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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, 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.