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Employers in Europe may soon have a duty to create reserved car parking spaces for obese staff, or adjust the office furniture for them as BBC reports that the European Court of Justice is considering a test case of a male nanny who says he was fired for being too fat - a ruling that could oblige employers to treat obesity as a disability. Employment expert Audrey Williams says the judges would have to decide "whether obesity itself should trigger preferential rights, or should only impact where an individual, due to obesity, has other recognized medical issues. Employers would have a duty to make reasonable adjustments to the workplace or working arrangements," says Williams. "This might include a review of where the employee is located and their seating arrangements, or even preferential access to car parking."
The US Equal Opportunity Commission already defines obesity as being a disability, under the Americans with Disabilities Act Amendments Act. In a recent case involving morbid obesity, a Texan employee who weighed more than 680 pounds received $55,000 in compensation for being dismissed. In October 2009, the man was told to report to human resources where officials told him the company had reached the conclusion he could no longer "perform his job duties because of his weight and he was therefore terminated," the suit said. Ronald Kratz, who had gotten two promotions and high performance ratings over his 16-year-career, insists his weight did not interfere with his ability to perform his job duties as a parts sorter. Kratz, who lost over three hundred pounds since he was fired, has not been able to find another job despite sending out numerous applications, and his unemployment benefits have run out. "It has been really hard on the family."
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Appalbarry on Monday June 16 2014, @01:27AM
I highly recommend the Obesity Panacea blog [plos.org] over at PLOS, for a lot of science based discussion and research around the whole issue.
I'd argue that one very big part of the equation is that each of our eating habits are determined largely by what we're raised with. A few years ago we hosted a student intern who was hitting 300+ pounds at age 18, and whose diet was - ENTIRELY - white bread, processed meat, processed cheeze slices and miracle whip. Plus gallons of soda.
I put the blame for his condition squarely on his (also obese) parents for setting him up for failure, for not recognizing a problem years earlier, and for allowing him to grow so obese that any sort of physical exercise would have been extremely difficult, if not dangerous.
That's why I support moves to get soda pop out of schools, and to encourage schools to have healthy foods instead of fries, pizza, and other crap.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by frojack on Monday June 16 2014, @01:48AM
Most of the time very heavy people are on Diet soda. Gallons of it.
There is something wrong with the whole concept of diet drinks when the actually seem counter productive most of the time.
One could almost make the case that the amount of real sugar in regular soda actually might suppress appetite but the fake sugar substitutes enhance appetite.
We sure as hell aren't getting any thinner since the advent of diet sodas.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by tynin on Monday June 16 2014, @02:11AM
I'll give you my diet coke when you pry it from my cold, fat hands!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Darth Turbogeek on Monday June 16 2014, @02:35AM
Absolutly correct - diet drinks are getting known in provoking the insulin response that causes fat storage. All the negatives of sugar response and no positives, plus the other chemicals that the body gets an addiction to. They are if anything worse than the drinks they claim to be a healthy sub to.
I switched from diet to fresh and unprocessed fruit juices as possible (in moderation, the only thing I drink in litres is water now) and apart from a fucking feral headache or two at beginning, it's quite conducive to losing fat.
If you want to lose fat, drink water. It's what genuinely works and helps flush crap out of your body too as well as giving your body something to help burn the fat.
(Score: 1) by pendorbound on Monday June 16 2014, @09:26PM
Gonna have to call BS on that one. I lost 200lbs (and kept it off going on three years) drinking 2-3 liters of diet soda a day. I know what a strong insulin response feels like (IE feels like shit) because a key part of my taking the weight off was curbing carbs and getting my insulin levels under control. Diet soda most definitely does NOT trigger the same insulin response that full sugar soda or other source of fast carbs does.
