yes. thank you. but that is just my concern. it was my concern on the vegan thread, too. these folks are ripe for exploitation and the problem is, just as with the vegan thing, it is advanced as an emblem of middle and upper-middle class status. and, as much as poor and working class people might sneer at the likes of those they often perceive as snobs, they are also endlessly and repeatedly told that middle- and upper-middle class = good and they are bad, disgusting, filthy, unhealthy.
and it works away on them. so when it becomes a cultural trend, even if a sub-cultural one among a certain faction, it has powerful effects.
it trickles down, in other words. and people get their information second-hand and third-hand. (We did a study of the poor in Syracuse on how they got their health information. It wasn't from reading books, etc. It was from the grapevine.)
So, people hear "natural" is good. etc etc.
So, unproblematic ally upholding this approach which is so unregulated, my head hurts just thinking about how little concern is given the those who will inevitably be exploited in this situation. And then turning around and actually blaming people for not actively pursuing serious health information or nutrition information, as someone did?
And btw, one reason why women are obsessively concerned with diet is, of course, the sexist pressure on them to lose weight and stay trim. But there is also something that is overlooked. The literature on weight loss too often takes men as the model. Thus, it takes the male metabolism as the model. Men, by and large, lose weight fare more quickly than women do.
When you are confronted with diet ads that show how much so-called weight loss to expect each week, you are often confronted with those consistent with how men lose weight. But women don't have the same bodies. So, women think something is wrong with them when they hit the plateaus and etc that men simply don't hit. Menopause will make this situation worse.
Then, too, the is the set-point weight phenom which means that the body actively pushes against the ideal weight and will conserve its metabolism so that it won't let you lose weight. These are real things, too, folks.
And they result in a situation that has been exploited by a fashion and weight loss industry to cultivate in women the obsessive search for something that will work.
It is truly the height of insult to have to read you guys ruining around claiming that you happen to know that women just don't really try to exercise and eat less. As if somehow they just haven't figured that out.
The people who actually study this stuff point out this: people don't like to count. So the diet schemes are ways for them not to have to count calories. It's a psychological thing.
But never mind the research, just spew crap anecdotage that you don't even run by a little peek at the research. Because -- hey -- it's women and ain't it tee hee fucking funny because, obviously, the right thing to do is extend our male experience right on to women!
Bitch | Lab http://blog.pulpculture.org