Haes Quotes

“But maintaining the primacy of the individual-lifestyle focus—without being transparent about larger influences—is an affront to people living in disadvantage, as it reduces their ill health to poor “choices”and blames them, all the while contributing to the stigma and judgmental thinking that fuels their oppression, worsens their health, and expands the health divide between the advantaged and disadvantaged.”
― Linda Bacon, Body Respect: What Conventional Health Books Get Wrong, Leave Out, and Just Plain Fail to Understand about Weight

“Blaming fatness for heart disease is a lot like blaming yellow teeth for lung cancer, rather than considering the possibility that smoking might play a role in both. And telling people they need to lose weight is a lot like telling someone with pneumonia to stop coughing so much—it may not be possible and won’t make the disease go away.”
― Linda Bacon, Body Respect: What Conventional Health Books Get Wrong, Leave Out, and Just Plain Fail to Understand about Weight

“Many factors other than your size, fat, and muscle tissue figure in resting metabolism. Some are genetic and immutable. You may have been born with the ability to burn a lot of energy quickly and effortlessly, while others have what’s called a “sluggish metabolism”and don’t use energy at a very fast rate. It’s interesting to consider the cultural value judgment in using the term “sluggish”; from a scientific perspective, the person with a slower metabolism is much more efficient, a trait that would have been highly prized in earlier times when food was harder to come by.”
― Linda Bacon, Body Respect: What Conventional Health Books Get Wrong, Leave Out, and Just Plain Fail to Understand about Weight

“The pharmaceutical industry, which has a vested interest in making us believe that fat is dangerous—and that they have a solution—wrote the BMI standards that are currently used.”
― Linda Bacon, Body Respect: What Conventional Health Books Get Wrong, Leave Out, and Just Plain Fail to Understand about Weight

“The pharmaceutical industry, which has a vested interest in making us believe that fat is dangerous—and that they have a solution—wrote the BMI standards that are currently used.

The derivation of children’s BMI standards was even worse. They were just arbitrarily assigned, without even the pretense of considering health data.”
― Linda Bacon, Body Respect: What Conventional Health Books Get Wrong, Leave Out, and Just Plain Fail to Understand about Weight

“U.S. life expectancy has increased dramatically in the same time period in which our weight rose, rising from an average 70.8 years in 1970 to 78.7 years in 2011, and continues to hit record highs.”
― Linda Bacon, Body Respect: What Conventional Health Books Get Wrong, Leave Out, and Just Plain Fail to Understand about Weight