Tuesday, October 25, 2005

Fat chance of a job?

A survey suggests that recruiters for many companies would discriminate against obese people simply because they are overweight. Given the hysteria about obesity, is anyone surprised?

Personnel Today surveyed more than 2,000 human resources (HR) professionals. Almost half of respondents said that obesity negatively affects employee output. A third thought obesity was a valid medical reason for not employing someone in the first place, while 11 per cent wrongly thought that firms could sack people just for being obese. Above all, given two people with equal qualifications for a job, 93 per cent would employ a thin person over an obese person.

However, this is not simply prejudice based on ignorance. It is the logical consequence of a climate in which those who are obese are automatically assumed to be chronically ill with every chance of keeling over from a heart attack. What employer would want to take a chance on such a person? Moreover, health professionals and government campaigns constantly tell us that obesity is always caused by excessive eating and a total lack of exercise. So employers may feel entirely justified in viewing a fat candidate as lazy, feckless and devoid of self-control.

This is not to suggest that this kind of discrimination is remotely on a par with the racial and sexual oppression of the past, as some campaigners have suggested. 'Being fat' is not a human right. What the survey does illustrate is the potential for harm caused by the excessive zeal for public health and behaviour modification - harm which might not be the aim of these campaigns, but is nonetheless a real consequence.

The obsession with body-shape is unnecessary because the risks are generally overstated and the most common solution - dieting - is usually a failure. The fanaticism about weight expresses itself in myriad forms unrelated to health, from depressing but petty prejudice through to difficulties getting a job, parents having their children taken into care and even locking-up one fat man as mentally ill. The damage done by the war on obesity surely outweighs the benefits.

Fattism is the last bastion of employee discrimination, Personnel Today, 25 October 2005

The Obesity Myth, by Paul Campos

Friday, October 21, 2005

Tory election: victory for the blank slate


David Cameron trounced rival David Davis in the MPs' vote for the Conservative leadership. Nobody seems to know exactly what he stands for - which is exactly what makes him so attractive.

Cameron's policies, where he's stated them, seem little different to those of Tony Blair: 'To be attractive, our programme must be balanced, compassionate and modern: balanced in the sense of improving the quality of life as well as creating prosperity; compassionate in the sense of helping people in Britain and the world who are least able to help themselves; modern in the sense of recognising the challenges of today's Britain and offering effective solutions.'

This is the kind of vacuous guff that Blair has practically copyrighted. But in a political environment where big ideas are largely absent, that is not a problem. By being largely unknown and relatively young, Cameron can be an empty vessel into which all the hopes of the party can be poured.

As long as his buzzwords are 'change' and 'a new party', he can be the recipient of votes from all those people who don't know what they want, but know they don't want the past. Cameron, unburdened by conviction or principle, does not offer much hope of a vigorous rebirth of politics in the future. He is, however, the poster boy for the empty, pointless politics of the present.

Policy programme, David Cameron, Daily Telegraph, 10 October 2005

Wake up, the Tories are telling us something, by Mick Hume, spiked

Monday, October 03, 2005

Nobel Prize for gut instinct

Two Australian scientists have been awarded the Nobel Prize for medicine for their discovery of the cause of most stomach ulcers. But there's a wider lesson to be learned about how illness is explained.

In 1982, a bacterium called Helicobacter Pylori was discovered by Robin Warren and Barry Marshall. Until their discovery, the idea that a bacterium could be responsible for peptic and duodenal ulcers had been dismissed. Instead, it was assumed that the root causes were stress and spicy food. Now, around 90 per cent of duodenal ulcers and up to 80 per cent of peptic ulcers are thought to be caused by the bacterium. In a throwback to the early pioneers of science and medicine, Marshall even went so far as to infect himself with Helicobacter Pylori, inducing gastritis, then successfully treating himself with antibiotics.

We live in an era in which most forms of ill-health seem to be explained in terms of our lifestyles. Promoting good health through changing our behaviour has become a modern alternative to old-fashioned moralising. But there may be a serious medical problem with this outlook. Government and health authorities have been only too keen to promote behavioural change and fund research into its effectiveness. However, the benefits of eating fruit and veg, taking more exercise and banning smoking in public places are at best limited. Meanwhile, important alternative explanations for illness may be getting overlooked.

If we were to find in years to come that the obsession with lifestyle had caused unnecessary worry, and led research up a blind alley, it would be pretty difficult to stomach.

Nobel for stomach ulcer discovery, BBC News, 3 October 2005