Disciplinarian parents who ignore the viewpoint of their children may be contributing to the obesity epidemic. The tentative explanation is that children overeat to cope with stress. Parents who set out rules, but listened to their children and provided them with a sense of security, had children with the fewest weight problems.

There’s a lesson for society as a whole here. Subjecting the most vulnerable members of society to constant insecurity isn’t an incentive to try harder, it’s an incentive to find ways to alleviate the stress. No matter what obesity-pundits say, food is an effective and cheap way of reducing stress. Business and government are currently being obliged to adjust to the reality of inceasing rates of obesity. The efforts seem to be focused on setting more controls: deprive people of food, berate the character of people who have “let themselves go”, and bemoan “addiction” on all the afternoon talk shows. Perhaps instead of spending all this time and money on damage control, which seems to be rife with humiliations that will only make the problem worse, people should consider providing more checks on rankism. Allowing open season to abuse the most vulnerable members of society has resulted in a tremendous cost, and the bills are now coming due.

More than half of the people who took last week’s Monster opinion poll believe cosmetic surgery could advance their career. Surveys have confirmed that beauty confers a social advantage that translates into unearned income. Workers have started to file lawsuits to protect themselves from appearance-based discrimination, but some economists are arguing that survival of the prettiest is an attribute of a free society. In other words, it’s human to make distinctions and humiliate others in the process of forming hierarchies: if the free citizen wants to redistribute income from skill and experience to the sexually desirable, so be it. Perhaps the economists might reconsider their position when people start killing for plastic surgery money.

What is it about facial differences that provoke people to violence?

According to this article, people with high IQ enjoy both greater wealth and greater longevity than the general population. Challenging the notion that high status provides a buffer from health-threatening stress and depression, the author asserts that “it’s dumb…to become obese.”

This IQ-rankism and weight-rankism all rolled into one. There are many causes of obesity, and it’s ridiculous to reduce it to a “choice” that stupid people make. Poverty reduces access to healthy foods, which are more expensive and often complicated to prepare. The depression that’s often associated with low status not only increases the temptation to reach for “comfort food” and lowers metabolism through decreased impulse for activity: the very medications that are supposed to help treat the depression contribute to longterm weight gain.

Besides the factors of food choice, social status, and depression, people sometimes suffer from invisible health problems that promote weight gain. Some disorders involve metabolic or hormonal factors that don’t respond to a “smart” diet. Other people may suffer from hidden disabilities that limit their mobility. For instance, I have a genetic disorder that causes claudication and susceptibility to both blocked and bursting arteries. Often people who are in better shape than me hint the world would hold me in higher regard if I would follow their superior regime of exercise. In these situations, I don’t always want to share the private details of my medical condition. This sort of weight rankism is especially difficult to deal with in the workplace because disclosures of disability raise legal issues and the easiest solution is often to fire the disabled person under some pretext. My IQ is more than passable despite the extra pounds, and while my low social status may have compounded my health problems, I certainly didn’t make any “dumb” decision to gain weight.

No matter how high their IQ is, fat women get paid less. Obesity is an ongoing social stigma and one of the most persistant categories of discrimination. Shame on the IQ-elitists for reinforcing this discrimination by reducing obesity to the slavish fate of the “dumb”.