I get that aspartame isn't anyone's idea of health food, but it doesn't magically break your metabolism the way a lot of people try to suggest. To me, diet soda is the most efficient way to get caffeine into my system, and being de-caffeinated is far worse of a metabolic effect on me than whatever aspartame and phosphoric acid might cause. It's not even the caffeine withdrawal thing that's a problem. I generally don't drink much soda over the weekends, and I'm fine. It's that the caffeine acts as a metabolism booster to a noticeable degree. Granted I'm sure there are other variables (reduced activity from less *zoom* probably), but on the few occasions I tried to cut out diet soda during my weight loss (for a week or so at a time), there was a noticeable reduction in my rate of loss for those weeks.
As far as flushing things out... Soda is still mostly water. If the number of times a day I need to pee is any indication, it's flushing me out just fine, thanks. For me, switching to fruit juice would be the worst thing I could do. Might as well drink sugar water.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 16 2014, @02:39AM
Everyone is quick to say it is 'one thing'. But it is a major combination of things. If it was as simple as eliminating one thing a diet would be easy. Lucky it is. Its sugar. The downside is there are about 20 different kinds of sugar. It is in *everything*. Also most juices are just sugar bombs in disguise. Keep your carb intake bellow a particular level and you will lose weight. That level is different for everyone.
However using diet drinks can be effective in a diet. However, if you just use it as an excuse to not reduce in other areas do not use diet drinks. I have noticed if I drink a diet drink I feel even more hungry than when I started.
I stick to water. As my level of exercise is low. If I had a higher level. I could get away with drinking some sugar drinks.
(Score: 1) by Qzukk on Monday June 16 2014, @03:25AM
I lost somewhere around 30 pounds switching from dr. pepper to diet (didn't have the heart to step on a scale when I started, so I don't really know where I started from but it was north of 300)
If someone came up with a diet cheese that was edible, I'd probably lose another 40 pounds.
People rant about burning calories or whatever, but it's pretty much entirely about what you put in, because it is possible to put in WAY more than you will ever burn, even if you somehow managed to run marathons back to back (one marathon apparently burns somewhere around 2500 Calories, depending mostly on weight).
Myself, my weight stabilized (at 6'4" 280lbs) with this as a complete and honest accounting of what I eat daily, numbers thanks to myfitnesspal.com:
Breakfast: 2 eggs, scrambled, nothing added but a bit of pam to keep it from sticking. Three slices of bacon, two slices of pepper jack cheese, two slices of toast (assembled into two open-face sandwiches). Calories: 540
Lunch: Healthy Choice cafe steamer (we have a freezer and a microwave at work, much more convenient than waking up early enough to make a lunch, and at $2.50 and ~300 calories, much cheaper both ways than eating out). Baby carrots, large red delicious apple. Calories: 450
Dinner: 2 roast beef sandwiches, Calories: 563
Snacks: about 1000 calories of cheese & crackers (a quarter pound of cheese and a handful of triscuits) (yes, it disgusts me when I think about it being a quarter pound of cheese that I just ate. No, that's not going to stop me)
That's what I've eaten today between the time I woke up at 10AM and now (10PM). 2500 calories without even trying. I don't even buy chips anymore since I could eat an entire bag at one sitting and still be hungry. I don't buy ice cream, cookies, etc for the same reason. My doctor keeps telling me to quit eating dessert, but doc, it's the cheese that's killing me.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 16 2014, @05:09AM
Listen to your doc. And, if you think the cheese is killing you, stop eating the cheese as well. Use the money you save to buy the complete Futurama DVD set or a used thinkpad on which to run Debian Hurd.
You don't need much food if you work at a desk.. just (hah.. easier said than done, I know) get in the habit of eating less (assuming you're looking for free advice :))
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 16 2014, @01:52PM
Breakfast: 2 slices of toast, coffee, and OJ: 270 calories
Lunch: out - something between rice bowl and Big Mac. Let's go with the Big Mac Meal deal: 1130
Dinner, or more likely 4:30 "Tea": quart of whole milk + yogurt: 700 calories
snacks: maybe a couple of bananas, berries, or a beer: 150 calories
drinks: water and unsweetened tea: 0
Your body expects to wake up, eat, and be active. Every species does this, regardless of whether they wake at dawn or dark. Shift your calorie consumption earlier in the day, get your blood glucose synchronized with your activity, and your body will feel less pressure to store those calories against future activity.
