foodconsumer.org: Can We Have A Fat Surgeon General?

Can We Have A Fat Surgeon General?
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admin on 08/02/2009 20:26:00
 
By Martha Rosenberg (marthar@foodconsumer.org)
The debate over the "fitness" of Obama's surgeon general nominee, Dr. Regina
Benjamin, for office is raging.
Can the 52-year-old doctor from Alabama, easily forty pounds overweight, advance
a cogent policy for our national obesity without controlling her own fork, many
are asking?
Should we put a convicted drunk driver in charge of highway safety while we're
at it?
But others say the criticism is hypocritical and sexist.
Isn't Obama himself a smoker? Doesn't his chief White House economic adviser
Larry Summers require a reinforced chair not just for his adiposity but his
narcolepsy in high level meetings?
Doesn't Benjamin's weight challenge make her the perfect spokesman like a
certain TV talk queen?
Besides, say fat acceptance groups, who says you can't be fat and still healthy?
One pundit with no tolerance for the "acceptance" movement is African American
Chicago personality Nate Clay, whose overnight show on WLS ABC radio had a large
following.
Discussing a TV ad for an eating disorder that told viewers their overeating was
"not their fault," he used say, "Who the heck's fault do you think it is? No one
made you walk into the kitchen and open the refrigerator door but you."
The Chicago Sun-Times' Laura Washington is equally as blunt in her newspaper
columns. She attacks "those lame old rationales African Americans use to cover
up the obesity problem," like, "We're naturally big-boned," "Diabetes, heart
disease and gastric maladies run in the family," and "We eat to combat the
stress of a racist society."
"It's not about beauty, or some socio-political gobbledygook," she rouses. "It's
about saving our lives."
Many in New Orleans remember "people's" doctor, Dr. G, who would see patients
for a nominal few dollars in his office in the Maison Blanche building on Canal
street. While giving buggy drivers tetanus shots, female impersonators hormones
and strippers diet pills--dance on Bourbon street fat?-- he chain smoked Salem
longs!
Of course no one would tolerate a surgeon general nominee smoking today--or
practically any doctor...yet we still tiptoe around oral addiction itself.
Who realizes, for example that Paul Newman, John Updike and George Harrison all
died from lung cancer after a life of smoking? That their deaths were probably
preventable? That's not what the obits said!
We don't mention it--like we don't mention obesity--because it's not their fault
and even it is their fault, it's tough to quit and even it it's possible to quit
since millions have done it after all, we don't want to be rude.
We don't mention it because we don't want to blame the victim (victims who
inflate health care costs) or claim the moral high ground or tell someone how to
live.
Who can say enabling?
One politician who isn't enabling is Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, the force
behind the ban on airplane smoking enacted twenty years ago and the new FDA
powers to regulate tobacco which passed in June, the most sweeping anti-smoking
legislation ever passed.
Why does he care? Durbin's father smoked two packs of Camel cigarettes a day and
died of lung cancer.
In a Sun-Times article called, "Latifah Shouldn't Be Proud Of Health Risks,"
Laura Washington calls the rap queen who says she "weighs "in the '2's,' and I
couldn't be happier," out on the carpet.
"Latifah is a role model for countless young women and girls who admire her for
besting the misogynist rap culture and claiming stardom on her own terms," says
Washington.  But her obesity is a "part the ladies should be running away
from--as fast as they can."
Many are hoping she'll write about Benjamin.