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Lately the health discussions within the United States have me fighting the urge to scream, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!” and I am not alone in my sentiments. Not only has the health care system itself degenerated into little more than overpriced tatters of a life raft, but the conversation about curing our ills is all wrong; and it is here I want to resuscitate your dissatisfaction with the system.
Just last month Whole Foods CEO John Mackey sent out a letter to employees entitled, “Team Member Healthy Discount Incentive Program,” a voluntary discount program based off employee’s individual BMI’s. The BMI calculates height and weight ratios to determine body fat.
The discounts will then be handed out competitively like some chummy sports team event (award amounts correlate with platinum, gold, silver or bronze) and if you don’t want to play, you still get the standard 20 percent off discount from the bench. But the so-called champions of this game will get 30 percent discounts.
So effectively, a grocery store is talking about an employer-sponsored game of “The Biggest Loser,” in order to gain lower health premiums and congratulate each other on achieving that stealthily marketed “healthy” lifestyle. Ironic might be an understatement, but against today’s backdrop culture of diet, lose, weigh less, etc., and health care costs that have no ceiling-I guess I can see where he thought this would fit with the identity of Whole Foods… but Mackey, I just ain’t buying it.
The notion that obesity is mainly responsible for engorging your premiums, and the myth that simply losing weight and eating less is healthy, slashes your health care costs and makes you less likely to experience heart problems, is quite frankly, disordered. If you want to chase that carrot, then I necessarily feel obliged to power down your treadmill and warn you: It is only a carrot you are pursuing.
In fact the topic of obesity in this country has endangered the very heart of the conversation. The implication that skinny is healthy is a disturbing trend. Two states (Alabama and North Carolina) have already adopted the fat tax and according to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP), “Anorexia nervosa and bulimia are on the increase among teenage girls and young women.”
These statistics ought to be unacceptable, and encouraging the youth of America to “lose weight” will have its consequences.
The trends are particularly disturbing to me because I have personally gone through an “intensive outpatient” hospitalization program for anorexia nervosa. I also had two friends who died as a result of anorexia. Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any mental disorder. I know that health is a balance that cannot be measured by any one number.
I can also tell you from personal experience that treatment of an eating disorder is light-years away from being cheap; or from bringing down your health insurance premiums, for that matter.
Whenever I hear someone in Colorado say that many Americans are obese, and then proudly exclaim that Boulder has some of the lowest statistics of obesity in the nation, I think of other eating disorder statistics that Boulder quietly suffers from.
In Boulder alone, according to statistics provided by the Boulder Youth Body Alliance (BYBA), “68.3 percent of girls are engaging in unhealthy weight control behaviors, and 21.2 percent of males are doing the same.”
An eating disorder is a mental disease-like cancer of the mind. You don’t consciously choose to get swept up in it, despite popular opinion. The answer to obesity is not some abstract ideal of thinness or some abstract BMI number, and the answer to our health care problems does not lie there either. The problem of health care lies deeper, beneath all the numbers and misconceptions that could feasibly keep us all under the thumbs of health insurance companies for years to come; especially if we allow them to tell us when we are overweight, and there is no underweight.
Health deserves a better conversation.
Contact CU Independent Staff Writer Andrea Rael at Andrea.rael@colorado.edu.