There's only 400 calories in a quarter pound of most cheeses.
(Score: 4, Informative) by opinionated_science on Monday June 16 2014, @04:08AM
There is a lot of confusion around obesity, largely due a wilfully ignorant political movement to decouple food consumption from environment.
Diet and exercise is the entirety of the problem. Full stop. Genetics may affect your personal efficiency at being able to exercise (and to burn calories) or absorb calories (your muscle mass), and the microbial cultures in our digestive tracts probably play a crucial role.
However, there has been a malign movement of trying to equate lack of objectivity with a weakening of the need for themrodynamics.
It has been measured in great detail the approximate energy expended to carry out exercise. Using CO2 metabolism and other technologies, it can be measured very accurately indeed. Clinical studies on marathon runners reveals a nice consistent number for "energy in a pound of fat". Approx 3500 kCals. So here's the rub. Professional atheletes are highly adapted to run efficiently so they will burn a minimum of the thermodynamic energy for 26 miles. But that is because they are adapted, probably have 14% body fat, and therefore are not carrying execess weight. But you and I will burn a MINIMUM of that amount, so why is society overweight?
The next dubious piece of folklore surrounds aging. There have been clinical measurements of atheletes and their metabolic potential (as measured using CO2 metabolism) as being essentialy unchanged (30-60), so long as training was adhered to. Sure, our ability to develop new muscle declines as we age, but the cliff in society, is not supported by the biology. Use it or lose it. The longer you wait to get in shape, the harder it is, and the more problems it will be to maintain.
Finally, there is the content of food, and their calories. Not all food is equal. Sugars (carbohydrates) have different enzymatics mechanisms to break them down, and physiologically different mechanism for storage. The biochemical explanation given in Lessig's talk on youtube is bang on the money. Glucose can be burnt by every cell in our body. Fructose and alcohol must be processed by the liver, and get stored as fat. Insulin is the hormone that will take free gluocose in the blood and deposit it in fat cells - rapidly. High fructose corn syrup, as the name suggests, is processed mostly by the liver and since gluocose triggers the insulin responce, excessive amounts cause the "selection" of cells that no longer respond to insulin. That's type 2 diabetes for you. There is a probably even a mechanism for the body to let food pass throught the body without absorption - I have NO evidence for this, but I suspect the microbes have a lot more to do than we know currently.
There is nothing wrong with fructose in its natural form. Eat an apple, orange, pineapple. Lovely stuff. But fruit juices are basically pure sugars. Soda is bad. But so is pure fruit juice. The actual fruit has cells you need to digest to get at it, slowing down its absorption.
The bottom line, calories matter. The daily limits you hear about? Complete fantasy. Think about it. Can all human males regardless of height or muscle mass really eat 2500 calories/day? Maybe if you are not in a sedentary occupation (yes, that's many of us). Fortunately, we have the technology to measure your resting metabolism. Daily limits of 1200 kcals/day are not unusal for sedentary jobs. Remember, you can run a marathon on 3500 kCals. Doesn't really make sense that sitting around all day would burn 2/3 of that, now does it?
The objective evidence is in. It is diet and exercise. Not diet OR exercise, it is both. Sure, you can lose weight just by eating less, but raising the number of mitochondria (by building muscle though exercise), is far quicker and probably safer since a diverse diet is easier to maintain. Walk for an hour @ 3mph, you can burn ~356 calories.
Also, if you do moderate exercise (defined as 60% of your metabolic potential), the body will preferentially burn fat. Its called ketosis, and so long as the carbohyrate level is not too high, you adapt to burning fat efficiently. This is quite literally what "getting fit is", improving the bodies mechanisms for expeneding energy.
