues with our children more broadly and how we can all be a little bit happier in our bodies. And today we're kicking off this series with Dr. Lindo Bacon whose seminal book Health at Every Size was written over a decade ago now and which exposes how the ideas that most of us believe about body fat and weight are actually not grounded in scientific research. She followed that by co-authoring a book called Body Respect, and her most recent book is called Radical Belonging: How to Survive and Thrive in an Unjust World (While Transforming it for the Better). Dr. Bacon earned their PhD in physiology from the University of California Davis, where they currently serve as an Associate Nutritionist. They also hold graduate degrees in Psychology and Exercise Metabolism. Dr. Bacon is industry independent, which means they have pledged not to accept money from the weight loss, pharmaceutical or food industries, which makes them almost unique among non governmental researchers on issues related to weight and food. Welcome, Dr. Bacon. I'm so glad you're here.   Dr. Lindo Bacon  02:20 Thanks, Jen. I'm looking forward to talking to you.   Jen Lumanlan  02:22 And before we get started, I just want to acknowledge that I'm going to follow your lead in your books by using the word fat in this interview and using that in a way that's really been stripped of its pejorative connotations. And many people it seems who are fat, who are now reclaiming the term in this way. But I do acknowledge that it may be jarring to some listeners to hear if they aren't accustomed to hearing it like that.   Dr. Lindo Bacon  02:45 Yeah, I think it's important to name all of that. So thank you, Jen. And I also just want to note for the listeners that if you do feel uncomfortable when you hear the word, then that's something helpful to look at, because that really shows that you've absorbed the cultural ideas about that. And hopefully, we can start to normalize it so that you could feel better about it.   Jen Lumanlan  03:09 Yeah, and hopefully this conversation is going to be a big part of that as well. So I wonder if we can start at the beginning with what I know is a big topic as it were, which is how we measure health. And so this body mass index, or BMI for short, has become the standard measure of how much weight a person is carrying compared to their height. And it's best considered an indicator of how healthy they are in some way. And it's used by everybody from the Centers for Disease Control in the US to the World Health Organization. Is the BMI actually a good measure - I guess I should start by saying of anything at all and then we can go from there and to health.   Dr. Lindo Bacon  03:47 You right. I think that your question already answered itself, but it really does not play much of a role in health at all. And I think that its use has been quite damaging to people. So I wish that the medical industry would throw it out.   Jen Lumanlan  04:03 Yeah. So where did it come from? How did we end up here?   Dr. Lindo Bacon  04:07 Well, it actually was written by or devised by someone who was a statistician looking at insurance, and that it wasn't meant or designed for health. And it was meant to look at what's going on in a population, not what's going on in an individual. And it's amazing when you start to look at the research of how it corresponds to health and you find some really surprising things. For example, it's pretty clear from the...