Chocolatefker - Im A Kitty Cat Cat

Ugh that post has gotten me thinking about fat acceptance in a way I haven’t in years. I’ve read more studies about weight and health than probably any other topic I’ve ever researched. And every time I see someone wail about health I am just like

Did you know that in post-mortem examinations there is zero correlation between weight and levels of arteriosclerosis and related diseases found?

Did you know that people with an overweight BMI have the longest life expectancy, that those with an “ideal” and an “obese” have about the same life expectancy, and that being “underweight” raises mortality rates more than being “morbidly obese”?

Did you know that losing weight and then gaining it back is worse for your heart than remaining at the weight you started consistently?

Did you know that 95% of people who lose weight do gain it back, and there has never been a single documented weight loss program that has been demonstrated to keep the weight off for five years or more in the majority or even a significant minority of people? Like, telling people to lose weight isn’t much use if we don’t know HOW to make that happen.

Like I have read The Obesity Myth by Paul Campos and Rethinking Thin by Gina Kolata and Big Fat Lies by Glenn A Gaesser (Ph.D!) And Fat!So? and several other books that I don’t own and so don’t remember all of their names I spent like four years reading every single study coming out and looking at the methodology and noting which ones had huge holes or terrible methods and which didn’t (the holes were almost always in the pro-weight-loss studies) and like

Big Fat Lies has 27 pages of bibliography. 27 pages worth of scientific citation. The book content itself is only 197 pages. That’s a page of references for every 7 pages of book. Reading the book is just reference after reference and study after study. Most of these doctors (like Linda Bacon, author of Health at Every Size) started out the same way. They wanted to use the scientific method to find a real weight loss program or health solution that worked and could be proven to work, and so studied everything they could about weight and fitness only to find out that we didn’t need weight loss in the first place. That all the studies calling for it were lacking or nonexistent. That weight and underlying metabolic health have very little relation. That the history of our relationship with health and obesity has little basis in fact and a LOT of basis in capitalism, politics, and fashion. No, really, the association between weight and health was first proposed by insurance companies looking for ways to charge people more by claiming risk. They also charged tall and short people more. And people with different skin colors. When they got in trouble for charging people for things they had no control over and had no bearing on their health, they set out to prove that weight was controllable and that fat was unhealthy to make money. 

These are also a lot of the same people who went on to invent the President’s fitness program, so if you went to public school you probably already hate them. 

Anyway, if you want a place to start reading about the issue, this article is a pretty good launching pad. 

Survival Myths That Could Do More Harm Than Good.

Cutting Water in Half With a superhydrophobic knife

Source

A new, clearer insight into Earth's hidden crystals

Geologists have developed a new theory about the state of Earth billions of years ago after examining the very old rocks formed in the Earth's mantle below the continents.

“The seven continents on Earth today are each built around a stable interior called a craton, and geologists believe that craton stabilisation some 2.5—3 billion years ago was critical to the emergence of land masses on Earth.

Little is known about how cratons and their supporting mantle keels formed, but important clues can be found in peridotite xenoliths, which are samples of mantle that are brought to the Earth’s surface by erupting volcanoes.”

“The research used a new thermodynamic model to calculate that the unusual mineralogy developed when very hot molten rock— greater than 1700 °C—interacted with older parts of the mantle and this caused the growth of silica-rich minerals.

“For more than 1 billion years, from 3.8 to 2.5 billion years ago, volcanoes also erupted very unusual lavas of very low viscosity—lava that was very thin, very hot and often contained variable levels of silica,“”

Honestly the biggest disappointment I had researching ABC was that medieval authors did not, in fact, see the creatures they were describing and were trying their best to describe them with their limited knowledge while going “what the fuck… what the fuck…”