Perhaps society as a whole needs to recognise that this is not something that can be left to "if I have the time" and we need some practical ways of getting the population to see it is in their best interests to be fit(ter). Making excuses doesn't help anyone. If you've ever had to deal with the effects of diabetes through friends or family, you will know that is something to be avoided if at all possible.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Monday June 16 2014, @07:37AM
Just like we know that flapping wings lifts a bird off the ground. Yet some birds simply cannot manage it. They flap as hard as they can and nothing much happens.
Some people have that problem with weight loss.
I find it hard to believe that give the level of interest in loosing weight and with so few managing any lasting results that we have the right answers.
We do know that if a fat rat has it's intestinal flora killed off with antibiotics and then re-seeded from a thin rat, the rat will become thin with no effort. That suggests that diet and exercise is not the whole story.
Sure, it is thermodynamics but it is a complex system. It's not Kcal eaten and exercise done. It's KCal actually absorbed (which may vary by type of food) rest metabolism, muscle efficiency, etc.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Darth Turbogeek on Monday June 16 2014, @10:25AM
The reason why, almost without fail, that people yoyo in weight is that they stop doing the things that made them lose weight in the first place. The actual answer that has been proved to work over and over again is you put your health first and you do NOT stop doing that.
The people who have a genuine health reason for beefing up are a minority. You only have to look thirty years ago to see the lower rates of obesity - people havent changed but the exercise is clearly lessened and the diets have gotten worse. So..... for most of us, you fix those two and you do NOT unmake the fix. There. It might take a while for some of us but it will work. It almost always does.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Monday June 16 2014, @04:48PM
So, if the fix works so well, why do you suppose it keeps getting unmade so often for so many? There must be some reason it is much harder than you think.
(Score: 2) by Darth Turbogeek on Monday June 16 2014, @10:38PM
Did I say it was easy? See a few posts up of mine, I *know* how fucking hard it can be to stay in shape. If you are making an effort and it's not going as well as you like I sympathize. I know what you are going through.
It's easy to fall off the fitness wagon and be a lazy slob however. That, for most people truly is the reason, nothing more. This isnt rocket science and the fact is that we're making it a lot more complex than it should be - eat decent food, moderate exercise, knock of the stupid drinks..... it works.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday June 17 2014, @02:17AM
I never said you think it's easy. I just said it is probably harder than you think (at least for some).
(Score: 3, Informative) by opinionated_science on Monday June 16 2014, @11:46AM
Yes, there are probably a wide range of parameters that can make a difference. But none of them can change the physics. I would be surprised if they amount to more than a factor of two.
Rat studies are interesting to get at the mechanism, but they are fundamentally flawed as the rats compliance is not optional. In a clinical setting the one thing that is not controllable is diet. They have tried it , but it is not legal to force people to eat something they don't want to, well often not..... I mean, would you like to be told what to eat (unless you are married of course...)? Exercise on the other hand, is much easier to measure...
As I pointed out in my post, the daily averages the governments and food companies foist upon us are a complete fantasy. Your personal metabolism is just that - personal. But if everyone who needed it only consumed 1200 kCals , the food companies would be lobbying for the government to tell us to eat more. It is a system with a perverse incentive - companies cannot make enough profit. They don't stop selling something to you when it is good for you.... Just like big pharma, who I am sure would love to sell you a weight loss pill....
In every instance if you expend more calories than you consume, you will lose weight. Once you gain the fat, it is harder to lose because those cells have to be emptied for long enough for your body to reabsorb them. Hence, some patients get "loose skin" in a appearance. But they will lose the weight. Hence, the longer you leave it, the harder it gets. There is some clinical research that suggests we don't lose them so easily....
Being able to exercise is a skill like any other. We are born with a certain amount and we can improve it with practice. The problem with our society is that self-control is in short supply, at a time when the system is setup to feed us anything we want....
