Fatso

The egregious William Saletan is at it again on heredity. Last time we paid attention to him, he was trying to sell us on the genetic character of racial differences on IQ tests. His credibility got shredded on that issue, so this time he is back on the subject of obesity, and for good measure, is taking the side of nurture rather than nature.

The logic works like this: obesity develops in childhood, obesity is overwhelmingly genetic, but, obesity is increasing and genes can't have changed, so it must be the parents fault.

An editorial on the study, published in the same journal, explains:

[T]he shared-environment effect is the result of the degree of variability of environments that were observed in the sample, and, therefore, it cannot be used to infer the possible effects of altering the environment in which we all live and that may vary only modestly among families. If all homes, for example, had the same poor dietary and exercise practices, the shared-environment effect would be estimated as zero, and yet it would be entirely appropriate to attribute much of the obesity to parental behaviors.


There is one crucial flaw in this argument, embraced by the journal editors and Saletan, but not by the study authors: there is zero evidence to back up this pure speculation. The nature of the environmental change promoting modern obesity is not known, nor is it known whether parents can control it. What is known is that all sorts of intensive interventions have failed.

It's certainly plausible that lifestyle changes like less exercise promote obesity. It's also true that intervention to significantly increase exercise have repeatedly failed to prevent or decrease obesity. We can't rule out the possibility that some large external factor plays a role: hormone like pesticides in the food, vitamin additives to the food, etc., etc., etc.

In the meantime, until Mr. Saletan and the smug assholes who edit The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition can point to some intervention that actually works to prevent or decrease obesity, they ought to save their lectures. They won't do so, because that would just be to admit that they are practicing a "science" without useful results.

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