The New York Times' deteriorating position on childhood obesity scales with its surrender to advertising interests and Wokish lunacies
Images, mostly
In 2010, U.S. “First Lady” Michelle Obama was driving public sentiment toward the idea of healthier lunches and leaner, healthier children. The stated idea was to leverage a combination of better exercise habits and more dietary diligence to eliminate childhood obesity altogether by around 2035.
In 2014, with Mrs. Obama now in her second term as First Lady, this strategy appeared to be working.
But in 2015, America still had an “epidemic” of childhood obesity, with overnourishment still the proposed culprit, or at least the primary contributor.
And in 2016, the NYT reminded us that overweight children become overweight adults with attendant health problems.
Now, however, in the age of corporate media serving as brownshirts for a worldwide and comprehensive “Everyone will submit unquestionably unquestioningly to the most extreme medical interventions we propose” campaign, the NYT has moved to suggesting drugs and surgery are the answer, including gastric bypass procedures for kids as young as 13 and weight-loss medications for children as young as 12. Which means that 9- and 10-year-olds will get these things, too.
All of this matches up with the barrage of puberty-blocking prescriptions and “transitioning” surgeries targeting this same age group in recent years, an enterprise as lucrative as it is ghastly.
No matter the editorial direction of the NYT at any point, it always publishes the same general editorial by a different overweight woman who complains that rising obesity rates imply that society should give up on the issue altogether.
Imagine applying the “Solutions haven’t worked, quit looking for them” model to addictions to drugs, gambling, sexual behaviors, and so on. Although this is essentially the plan of the U.S. Government and its puppeteers, it’s not something sensible people on the ground believe.
Something has happened in the U.S. in recent decades to bloat the population. It’s not biological evolution, and no level of proposed or observed decreased inactivity in American adults can account for the magnitude of the increase in the prevalence of obesity among those adults.
Anyone with access to a time machine who took a brief, sequential tour through the supermarkets, restaurants, convenience stores, and schools of the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, and up to the present would figure this out almost immediately. Portion sizes of high-starch foods have exploded, as have those of sugary beverages, and this crap is everywhere. I wouldn’t be surprised to see vending machines on school buses soon, although I should probably stop sneaking onto them for free rides downtown.
Had I been transported in my 1980s teenage years into a standard candy aisle of today, I would be confused. I would not know what to make of the number of “foods”—Tear Jerkers, Sour Patch Kids, Warheads—clearly designed to not only spike blood glucose but ravage tooth enamel. Outside these places, I would be seeing lots of already obese 12-year-old kids riding around on scooters, some with two-quart soda containers balanced on the handlebars.
In the 1980s, these were gag drinking cups only, available at joke-shops such as Spencer’s. And, while it’s just as well times have changed, any fat kid riding a motorized device around in those days would have been heckled to tears or even had his scooter lobbed into the nearest dumpster.
In this bout of temporal displacement, I would probably be wearing a rugby shirt purchased at an American Eagle, and have hair parted in the middle and feathered on the sides. I would be aghast and agog, and I would tell whoever was ferrying me along through this time-travel adventure to turn right around and take me straight the fuck back to the alleged dark ages.
The aspect that someone noticing these trends across the decades—growing portion sizes, junk food expanding into places it can do the most damage—would miss is what’s actually in the food now.
I happen to handle glucose exceptionally well, and eating foods with particular combinations of semisynthetic carbohydrates doesn’t cause an insulin spike that negates the work of the most helpful exercise hormone of all, glucagon (also made in pancreatic islet cells). I can eat food-like material from jars and boxes loaded with HCFS HFCS and its various mutant cousins, and it’s no different to me than eating a pile of plain mashed potatoes or devouring them right out of the ground, relishing how the taste of soil melts nicely into the tang of the potassium-rich skin.
This is not the case for most people. The wildly fluctuating individual responses to different starch loads and other variables (apart from frank allergies and “intolerances”) have always made sweeping dietary guidelines and U.S. Department of Agriculture “food pyramids” (indirectly “built” for decades on end, as fate would have it, by the food-production industry).
The reason childhood-obesity experts’ advice is changing is not given in the NYT article purporting to offer it. It’s that the NYT is nothing more than clarion for pharmaceutical, biomedical, and other corporate interests, including that of food-makers. Its reporters and columnists lie about literally everything, and its publisher A. G. Sulzberger—one of the most adversarial bug-persons alive and someone who has accomplished nothing in his life besides inheriting a newspaper and wrecking it—just got back from Davos and a group lament led by fellow lie-0merchant Brian Stelter about the need to use laws to squelch misinformation.
Mixed messages from the mass media on the topic of obesity, however, are nothing new. More appalling is that medical schools, in addition to muddying the scientific concept of biological sex, are now blaming obesity—apparently still a medical problem of some sort—on racism.
Every goal of this new “system,” despite its being draped in BLM and diversity flags, seems curiously intended to preferentially wipe out ethnic minorities. Every aspect of life for struggling black people has gotten worse in recent years, with the only beneficiaries of color being grifters and the already prosperous.
If I could commit to the occasional apparent stance of this site and root outwardly for the collapse of civilization, none of this would bother me. But apparently, I don’t dislike people as much as sometimes I wish I could. I just detest the 0.1 percent wrecking things for everyone else, including pink-haired Wokish transmen and their counterparts—anti-Woke right wingers whose idea of activism is growing a beard and guzzling Mountain Dew during YouTube or Rumble presentations to emphasize to their viewers that a lard-bellied Yosemite Sam clone will never be mistaken a soyboy.
I could credibly profess as a childless and pension-free person that I don’t care what schools or anything else will look like even five or ten years from now. But I just want everyone to be happy or at least free, though not free of derision. Failing that, I’d like to see the entire health profile of American kids not driven straight into the side of a concrete-and-steel wall.
This is sort of an aside, so I might put a divider above it, but I don’t envy the jobs of doctors, nurse practitioners, or anyone functioning as a primary care provider at this point. These are generally regarded as high-status positions, but how many physicians do you know who are genuinely arrogant or undeservedly prosperous? (Toss cosmetic surgeons; I’ve never met one who wasn’t a hilariously pompous asshole.) Most doctors—and this was true long before covid—usually look more tired than dastardly to me. And while it’s a comfortable living, it’s not a career to embark on for those whose chief desire is to get rich; someone who takes out loans for medical school is not even in the black until their early thirties, by which time a master plumber is possibly eyeing a second home.
It’s becoming harder for these people to do their jobs, especially family physicians, because many of them have to zip their lips—particularly regarding the explosion in gender acrobatics. And this goes for the nurses who glue hospitals together, although a lot more of them (i.e., a higher percentage) are Branch Covidians than primary care providers are. None of them ever mentioned the CDC, the FDA, the media, and hospital administrators conspiring to make it impossible to do their jobs the way they were trained to and the way they always say themselves doing.