(Score: 2) by sjames on Monday June 16 2014, @04:54PM
What compliance? It has been tried with the rats free feeding and with equally rationed diets. Either way one day fat rat. Antibiotics and inoculation from thin rat later, rat becomes thin. Laws of physics suspended for rats or system analysis more complex than Kcal eaten - Kcal used? I'll take option B :-)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 16 2014, @01:21PM
There are also excellent studies that show muscle mass drops by about 2%/year starting at age 40, regardless of whether you're a couch potato or an elite weight lifter. Of course, these are all cross-sectional studies and the population variability is huge, so you can easily find anecdotal evidence to counter it. And if you do studies with fewer than 20-50 people in a group, you can easily miss such subtle effects.
But there's little interest in doing scientific studies spanning 20-40 years. Seriously: 40 years is going to span multiple principal investigators' careers. There's little funding for intervention-based "wellness" studies, so group sizes tend to be 10-12.
I think you're also neglecting the influence of sedentary activity. We all know a guy who can't stop bouncing his leg at the table, or someone who just looks tense all the time. If you're holding a 4% MVC most of your waking hours, you're going to burn a lot more calories than someone whose only activity is riding an hour long 60% VO2max bike ride.
(Score: 2) by Covalent on Monday June 16 2014, @02:30PM
This is it precisely, though I could take it a step further. No matter what your genetics, you cannot violate the Law of Conservation of Mass. You cannot gain 10 pounds by eating 9 pounds of food, even if it is complete and utter garbage. A gallon of soda can, at most, result in a little more than 8 pounds of weight gain (densities vary by sugar content).
The reality, of course, is that 8 pounds of food will result in significantly less than 8 pounds of weight gain. I mean, you have to keep breathing, and every exhalation results in some carbon leaving your body. That carbon came from your food (predominantly, especially if you are overweight) so your body is losing mass in that way with every breath. You also lose water mass to sweat, urine, etc.
So keep those portion sizes way down, and the carbon your body exhales will have to come from stored fat (and to a lesser extent glycogen), not from food. Voila! Exhale your way to a slimmer you.
You can't rationally argue somebody out of a position they didn't rationally get into.
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Monday June 16 2014, @06:07PM
Yes.
weight of food != weight gained. Water is a major component of our bodies. Exhalation is not the only way to lose mass. You also excrete cellular matter and other waste via bile salt aggregation. The microbial cultures also get their cut.
But when it comes to excess fat, the *minimum* energy you will expend can be measured using CO2 metabolic calibration. The "overweight" label is perhaps not specific enough, which is why obesity is used.
A pound of fat ~= 3500 kCals. That means you can extract maxiumum of 3500 kCals - that is biochemistry.
However, not everyone will get 3500 kCals, but the government nutrition advice gives a made up number that is probably only applicable for 10% of the population. Perhaps the population needs to get an objective metabolism measurement every year? Probably a lot cheaper than the costs of managing all the other diseases.
(Score: 1) by q.kontinuum on Monday June 16 2014, @08:26AM
I don't. It's just too easy to use it as an excuse. I started doing sport early, without my parents telling me to do so. My parents smoked, I despised that. My parents ate diet-butter and drank diet-soda, I rejected. (I'd rather drink water than this disgusting diet stuff, and if I want a softdrink, I want the real deal.)
I do agree that parents usually do have a strong influence and can do a lot of damage (mine were supportive and never tried to force their habbits on me, partially because I didn't use to be fat skinny, partially because they accepted my individuality), and the first years can make it already very difficult to start caring for your own body. But if something bothers you, usually the only things you can change about it are your own behavior and attitude, and emphasizing the part others play in your problem doe not help you to resolve doing your part to change it. I'm all for supporting those who want to tackle their obesity, and I'm also all for helping those who already do their best, but are physiologically not able to lose weight without torturing themselves. But in that case this physical condition preventing them to lose weight is the disability, the weight is only a symptom.
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum